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To explain the "special kind of program" further, the US government has a very strict salary ladder (the "General Schedule" and similar), necessary to keep the
by pavpanchekha 9y ago
To explain the "special kind of program" further, the US government has a very strict salary ladder (the "General Schedule" and similar), necessary to keep the enormous federal workforce paid fairly and without corruption. However, the salary ladder has not kept up with the explosion of incomes for very specialized professionals. For example, the scheduled salaries generally lie below the $400k salary for the president; top engineers sometimes earn more than that, and top engineering managers often do. This makes it hard to hire those professionals.
The special kind of program here is a special allowance from Congress to hire people at salaries larger than the general schedule allows; Congress gives this right to some agencies for a limited time when it perceives a need (and politics allow). For another example, Congress gave the FDA the right to do this last year to allow it to hire more drug reviewers (a job pharma companies are willing to pay a lot for).
In this case, Congress allowed the program to run out too soon (perhaps due to budget negotiation issues, perhaps due to oversight). Often that leads to people leaving and a lot of social and organizational capital drying up, just like it did here.
- madengr 9y agoHa ha, “generally lie below $400k”. Usually way below 400k.
- sailfast 9y agoThe maximum pay rate for a GS-15 (top civilian grade) in the DC area is around $158K. Special hiring authorities are great ways for government to get what they need in a hurry, but can be abused, and should (in my opinion) only be used to experiment (read: test hypotheses) about hiring in the federal government, rather than as a band-aid fix.
- oceanghost 9y agoYes. The Department of Education in Orange County called me once for a contracting gig-- The absolute highest they could pay was $60/hr for what at the time was a very specialized skillset. And they had all sorts of ludicrous restrictions-- part of what they wanted to do was an enterprise iOS deployment-- they only had one mac-- and only a certain guy was allowed to use it. It was just utter horseshit. I still really wanted to take the gig to make contacts, but I couldn't justify taking time off more lucrative gigs.