5 ms·

Where would they get the talent and expertise to do that? Whats the most you can make at government job? $170k? How much money do engineers make at AWS? I j

by adrr 5y ago

Where would they get the talent and expertise to do that? Whats the most you can make at government job? $170k? How much money do engineers make at AWS? I just had a recruiter call me for architect role that was $500k in compensation a year.

Ericson2314 5y ago
For what? The initial design work and a demo deployment can be outsourced. After the design is proven then cheaper sysadmins can run the thing. Also, the fact that government jobs are so capped like that is a conspiracy to make the public sector suck, basically. We should fix that too, but I recognize it cannot be done in time, hence allowing that the design work to be outsourced.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  The problem with cleaving contractor deliverables from suitability results is that you remove all incentive for quality work. Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    > AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS hahaha ----- I am trying to structure the contract to avoid this stuff, by making the deliverables include both the contractors running their own working deployment, and the government also running their own. For the latter, there should be a tech transfer period where the contracter needs to do training and promptly answer questions, and then a government independence period where the contractor is not allowed to intervene at all to prove the knowledge has actually been transferred, and government isn't entering an IT-support protection racket. Only then is full payout given. Yes, that means finishing the entire project will take quite a bit longer than doing all the dev work. Yes, that also means the project is riskier for the contractor and has less ongoing reward, and so they will need to be paid more initially. But it's worth it in the end. If there is some gotcha here where the private sector can get out with too much proprietary IP or a weak and dependent customer in the government, do let me know, that is not my intent. I'm trying to envision a transitional project to get out of today's privatized world to one with better US state capacity.
patentatt 5y ago
I may be naïve, but I’d venture to guess that plenty of $170k developers could make a great cloud platform if given the chance.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  I think many would jump at the opportunity to be paid to pioneer what's known in advance to be highly visible and impactful FOSS project. That's like a manhandle-project-class career legacy for you, at a fraction of the cost for the government.
- adrr 5y ago
  Someone straight out of college is going to be making close to $50k. $170k would be a very senior person to come in at the top level. I can't imagine building a cloud platform at the government. What type of hardware is the procurement department going to get with the bidding process? You'll also won't able to get unix machine or macs to run as your development machines, it will be windows boxes filled with spyware. I say this as my dad worked as a senior scientist creating software / models to track oil spills and toxic chemical spills. On his last year before retirement, they banned his team from using Macs.
  - EricE 5y ago
    ha - the iPhone is the catalyst that really broke the Windows homogeny - Mac's are everywhere inside government these days. Windows still dominates most orgs, but never thought I would live to see any significant numbers - but here we are.
- doublejay1999 5y ago
  its not naive to think there are plenty of talented 120k devs sitting in faangs waiting to catch a break.
zhengyi13 5y ago
To your first question, https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/. To your second, well, /shrug. A reasonable number of folk might well jump at the chance to have a job like that on their resume, and there's likely a fair amount of possible cross pollination w/ various folk in the DoD/military to bring up bodies and relevant expertise (i.e. security).
- 0xy 5y ago
  Private sector pays over double the government. Why do you think the US government has so many problems with security? What security engineer worth his salt is going to accept half the pay to work for the government where things move at a snails pace?
  - mellosouls 5y ago
    Not everybody is driven solely by money.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Not every co moves at startup speeds. I have seen plenty of large companies move just as slow or slower. Problems of red tape are not limited to only government ,it is function of most large organizations Plenty of security engineers are constantly frustrated at the lack of security focus in corporate sector, investments are only made when it affects revenue . Even after all the ransomware companies some times do the bare minimum and buying insurance Government on the other hand cares about security for different reasons, they take it lot more seriously. They don't sacrifice security in the interest of sales. I would anyday prefer to work for some org where security actually matters not where it is inconvenience
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      That's all true, but we should also be willing to pay more in the public sector. Capping government salaries and then paying for consulting is an especially lousy form of privatization.
    - 5y ago
bob1029 5y ago
