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I've heard that the salaries of government employees are capped. I'm very curious how this will play out. The Air Force can easily afford to pay Silicon Valley

• nkassis 8y ago
  The cap should be based on the private sector equivalent of a job. Having an absolute cap is counter productive.
  • slededit 8y ago
    I don't think the public is quite ready for just how much developers get paid. I doubt many would believe it.
    • dfjliasjg 8y ago
      We can't even afford fresh college graduates. But we can afford Oracle.
    • bigiain 8y ago
      I'm not even sure all _developers_ are quite ready for how much they (can) get paid - if they choose the most lucrative jobs. https://www.recode.net/2018/4/30/17301264/how-much-twitter-google-amazon-highest-paying-salary-tech https://www.recode.net/2018/4/30/17301264/how-much-twitter-g... Facebook's _median_ salary is apparently over $240k...
      • toomanybeersies 8y ago
        And IBM's is around $50k. Everyone hears about these $200k salaries, but most developers aren't making that. The median for the USA is around $100k, it's still a high salary for a job that requires only an undergraduate degree and no certifications, but it's not obscenely high like $240k.
        • iends 8y ago
          Would be surprised if the average IBM developer salary is around 50k. My guess would be higher, proabably around 90k - 100k for US employees.
        • closeparen 8y ago
          And the $50k IBMer in upstate New York lives about as well as the $240k Facebook employee in Menlo Park.
          • na85 8y ago
            That's a sad statement about the cost of living near SF.
            • closeparen 8y ago
              You can't make this shit up: the median home price in Ithica is $242k [0]. In Menlo Park, it's $2.42m [1]. A nice, even 10x. [0] https://www.zillow.com/ithaca-ny/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/ithaca-ny/home-values/ [1] https://www.zillow.com/menlo-park-ca/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/menlo-park-ca/home-values/
              • derekp7 8y ago
                Wow, that makes my 160K 1500 sq ft house in the upper midwest (with easy access to 6-figure jobs) seem absolutely cheap by comparison. Only problem is property taxes are high (4K - 8K in this area). Oh, and typical corrupt Illinois politics.
• Amezarak 8y ago
  The article talks about enlisted doing the coding, not officers. They cannot leave until their contract is up. They literally cannot leave as soon as they've learned if they still have years in their contract. Additionally, the military dangles a lot of incentives to re-enlist, and people who have spent a lot of time in the military sometimes have trouble adjusting to life outside it. But yes, people will leave. There's always more. You would be surprised how many bright people choose to join the military even though it doesn't make economic sense for them. I'm on mobile and copy paste isn't working, but enlisted pay grades are publicly available. They are much lower than SV salaries and they are set in stone.
  • chrisseaton 8y ago
    You get specialist pay don’t you? An enlisted person who pilots a helicopter or works in a special operations unit gets paid more. You could just have specialist pay for developers. But anyway this whole ‘you need to pay them the same as civilians’ is nonsense anyway - soldiers are already paid a fraction of what private security get now and it doesn’t seem to be a major problem causing people to leave to do that equivalent job. People join and stay in the military for great reasons other than pay, such as comradeship, family history, sense of duty, the challenge - appeal to those.
    • SEJeff 8y ago
      Sort of, but not really. Being in SOCOM (special operations command) units, you'll often get extra training in the form of Additional Skill Modifiers. For instance I was a UAV Pilot trained to fly the Hunter TUAV who got put in a Shadow 200 TUAV unit. I went back to training for a few months and came back with a W2 ASI denoting Shadow 200 qualification. That made my job designation change from 96U to 96UW2, which depending on the role, can mean extra pay. Generally socom operators get paid more due to hazard pay, which is a graded scale based on how likely you are to get maimed for life or killed. I can't speak for anyone but the US Army, but they only allow commissioned officers and warrant officers to fly helicopters. As a UAV pilot, I was in a group of the only enlisted pilots in the entire US Army. We were on the same flight status with the same awful yearly physicals of the helicopter / plane pilots.
