6 ms·

For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-employees-hi

For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-employees-hit-the-federal-pay-ceiling-in-2020/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e... >But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year. And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector. Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.

brundolf 6y ago
That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
- offtop5 6y ago
  That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that. It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector. I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qualifications to architect out a whole system. And while we all want to act like we could whip up this entire thing with VueJs in a weekend, pretty sure there's some God forsaken legacy system it needs to hook into. Since most engineers don't want to work with legacy systems for less than market pay, the engineers who end up working on this stuff tend to not be all that great.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    They only have to be better than the Deloitte grifters
    - offtop5 6y ago
      The article mentions Florida using Eventbrite. That seems like a much better solution rather than rolling your own.
      - brabel 6y ago
        Tell that to the people on this thread trying to justify how 45M is reasonable for a project like this because "software development is just a small part of the process". If a state can use freaking Eventbrite for this, clearly they are wrong.
        pas 6y ago
        Are they justifying or explaining?
- philipkiely 6y ago
  Also, the core benefits (health insurance, retirement, etc) are better than most companies. Sure, you don't get the perks, but the core stuff is there. For example, I'd rate access to Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program health insurance for you + spouse for life and kids through 26 as worth 2-3k per month, and invaluable if you or a dependent has a serious health condition.
dopylitty 6y ago
As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms whose sole purpose is to fleece the government. Can you imagine how much better it would feel to work on important and needed systems than working on the 100th food delivery app or yet another social media facism incubator?
- brundolf 6y ago
  Exactly! That feeling of improving society would go a long way toward balancing out the pain of working on legacy systems
- deathgrips 6y ago
  If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
- gunsch 6y ago
  There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about. I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
  - brundolf 6y ago
baby 6y ago
That's actually much more than I imagined o_O and a government job is usually pretty stable as well.
hakfoo 6y ago
I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment. TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax." With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly. Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.
- flurben 6y ago
  As far as federal employees go, making their salaries tax-free would cost the government lost tax revenue. It would also make a lot of voters angry because they still pay taxes, but "those bureaucrats in Washington DC exempted themselves from taxes." I can see the speeches now. Approximately 50% of American politicians are anti-government as an ideology, and use the argument of "cutting overpaid government salaries" as a plank in their economic policy, so having well-paid gov't staff is just "waste" in their minds. As far as teachers go, they are not employed by the federal government. In most states they are county-level employees and the counties obviously do not have authority to dictate federal income tax levels.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I can't think of a worse solution. Sure, it effectively raises their salary, but it is full of moral pitfalls. It is already outrageous that government employees are exempt from social security taxes.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Uh, what? Former federal employee here. I've got one of my pay stubs in front of me and there is definitely a social security line.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      It is primarily state employees (police & teachers) that are exempt from social security if they have a different state funded pension plan. Take a look at table 2 and chart 1 of this report from the social security administration[1] for some examples of rates in different states. >In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job I find this offensive because one of the main functions of SS is to subsidize the retirement of low earners at the expense of higher earners. As a private citizen, I don't get to opt out of this social obligation just because my 401k gets a better return. Not only that, but as a tax payer, I will be on the hook for bailing out the public employee pension funds when they go belly up. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html

brundolf 6y ago

That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.

offtop5 6y ago
That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that. It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector. I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qualifications to architect out a whole system. And while we all want to act like we could whip up this entire thing with VueJs in a weekend, pretty sure there's some God forsaken legacy system it needs to hook into. Since most engineers don't want to work with legacy systems for less than market pay, the engineers who end up working on this stuff tend to not be all that great.
- brundolf 6y ago
  They only have to be better than the Deloitte grifters
  - offtop5 6y ago
    The article mentions Florida using Eventbrite. That seems like a much better solution rather than rolling your own.
    - brabel 6y ago
      Tell that to the people on this thread trying to justify how 45M is reasonable for a project like this because "software development is just a small part of the process". If a state can use freaking Eventbrite for this, clearly they are wrong.
      - pas 6y ago
        Are they justifying or explaining?
philipkiely 6y ago
Also, the core benefits (health insurance, retirement, etc) are better than most companies. Sure, you don't get the perks, but the core stuff is there. For example, I'd rate access to Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program health insurance for you + spouse for life and kids through 26 as worth 2-3k per month, and invaluable if you or a dependent has a serious health condition.

dopylitty 6y ago

As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms whose sole purpose is to fleece the government. Can you imagine how much better it would feel to work on important and needed systems than working on the 100th food delivery app or yet another social media facism incubator?

brundolf 6y ago
Exactly! That feeling of improving society would go a long way toward balancing out the pain of working on legacy systems
deathgrips 6y ago
If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
gunsch 6y ago
There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about. I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
- brundolf 6y ago

baby 6y ago

That's actually much more than I imagined o_O and a government job is usually pretty stable as well.

hakfoo 6y ago

I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment. TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax." With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly. Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.

flurben 6y ago
As far as federal employees go, making their salaries tax-free would cost the government lost tax revenue. It would also make a lot of voters angry because they still pay taxes, but "those bureaucrats in Washington DC exempted themselves from taxes." I can see the speeches now. Approximately 50% of American politicians are anti-government as an ideology, and use the argument of "cutting overpaid government salaries" as a plank in their economic policy, so having well-paid gov't staff is just "waste" in their minds. As far as teachers go, they are not employed by the federal government. In most states they are county-level employees and the counties obviously do not have authority to dictate federal income tax levels.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
I can't think of a worse solution. Sure, it effectively raises their salary, but it is full of moral pitfalls. It is already outrageous that government employees are exempt from social security taxes.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  Uh, what? Former federal employee here. I've got one of my pay stubs in front of me and there is definitely a social security line.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    It is primarily state employees (police & teachers) that are exempt from social security if they have a different state funded pension plan. Take a look at table 2 and chart 1 of this report from the social security administration[1] for some examples of rates in different states. >In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job I find this offensive because one of the main functions of SS is to subsidize the retirement of low earners at the expense of higher earners. As a private citizen, I don't get to opt out of this social obligation just because my 401k gets a better return. Not only that, but as a tax payer, I will be on the hook for bailing out the public employee pension funds when they go belly up. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html