> Whats the most you can make at government job? If we were serious about fixing this problem, existing federal pay scale constraints would not be a barrier to entry. Legislation could be passed yesterday that would add arbitrary pay scales for special purposes such as these. Attach an AWS architect salary to a government job and I think you will immediately find the skill gap filled. Bonus points if you put incentive structures in the employee contracts so that the brilliant minds are directly incentivized to deliver, rather than via proxy of their lobbying container organization.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Or how about we just end this culture of legislative micro-management, so that we don't have the problem in the first place? From there, we can give the agency the budget to do the job, and let someone who's actually close to the situation decide whether it makes more sense to contract it out or build an in-person team. A bunch of legislators who are well-known to be perpetually too busy conducting fundraising lunches with lobbyists to actually read the text of the bills they're crafting and voting on are never going to be making informed decisions on matters at this level of detail.
  - xenophonf 5y ago
    Legislative oversight of the executive branch is a feature, not a bug. Presidents aren't kings, neither are cabinet members princes. That said, appropriations is no barrier to hiring the necessary talent. There are plenty of well-run private data centers in the federal government, staffed by both federal employees and government contractors.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Politician micro-management is a real problem in the US, but keep in mind that these restrictions of the bureaucracy are a more second-order effect. They are less about directly giving the politicians more control than keeping the civil service week to the benefit of the contractors, and that outcome continues whether or not the politicians find it worth their time to meddle with any specific project. Also, it's my understanding that the micro-management is more a problem on the state and local level, like NY state politicians such as Cuomo forcing the MTA to take on debt for these stupid stations rather than improve service.
manquer 5y ago
How many hours you have to work for that ?. How long before you get fired because you didn't kiss someone's ass or can't keep competiting with 27year single male with no other life ? Compensation is only one aspect of a job. Plenty of people work in defense while private sector pays more, public service motivation, job security, benefits, better work hours, more seniority driven promotions there are a ton of reasons. Doesn't mean it is the most efficient way to run an org, point is there are enough qualified people who value the other benefits more than just the cash. Funny you mention 170k Amazon is known to have a fairly strong cap on base salary compensation. Usually at 150-170k range.
freeopinion 5y ago
I don't know you. I don't know anything about you. I don't mean any disrespect to you, but... I'll match you against somebody willing to take $150k for the exact same work. I'll match 4 of you against 8 of my hires. I'm willing to bet that my $1.2M team will outperform your $2M team. I'll very happily match 50 of your team against 75 of mine. You could poach 25 of mine who prove to be superstars, and I'll hire more. That doesn't mean that you are dumb or incompetent or less skilled. I just think that there are some very smart and capable people willing to work for $150k. I think that many of them are as good as any AWS hire. And I think they could be motivated by something besides money to create something as good or better than anything from AWS. Indeed, less money could itself be a strong motivation to outperform. Thankfully, we don't live in a world where there are only 10 geniuses to go around. The world is much much cooler than that!
- cellis 5y ago
  I’ll take that bet. 10 150k public sector employees vs 10 250k private sector, its going to be a slaughter in terms of productivity in favor of the private sector. In fact I would take 10 private sector engineers at 250k vs your 20 public sector at 150k and would still win. The reason is not talent, but process. Governments are bureaucratic by nature, companies are meritocratic by nature. Obviously this is a vast simplification and there are exceptions but I wouldn’t bet on your team being one.
  - scudd 5y ago
    I've observed that large corporations are also quite capable of bureaucracy. Although I've never worked in public sector so I can't make a cross comparison.
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    I didn't say my hires would be public sector. They just have to produce something that is freely available to the public sector and meets a specific public sector need.
  - EricE 5y ago
    lol - the larger the company the more bureaucratic they become. I have friends inside the casino industries and they are 10 times worse than I've ever seen government when it comes to gross internal inefficiencies. Makes sense - the government doesn't have to earn its money, it just uses the IRS to confiscate it and casinos don't earn their money either, they just steal it.
AndrewKemendo 5y ago
Maybe it sounds lame or hokey or whatever but the point of working for the government is not to make money it's to provide your services for a significant discount for the betterment of the population. Is that how people approach it? Yes some do, and there are fantastic people who are working the government in service to the nation. Certainly not all and almost never for government contractors. That's the spirit at least. I don't think it's actually working unfortunately because trust in government is so low. There was a time though...

