6 ms·

So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My i

So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative? (Reposting at the top level because it makes more sense to hopefully get more discussion)

structural 7y ago
Defense contractors are similar to other companies that (strongly) do not believe that software is their product and do not value it any further than that it is a small component in the large system they are delivering. There's a lot of old-school attitudes still present: for example, I've heard software developers referred to as "software typists" a number of times. Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. These people can get paid very well. On the other hand, a "software developer" is much more likely to be a support function. Lots of maintenance of legacy stuff more than anything, and what actual development work exists might be nothing more than taking an algorithm directly from a standard and implementing it in whatever language is required by the project. These roles are not particularly well-paid and have a lot of turnover. It is a very different world.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case). > These people can get paid very well. In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.
galangalalgol 7y ago
If you just look at salary comparison websites you will think the two have comparable salaries. 10 years of dev experience will put you in the 130k range before cost of living bumps. But FANG gives a lot or even most of the compensation as something besides salary.
jki275 7y ago
Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall. I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.
- apexalpha 7y ago
  >Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    The abbreviation is meant to encompass the top-performing tech stocks. It was appropriated for pay because they are also amongst the top-paying.
  - jki275 7y ago
    Well that's true. LM is known to pay lower than most of the defense industry as well though.
    - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
      Wow, P&W also didn't pay very well, wonder how low LM is.
- sesteel 7y ago
  Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003. There is also the fact that finding ways to get more ads in front of people is not inherently motivating for some engineers when compared to building space systems or solving other interesting problems like deconflicting telescope laser alignment with satellite orbits.
devonkim 7y ago
The larger defense contractors have issues paying software engineers remotely close to private industry nowadays. In certain regions of the US the software market is dominated by defense though. Back in the early 2000s I know of some J2EE architects that pulled $200k as defense contractors once they got a Sun certification. The certification and diploma mill market in the US is driven squarely by big federally funded institutions that value paper over experience because they don’t know how to measure ability any better than SV Leetcode questions would assess. Of defense contractors I’ve seen pay tables for in the DC area, LM and Raytheon paid worse for senior engineers than slightly smaller, more specialized companies but they certainly had a lot more overhead and administrative positions available that were possible to reach just by having a PhD even if it’s not related to engineering or STEM in general at all (political science obviously makes sense here as valuable, for example). But under DHS you can hit $200k+ as a contractor for anything that has “cyber” attached to its name these days. But for the most part, the high payout days for software engineers in defense are over which is what led me to leaving the DC area years ago to stick with better pay and work environment with private sector. A TS is a pain and the pay bump is a joke compared to RSUs. I’ll take leetcode grinding for months to get a stack of RSUs and marketable engineering skills over the demonstrably useless charade of the DoD security theater practices with none of the employment benefits besides some smug, self-assured sense of patriotism. Most of the higher paid contractors in DoD aren’t engineers - they’ve usually been intelligence officer trainers and skilled and experienced warfighters (well past $400k, much of it untaxed).
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Apparently RSU doesn't mean "real soon unless". It appears to mean, instead, "restricted stock unit", a form of delayed compensation.
- souprock 7y ago
  You can get the pay increase associated with "cyber" in the name without having to live in the costly DC area. That works for me, supporting 12 kids on a single income. The work-life balance is to be appreciated as well, with 40-hour weeks (or paid overtime) and flexible hours.
euler_angles 7y ago
In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work. But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands on the technical career track). You would typically find a Level 5 engineer serving as an engineering technical team lead, a Level 6 as a site deputy chief engineer, and a Level 7 as a site chief engineer. A few years ago, LM Aeronautics offered all Level 5 and above engineers an early buyout/retirement and got over 1000 engineers to leave the company that way. Those engineers were largely not replaced, either in skills (hard to replace that level of expertise), billets (those jobs were not re-filled), or promotions (the sudden vacuum at the top end of the technical career pyramid was not filled by promoting large numbers of level 4 engineers to level 5, etc).
- somatic 7y ago
  So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right? What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move? Do you know what the total realized effect was?
  - euler_angles 7y ago
    Not fired, that would indicate termination for cause. This was an early buyout. Engineers at those levels were offered a severance package that included some number of weeks of pay per years spent with the company (up to a maximum of 6 months of pay) and a base amount on top of that. This was the precursor to layoffs -- LM hoped to avoid layoffs by offering buyouts to these engineers. The wisdom of all of this... I don't see it. Their goal was to reduce total amount spent on salaries. This came at the time that the F-35 flight test program began its long wind-down. Other companies were hiring in large numbers because they had just begun big test programs (NGC had just won the B-21 contract and was testing its Triton UAVs), the net effect was that a HUGE amount of engineering knowledge and talent went out the door within a year. I can only speak for what it did to the F-35 test forces -- basically made them start over in terms of learning how to execute their jobs.
burfog 7y ago
They pay quite well if you measure that by how many hours of work you must do to pay a mortgage on a nice home. This is because: 1. It's typically a 40-hour week. They legally can't make you work 48 or more without paying overtime, and many will start paying overtime after 40. 2. You don't have to live in an expensive place like San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, or New York City. The worst cases are usually the DC area and San Diego, but typical locations are far cheaper. Instead of $2,000,000 for a house, you might pay $120,000 for a better house. Everything around you is cheaper too, from food to electricity. Gasoline is half the cost. The choice is pretty clear if you hope to raise a family.