• AFNobody 8y ago
  To be 100% honest, if they offered $80k and military level benefits I bet you a ton of people would take that offer as long as it was guaranteed in writing they would be in the US writing code. Most developers are mediocre and paid in the $80-120k range depending on cost of living.
  • WesleyJohnson 8y ago
    Honest question, how can one look at themselves unbiasedly and determine if they're a mediocre programmer?
    • AFNobody 8y ago
      If you don't: A) Massively outperform compared to your peers. B) Massively underperform compared to your peers. You are almost certainly a mediocre programmer. If you are in the B category, it is usually pretty obvious to _everyone_ and you've probably seen your performance reviews at _multiple_ employers be below average. If you massively outperform your peers, you probably find your boss at _multiple_ employers going out of his way to retain you. (i.e. Massive salary bumps, bonuses, promotions, etc.) If neither of these are true, you are almost certainly mediocre. For instance, I made a really stupid decision for personal reasons to leave a job where I massively outperformed my peers (my boss was really bad at hiring people) and received a 30k raise a couple years before I left. But, realistically, that was the _only_ job I had that kind of outsized performance and it was more to do with my boss's skill at hiring people than my skill as a developer. At my jobs before and after that one, I've fell safely in the mediocre range. Never been fired, never had a PIP, and generally got "Meets expectations-ish" performance reviews. At my current job, I underperform my peers but that is largely because I'm their first hire in ~3 years. I have alot of catching up to do as a result, and I've been there ~90 days.
      • vehementi 8y ago
        Mathematically the vast majority of programmers in the world are mediocre by your definitions there. Was that the intent of your post?
• jacques_chester 8y ago
  Many folks who join the military did so out of a sense of purpose. Not all, to be sure, but many.
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    The second thing my acquaintances who enlisted cited was retiring from military with half pay after 20 years of service and access to veterans’ benefits which in hindsight looks pretty nice for most non professional career options otherwise.
    • amorphid 8y ago
      It's not a bad deal, especially when you consider you could live with minimal expenses while in the military. Saving a lot is not hard even on modest military pay when your living costs are all covered. I can't think of any other opportunities where you could start working at 18, save a lot, retire at 38, and get a pension.
      • SEJeff 8y ago
        Living costs, food costs, most of your clothing, transportation, etc. You literally just pay for fun and off duty extra activities / extra food.
• MithrilTuxedo 8y ago
  One thing I was disturbed by going from the US Navy to working privately in software development in Seattle is how much of a secret pay is in the private sector. You can pretty much look up how much money anyone in the military makes. Base pay is trivial to look up, and all the other allowances (housing, hazard, etc.) can be looked up. https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/military-pay-charts.html https://www.dfas.mil/militarymembers/payentitlements/militar... The same is true in the government, AFAIK. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/18Tables/html/GS.aspx https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
  • bmpafa 8y ago
    AF vet, and frequently frustrated by this taboo. It's so contrary to the interests of everyone except the employer, but folks become visibly uncomfortable whenever talk of comp comes up. Well, the American folks anyway. I work with a lot of Europeans, and they don't seem to share the norm.
    • flak48 8y ago
      Europeans are open with their salaries?
      • amzans 8y ago
        I don’t know about the rest of Europe, but here in Germany people have openly talked about their salary with me in several occasions. Granted, it wasn’t any coworkers, it was always a friend or someone I knew.
        • josteink 8y ago
          In Norway this is an open database which gets published annually and anyone can search in it to see what other people make. It's not a digital wild-west open style though: 1. You have to authenticate using something which identifies you specifically as a citizen. 2. Another caveat is that people who gets looked up will be notified about that, with information about who it was who looked them up. (so it can't be used for direct covert spying) That said, this system allows for a certain degree of transparency, and makes it easier for journalists, press, researchers etc to dig into issues such as social inequality.
• astockwell 8y ago
  The allure would be job/salary security for 10-20 years (albeit at a lower salary than SV), and retirement in 20 years with full pension and medical benefits for life.
• closeparen 8y ago
  The housing allowance for an O-1 in San Francisco with no dependents is over $4000. That’s a good deal better than the rent spending most Bay Area bigco engineers feel comfortable with. I’d argue the military is quite competitive with the tech industry when location is taken into account.
