3 ms·

You have been down voted, but your observation is correct, and the parent comment is misleading as to rates. Source: I’m a government contractor and line manag

• vonmoltke 9y ago
  I worked for government contractors for almost 15 years (until October 2016) and participated in proposal efforts ranging from $750k SBIRs to a $1B+ multi-year prime contract for a radar system. Every one had established billing rates for labor, based on the type of employee rendering the labor. How is this misleading?
  • mturmon 9y ago
    It's misleading because, for experienced + well-qualified people, the upper ranges of the established rates are rather high, and therefore don't significantly constrain the hourly rates of those people. So for instance, if, within a given discipline like "security", there are 6 experience levels (1 = fresh-out undergrad, 6 = most senior), and within those, 4 maturity levels (20th thru 80th percentile, say), then the 80th percentile of, say, level 5, will be a very high rate. Because it's HN, and the comments above were referring to boutique security consultants ("top NSA specialists work[ing] for contractor firms"), I assumed that's who we're talking about. Cybersecurity, especially, has become a domain where institutional constraints have been lifted in the last few years - it requires less on-paper experience to get up to the "level 5" above. On the other hand, and in agreement with your comment, the aggregate labor rate for a large contract (I'm sure $1B qualifies) could not be too out of whack with industry norms, and this would be a significant constraint on rates.