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. Unle

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.