by adrr 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago

For what? The initial design work and a demo deployment can be outsourced. After the design is proven then cheaper sysadmins can run the thing. Also, the fact that government jobs are so capped like that is a conspiracy to make the public sector suck, basically. We should fix that too, but I recognize it cannot be done in time, hence allowing that the design work to be outsourced.

ethbr0 5y ago
The problem with cleaving contractor deliverables from suitability results is that you remove all incentive for quality work. Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS hahaha ----- I am trying to structure the contract to avoid this stuff, by making the deliverables include both the contractors running their own working deployment, and the government also running their own. For the latter, there should be a tech transfer period where the contracter needs to do training and promptly answer questions, and then a government independence period where the contractor is not allowed to intervene at all to prove the knowledge has actually been transferred, and government isn't entering an IT-support protection racket. Only then is full payout given. Yes, that means finishing the entire project will take quite a bit longer than doing all the dev work. Yes, that also means the project is riskier for the contractor and has less ongoing reward, and so they will need to be paid more initially. But it's worth it in the end. If there is some gotcha here where the private sector can get out with too much proprietary IP or a weak and dependent customer in the government, do let me know, that is not my intent. I'm trying to envision a transitional project to get out of today's privatized world to one with better US state capacity.

patentatt 5y ago

I may be naïve, but I’d venture to guess that plenty of $170k developers could make a great cloud platform if given the chance.

Ericson2314 5y ago
I think many would jump at the opportunity to be paid to pioneer what's known in advance to be highly visible and impactful FOSS project. That's like a manhandle-project-class career legacy for you, at a fraction of the cost for the government.
adrr 5y ago
Someone straight out of college is going to be making close to $50k. $170k would be a very senior person to come in at the top level. I can't imagine building a cloud platform at the government. What type of hardware is the procurement department going to get with the bidding process? You'll also won't able to get unix machine or macs to run as your development machines, it will be windows boxes filled with spyware. I say this as my dad worked as a senior scientist creating software / models to track oil spills and toxic chemical spills. On his last year before retirement, they banned his team from using Macs.
- EricE 5y ago
  ha - the iPhone is the catalyst that really broke the Windows homogeny - Mac's are everywhere inside government these days. Windows still dominates most orgs, but never thought I would live to see any significant numbers - but here we are.
doublejay1999 5y ago
its not naive to think there are plenty of talented 120k devs sitting in faangs waiting to catch a break.

zhengyi13 5y ago

To your first question, https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/. To your second, well, /shrug. A reasonable number of folk might well jump at the chance to have a job like that on their resume, and there's likely a fair amount of possible cross pollination w/ various folk in the DoD/military to bring up bodies and relevant expertise (i.e. security).

0xy 5y ago
Private sector pays over double the government. Why do you think the US government has so many problems with security? What security engineer worth his salt is going to accept half the pay to work for the government where things move at a snails pace?
- mellosouls 5y ago
  Not everybody is driven solely by money.
- manquer 5y ago
  Not every co moves at startup speeds. I have seen plenty of large companies move just as slow or slower. Problems of red tape are not limited to only government ,it is function of most large organizations Plenty of security engineers are constantly frustrated at the lack of security focus in corporate sector, investments are only made when it affects revenue . Even after all the ransomware companies some times do the bare minimum and buying insurance Government on the other hand cares about security for different reasons, they take it lot more seriously. They don't sacrifice security in the interest of sales. I would anyday prefer to work for some org where security actually matters not where it is inconvenience
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    That's all true, but we should also be willing to pay more in the public sector. Capping government salaries and then paying for consulting is an especially lousy form of privatization.
  - 5y ago

bob1029 5y ago

> Whats the most you can make at government job? If we were serious about fixing this problem, existing federal pay scale constraints would not be a barrier to entry. Legislation could be passed yesterday that would add arbitrary pay scales for special purposes such as these. Attach an AWS architect salary to a government job and I think you will immediately find the skill gap filled. Bonus points if you put incentive structures in the employee contracts so that the brilliant minds are directly incentivized to deliver, rather than via proxy of their lobbying container organization.