• sidlls 8y ago
  Guaranteed pension and benefits for life after 20 years with substantial subsidies are worth a lot. Given the choice between a typical developer's life (outside a tech hub or hot spot most programmers aren't compensated much different from any other low social status white collar worker), moral issues aside, I'd take the military job any day. A person can join the military at 18, retire at 38 and be in a prime position to capitalize on his network as a consultant or "small business owner" contractor, or else just sit back and enjoy his generous pension and health and other benefits. That's a big deal.
  • dralley 8y ago
    Unless you have to work in a SCIF
  • thret 8y ago
    Well then, take the military job if it is that simple. There's probably nothing stopping you joining.
  • DennisP 8y ago
    Military retirement after 20 years isn't all that generous, it's about $40K. It's nice but you're still probably getting a job if you've got a family.
    • Jtsummers 8y ago
      $40k household income for life, and that's still above median for many parts of the US (though about 2/3rds median for the US as a whole). Are there other job opportunities, outside some police departments, that offer similar compensation and let you retire at age 40?
      • DennisP 8y ago
        Yes it's great, it's equivalent to over a million dollars with a safe withdrawal rate. I'm just saying you're probably still going to be working, not actually retired. $40K is the figure I got from a Navy commander who's been in over 20 years. He and his family are used to approximately triple that level of income. He doesn't feel he can retire. Lower-ranking people will be used to living on less, but will also have proportionally lower retirement pay. If you're a lower-ranking person and can get significantly higher pay in the private sector, it's not necessarily a dumb choice to go for it.
• bane 8y ago
  The best rank structure for this would be the warrant officer.
• eksemplar 8y ago
  I work in the public sector for a lot less than the offers I get from the private sector. I haven’t once considered leaving. Well I have, but that’s when the right decision drowns in politics and red tape, not because of money. A lot of people would consider me an idiot, but I get a sense of duty and purpose from public service that is worth more to me than money. Of course it helps that my pay check isn’t exactly bad. So it’s also a choice between good money and better money, I’m not sure how I’d feel if it was a choice between shitty money and great money.
• oliwarner 8y ago
  This is a bizarre thing that keeps popping up here. This assumption that as soon as somebody learns how to code, they pack up and move to the Bay Area. Since when was Silicon Valley the only place with competent software developers? We exist all over the planet, often getting paid very different amounts, and usually, yes, very much less than Bay Area developers. In reality, the USAF here is competing against the cost of defence contractors. Which it turns out, is pretty easy because they've been charging megabucks for everything for two decades because their only competition has been other defence contractors. Thanks to politics, right or wrong, they've had no capacity to ramp-up on in-house development and submit their own bids to really compete on price. I really hope we're entering into an age of reality where public organisations (military, government, healthcare in the civilised world, etc) —and more, the people funding them— realise that in-housing development work is so much cheaper than farming it out.
  • mattmanser 8y ago
    To be fair on them, one of the reasons it got so expensive was probably also because it all followed waterfall and the USAF would pile on every conceivable, often contradictory requirement, rather than start with an MVP and iterate. Plus it would take huge amounts of salesman/consultant hours to get through the bidding process, plus each successful bid has to effectively pay for all the costs of other bids that failed for the consultants to be profitable.
    • oliwarner 8y ago
      Oh most definitely. The tender process is awful from start to finish, regardless of market. If nothing else, as you say, it funnels huge amounts of resource away from where it needs to go (the product, developers and engineers) and into the pockets of salesmen, managers and shareholders. It just doesn't make sense for public money. But MVPs aren't always themselves a viable development target... Especially here in a military scenario where the finished product tends to be the MVP. Safe enough and hopefully effective.
    • mcculley 8y ago
      For the Air Force, the MVP is often something that can do a lot of damage. Some things require expensive upfront design. One cannot just iterate through two week sprints until the crew survives.
• cryptonector 8y ago
  Working for the military can pay very very well -- if you're a consultant or work for a third party.