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Make sure to drill into the pay scales by location... suburban DC gets a 30% bump. SV/Bay Area is >40% bump over base GS scale. Why would somebody take the .g

Make sure to drill into the pay scales by location... suburban DC gets a 30% bump. SV/Bay Area is >40% bump over base GS scale. Why would somebody take the .gov job? Same reason anybody would take a .gov job... Benefits (though that gap has closed). Work/life balance. Job security. Interesting work (agency-dependent). Inertia + location (many of my peers who are bureaucrats come from families of bureaucrats and are DC natives) Anyways, the government can't hire developers not because the salary is too low but because the electorate has decided the government should be "small" which forces outsourcing to the big name consulting/contracting shops.

acdha 4y ago
> the government can't hire developers not because the salary is too low but because the electorate has decided the government should be "small" which forces outsourcing to the big name consulting/contracting shops. I wouldn’t say “not” because those are really the same problem from different angles. Keeping salaries low encourages attrition, not adding or backfilling positions makes it permanent. The best part is that this process reliably produces expensive failures to provide the pretext for repeating it.