mumblemumble 5y ago
Or how about we just end this culture of legislative micro-management, so that we don't have the problem in the first place? From there, we can give the agency the budget to do the job, and let someone who's actually close to the situation decide whether it makes more sense to contract it out or build an in-person team. A bunch of legislators who are well-known to be perpetually too busy conducting fundraising lunches with lobbyists to actually read the text of the bills they're crafting and voting on are never going to be making informed decisions on matters at this level of detail.
- xenophonf 5y ago
  Legislative oversight of the executive branch is a feature, not a bug. Presidents aren't kings, neither are cabinet members princes. That said, appropriations is no barrier to hiring the necessary talent. There are plenty of well-run private data centers in the federal government, staffed by both federal employees and government contractors.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Politician micro-management is a real problem in the US, but keep in mind that these restrictions of the bureaucracy are a more second-order effect. They are less about directly giving the politicians more control than keeping the civil service week to the benefit of the contractors, and that outcome continues whether or not the politicians find it worth their time to meddle with any specific project. Also, it's my understanding that the micro-management is more a problem on the state and local level, like NY state politicians such as Cuomo forcing the MTA to take on debt for these stupid stations rather than improve service.

manquer 5y ago

How many hours you have to work for that ?. How long before you get fired because you didn't kiss someone's ass or can't keep competiting with 27year single male with no other life ? Compensation is only one aspect of a job. Plenty of people work in defense while private sector pays more, public service motivation, job security, benefits, better work hours, more seniority driven promotions there are a ton of reasons. Doesn't mean it is the most efficient way to run an org, point is there are enough qualified people who value the other benefits more than just the cash. Funny you mention 170k Amazon is known to have a fairly strong cap on base salary compensation. Usually at 150-170k range.

freeopinion 5y ago

I don't know you. I don't know anything about you. I don't mean any disrespect to you, but... I'll match you against somebody willing to take $150k for the exact same work. I'll match 4 of you against 8 of my hires. I'm willing to bet that my $1.2M team will outperform your $2M team. I'll very happily match 50 of your team against 75 of mine. You could poach 25 of mine who prove to be superstars, and I'll hire more. That doesn't mean that you are dumb or incompetent or less skilled. I just think that there are some very smart and capable people willing to work for $150k. I think that many of them are as good as any AWS hire. And I think they could be motivated by something besides money to create something as good or better than anything from AWS. Indeed, less money could itself be a strong motivation to outperform. Thankfully, we don't live in a world where there are only 10 geniuses to go around. The world is much much cooler than that!

cellis 5y ago
I’ll take that bet. 10 150k public sector employees vs 10 250k private sector, its going to be a slaughter in terms of productivity in favor of the private sector. In fact I would take 10 private sector engineers at 250k vs your 20 public sector at 150k and would still win. The reason is not talent, but process. Governments are bureaucratic by nature, companies are meritocratic by nature. Obviously this is a vast simplification and there are exceptions but I wouldn’t bet on your team being one.
- scudd 5y ago
  I've observed that large corporations are also quite capable of bureaucracy. Although I've never worked in public sector so I can't make a cross comparison.
- freeopinion 5y ago
  I didn't say my hires would be public sector. They just have to produce something that is freely available to the public sector and meets a specific public sector need.
- EricE 5y ago
  lol - the larger the company the more bureaucratic they become. I have friends inside the casino industries and they are 10 times worse than I've ever seen government when it comes to gross internal inefficiencies. Makes sense - the government doesn't have to earn its money, it just uses the IRS to confiscate it and casinos don't earn their money either, they just steal it.

AndrewKemendo 5y ago

Maybe it sounds lame or hokey or whatever but the point of working for the government is not to make money it's to provide your services for a significant discount for the betterment of the population. Is that how people approach it? Yes some do, and there are fantastic people who are working the government in service to the nation. Certainly not all and almost never for government contractors. That's the spirit at least. I don't think it's actually working unfortunately because trust in government is so low. There was a time though...