The valuing of seniority hits a nerve. There's an inability to reward top performers even if the person's supervisor knows they deserve more pay. Pay is heavily

The valuing of seniority hits a nerve. There's an inability to reward top performers even if the person's supervisor knows they deserve more pay. Pay is heavily determined by years of experience and their step system. Granted merits do come into play a lot more regarding promotions, there's also circumstances when teams promote an individual "up and out" so they won't have to deal with them anymore. It's so hard to fire someone, it's easier to promote them.... This is a recipe to losing the best and brightest. In addition to this, the slowness and amount of red tape they have to deal with. Tech culture, for better or worse, revolves around new technology and shipping vs. gov't tech with a lot of maintenance of legacy systems. One friend told me a military base's system is running on top of Pike (language), that no one knows. There was a stackoverflow thread that show about 6 people on the site uses it...