structural 7y ago

Defense contractors are similar to other companies that (strongly) do not believe that software is their product and do not value it any further than that it is a small component in the large system they are delivering. There's a lot of old-school attitudes still present: for example, I've heard software developers referred to as "software typists" a number of times. Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. These people can get paid very well. On the other hand, a "software developer" is much more likely to be a support function. Lots of maintenance of legacy stuff more than anything, and what actual development work exists might be nothing more than taking an algorithm directly from a standard and implementing it in whatever language is required by the project. These roles are not particularly well-paid and have a lot of turnover. It is a very different world.

vonmoltke 7y ago
> Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case). > These people can get paid very well. In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.

galangalalgol 7y ago

If you just look at salary comparison websites you will think the two have comparable salaries. 10 years of dev experience will put you in the 130k range before cost of living bumps. But FANG gives a lot or even most of the compensation as something besides salary.

jki275 7y ago

Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall. I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.

apexalpha 7y ago
>Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  The abbreviation is meant to encompass the top-performing tech stocks. It was appropriated for pay because they are also amongst the top-paying.
- jki275 7y ago
  Well that's true. LM is known to pay lower than most of the defense industry as well though.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    Wow, P&W also didn't pay very well, wonder how low LM is.
sesteel 7y ago
Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003. There is also the fact that finding ways to get more ads in front of people is not inherently motivating for some engineers when compared to building space systems or solving other interesting problems like deconflicting telescope laser alignment with satellite orbits.

devonkim 7y ago

The larger defense contractors have issues paying software engineers remotely close to private industry nowadays. In certain regions of the US the software market is dominated by defense though. Back in the early 2000s I know of some J2EE architects that pulled $200k as defense contractors once they got a Sun certification. The certification and diploma mill market in the US is driven squarely by big federally funded institutions that value paper over experience because they don’t know how to measure ability any better than SV Leetcode questions would assess. Of defense contractors I’ve seen pay tables for in the DC area, LM and Raytheon paid worse for senior engineers than slightly smaller, more specialized companies but they certainly had a lot more overhead and administrative positions available that were possible to reach just by having a PhD even if it’s not related to engineering or STEM in general at all (political science obviously makes sense here as valuable, for example). But under DHS you can hit $200k+ as a contractor for anything that has “cyber” attached to its name these days. But for the most part, the high payout days for software engineers in defense are over which is what led me to leaving the DC area years ago to stick with better pay and work environment with private sector. A TS is a pain and the pay bump is a joke compared to RSUs. I’ll take leetcode grinding for months to get a stack of RSUs and marketable engineering skills over the demonstrably useless charade of the DoD security theater practices with none of the employment benefits besides some smug, self-assured sense of patriotism. Most of the higher paid contractors in DoD aren’t engineers - they’ve usually been intelligence officer trainers and skilled and experienced warfighters (well past $400k, much of it untaxed).

ncmncm 7y ago
Apparently RSU doesn't mean "real soon unless". It appears to mean, instead, "restricted stock unit", a form of delayed compensation.
souprock 7y ago
You can get the pay increase associated with "cyber" in the name without having to live in the costly DC area. That works for me, supporting 12 kids on a single income. The work-life balance is to be appreciated as well, with 40-hour weeks (or paid overtime) and flexible hours.

euler_angles 7y ago

In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work. But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands on the technical career track). You would typically find a Level 5 engineer serving as an engineering technical team lead, a Level 6 as a site deputy chief engineer, and a Level 7 as a site chief engineer. A few years ago, LM Aeronautics offered all Level 5 and above engineers an early buyout/retirement and got over 1000 engineers to leave the company that way. Those engineers were largely not replaced, either in skills (hard to replace that level of expertise), billets (those jobs were not re-filled), or promotions (the sudden vacuum at the top end of the technical career pyramid was not filled by promoting large numbers of level 4 engineers to level 5, etc).

somatic 7y ago
So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right? What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move? Do you know what the total realized effect was?
- euler_angles 7y ago
  Not fired, that would indicate termination for cause. This was an early buyout. Engineers at those levels were offered a severance package that included some number of weeks of pay per years spent with the company (up to a maximum of 6 months of pay) and a base amount on top of that. This was the precursor to layoffs -- LM hoped to avoid layoffs by offering buyouts to these engineers. The wisdom of all of this... I don't see it. Their goal was to reduce total amount spent on salaries. This came at the time that the F-35 flight test program began its long wind-down. Other companies were hiring in large numbers because they had just begun big test programs (NGC had just won the B-21 contract and was testing its Triton UAVs), the net effect was that a HUGE amount of engineering knowledge and talent went out the door within a year. I can only speak for what it did to the F-35 test forces -- basically made them start over in terms of learning how to execute their jobs.

burfog 7y ago

They pay quite well if you measure that by how many hours of work you must do to pay a mortgage on a nice home. This is because: 1. It's typically a 40-hour week. They legally can't make you work 48 or more without paying overtime, and many will start paying overtime after 40. 2. You don't have to live in an expensive place like San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, or New York City. The worst cases are usually the DC area and San Diego, but typical locations are far cheaper. Instead of $2,000,000 for a house, you might pay $120,000 for a better house. Everything around you is cheaper too, from food to electricity. Gasoline is half the cost. The choice is pretty clear if you hope to raise a family.