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I heard about this a couple months ago, with largely the same sales pitch: "We're looking for software developers to help rebuild the government's systems. You

I heard about this a couple months ago, with largely the same sales pitch: "We're looking for software developers to help rebuild the government's systems. You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty. And we're looking for 500 people! Also you'll be relocating to DC." If I was rebuilding important systems, I'd happily take 300 people at market rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-;

phillmv 11y ago
Not that many people who work directly for the government work for market rates. Cabinet members for instance make about $200,000 - which is not comparable to executive salaries in 2015.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  They are also "paid" in name recognition and political access, and those retain some value after that person has left the office. Furthermore, the base salary does not include the value of various benefits available to the government employee, which varies wildly by the office to be filled. These often include immunity from prosecution, defined benefit pensions, service discounts, medical benefits, protections against arbitrary dismissal, and others. Even so, those barely obfuscated benefits are probably not nearly enough to match the usual differential between a competitive market rate and the government pay scales. Just a few years ago, I was asked by an Army officer to consider a job with the government. She said, "The government needs good programmers." As I politely disengaged, I thought silently to myself, "Yes, well, that's because the government only pays for awful to mediocre programmers." Unlike some other positions in the bureaucracy that may be indirectly monetized, the only truly remunerative route I see on this proposed team is to work in it for a few years, writing obscure arcana into the code, then quit to become a consultant in working around the quirks in the very same code you just wrote. I don't know anyone who works as a bureaucrat who does it out of a sense of patriotism.
  - jkestner 11y ago
    Likewise, you could say that these engineers are "paid" in recognition/agency (from the President) and meaningful work. Yes, it doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with market pay, but if they're attracting great programmers now, I'd say the market is working.
  - chernevik 11y ago
    Jack Lew, currently Treasury Secretary, made millions at NYU and Citibank, chiefly because he was politically connected. He's a reasonably smart guy, but hasn't show the anything the capability needed to earn that sort of change strictly on his own personal productivity. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112548/jack-lew-confirmed-treasury-secretary-democrats-gave-him-pass http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112548/jack-lew-confirmed... Anybody sticking around DC for any serious period of time will find similar ways of being compensated, with corresponding effects on the quality of the work they do. The USDS isn't about changing government. It's about expanding Democratic networks into new channels of information power and government largesse.
fixermark 11y ago
>> You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. But the overall benefits package may very well be competitive, assuming they're bringing people in as government employees or contractors. The federal government is legally back-stopped on how limited it can allow benefit packages to be (contrast with the package in some startup companies, though of course the possibility of massive windfall profit sharing is supposed to make up the difference).
jonjenk 11y ago
I know some of the people who have signed up for this and I can say with confidence that I'd happily take them at any salary. The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bcg1 11y ago
  Have you ever worked for the government? Your friends will either be assimilated by the Borg or shot out of a torpedo tube. Resistance is futile.
  - rdl 11y ago
    There are parts of the government which are different. (Some are better, some are worse, and all in different ways.) Thinking of the US Government as a monolithic entity with a single culture was probably my biggest incorrect preconceived idea; it seems to be fairly universal to people who have never seen inside.
- tolmasky 11y ago
  There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world" in a startup or being patriotic for the government. > The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging. There's actually really simple reasoning behind this: the flip side to your statement is "the fact that the government isn't willing to pay for work that is important is discouraging". You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects (everything from military contractors to the bay bridge that got built by a FOREIGN company, went over budget, and now may not even be safe). Clearly some projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for. If your project doesn't command market rate, then either it isn't as important as they're trying to tell you it is (since they've clearly demonstrated a willingness to pay in other areas), or, perhaps worse, it is but they just don't care about it enough. Its so strange that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.
DevX101 11y ago
They should just pay market rates. The alternative is hiring contractors at 2-3x market rate
- ethanbond 11y ago
  This article is entirely about another alternative. Which is to pay below private market rates but exposure to otherwise inaccessible problems.
- wslack 11y ago
  It's not possible. Government jobs (except for those for the equivalent of flag officers in the military) are categorized at certain pay levels. The highest pay level tops out around 160K. I think the original intent was to avoid politicians paying their friends extreme salaries, which is how gov't jobs used to work (see "Spoils System).
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Feel free to tell that to Congress.
jsolson 11y ago
I know two people who went to do this (and have stayed on past their initial six month terms). I think they're insane, but they are fantastic engineers. Even at the top of the GS pay scale, they're making ~half what they were in their prior industry jobs. The government just doesn't pay that well, and as far as I know the pay scale is congressionally managed.
- sehugg 11y ago
  If you stick around for the long-term, you can make $130k-150k as a GS-15, work eight-hour days, and get a sweet pension at 55 instead of the Logan's Run layoff-crystal going off when you turn 30.
  - jsolson 11y ago
    As I understand it they both started at GS15 step 10, which even with the cost of living decrease moving to DC still puts them around half where they were before.
renegadedev 11y ago
"You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty" Sounds like a modern day Shackleton job posting
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Well you can't pay for good software these days, so maybe they are on to something.
rbanffy 11y ago
> I'd happily take 300 people at market rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-; I mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again here. There is the best talent money can buy and there is the talent no money can buy. If I could, I would apply without thinking twice.
mesozoic 11y ago
What a sales pitch!
yoz 11y ago
I was hired into 18F last year. I work out of San Francisco, where we have a team of about 15 working in the center of the city (UN Plaza). It's the second-largest office; the largest is DC, but we have smaller offices in Chicago and NYC, as well as many people working remotely in other parts of the country. I have 20 years of software engineering experience, and the salary I get is competitive with similar salaries in SF. The benefits are decent, plus you get loads of discounts of things just for being a Federal employee. There were several reasons I joined, but patriotism isn't one of them: I'm actually a British citizen who relocated to the USA almost a decade ago. Having kept in touch with friends back in London, I'm amazed and inspired by what GDS has achieved: they are, quite literally, setting the high water mark for user-centered design and research. Then I looked around the state of US government websites, and I felt what is one of the most common motivations for an engineer: seeing something broken that you know how to fix. Not only are the people here fantastic, but we're getting to use better tools and services than I have previously. We started deploying using AWS and all its associated services, but have recently set up Cloud Foundry, and that's made fast development and deployment so much easier. (Yay, that wonderful feeling of deleting huge swathes of configuration you just don't need any more.) The project I'm on uses Mandrill and Twilio, plus Snap CI for testing & deployment. (Other projects may use different tools. Not much is mandated.) We all work on MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt Displays. (Some of us run Linux on those MacBooks.) Part of what makes this work so well is that, while 18F does bill clients for our time, our primary motivator is quality rather than profit. We get to do the right thing because it's the right thing. If we find a better way to build, we switch to that. I've worked with plenty of startups but I've rarely worked with any team that was able to improve its working methods so quickly. Everything we build is open source by default, available on Github. Plus, we contribute to other FOSS projects (such as the aforementioned Cloud Foundry). I've ended up making PRs back to plenty of libraries and other projects while working on this one to fix minor bugs or add useful features. No, my day job here is not totally free of strange and frustrating bureaucracy, but there's far less than you'd guess, and plenty of freedoms that make up for that. I could bang on about my beliefs about the role of government and politics and how all this should work, and that is all important to me, but it's less relevant to the day-to-day work. And so far, that work is immensely satisfying.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago

phillmv 11y ago

Not that many people who work directly for the government work for market rates. Cabinet members for instance make about $200,000 - which is not comparable to executive salaries in 2015.

logfromblammo 11y ago
They are also "paid" in name recognition and political access, and those retain some value after that person has left the office. Furthermore, the base salary does not include the value of various benefits available to the government employee, which varies wildly by the office to be filled. These often include immunity from prosecution, defined benefit pensions, service discounts, medical benefits, protections against arbitrary dismissal, and others. Even so, those barely obfuscated benefits are probably not nearly enough to match the usual differential between a competitive market rate and the government pay scales. Just a few years ago, I was asked by an Army officer to consider a job with the government. She said, "The government needs good programmers." As I politely disengaged, I thought silently to myself, "Yes, well, that's because the government only pays for awful to mediocre programmers." Unlike some other positions in the bureaucracy that may be indirectly monetized, the only truly remunerative route I see on this proposed team is to work in it for a few years, writing obscure arcana into the code, then quit to become a consultant in working around the quirks in the very same code you just wrote. I don't know anyone who works as a bureaucrat who does it out of a sense of patriotism.
- jkestner 11y ago
  Likewise, you could say that these engineers are "paid" in recognition/agency (from the President) and meaningful work. Yes, it doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with market pay, but if they're attracting great programmers now, I'd say the market is working.
- chernevik 11y ago
  Jack Lew, currently Treasury Secretary, made millions at NYU and Citibank, chiefly because he was politically connected. He's a reasonably smart guy, but hasn't show the anything the capability needed to earn that sort of change strictly on his own personal productivity. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112548/jack-lew-confirmed-treasury-secretary-democrats-gave-him-pass http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112548/jack-lew-confirmed... Anybody sticking around DC for any serious period of time will find similar ways of being compensated, with corresponding effects on the quality of the work they do. The USDS isn't about changing government. It's about expanding Democratic networks into new channels of information power and government largesse.

fixermark 11y ago

>> You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. But the overall benefits package may very well be competitive, assuming they're bringing people in as government employees or contractors. The federal government is legally back-stopped on how limited it can allow benefit packages to be (contrast with the package in some startup companies, though of course the possibility of massive windfall profit sharing is supposed to make up the difference).

jonjenk 11y ago

I know some of the people who have signed up for this and I can say with confidence that I'd happily take them at any salary. The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bcg1 11y ago
Have you ever worked for the government? Your friends will either be assimilated by the Borg or shot out of a torpedo tube. Resistance is futile.
- rdl 11y ago
  There are parts of the government which are different. (Some are better, some are worse, and all in different ways.) Thinking of the US Government as a monolithic entity with a single culture was probably my biggest incorrect preconceived idea; it seems to be fairly universal to people who have never seen inside.
tolmasky 11y ago
There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world" in a startup or being patriotic for the government. > The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging. There's actually really simple reasoning behind this: the flip side to your statement is "the fact that the government isn't willing to pay for work that is important is discouraging". You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects (everything from military contractors to the bay bridge that got built by a FOREIGN company, went over budget, and now may not even be safe). Clearly some projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for. If your project doesn't command market rate, then either it isn't as important as they're trying to tell you it is (since they've clearly demonstrated a willingness to pay in other areas), or, perhaps worse, it is but they just don't care about it enough. Its so strange that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.

DevX101 11y ago

They should just pay market rates. The alternative is hiring contractors at 2-3x market rate

ethanbond 11y ago
This article is entirely about another alternative. Which is to pay below private market rates but exposure to otherwise inaccessible problems.
wslack 11y ago
It's not possible. Government jobs (except for those for the equivalent of flag officers in the military) are categorized at certain pay levels. The highest pay level tops out around 160K. I think the original intent was to avoid politicians paying their friends extreme salaries, which is how gov't jobs used to work (see "Spoils System).
s73v3r 11y ago
Feel free to tell that to Congress.

jsolson 11y ago

I know two people who went to do this (and have stayed on past their initial six month terms). I think they're insane, but they are fantastic engineers. Even at the top of the GS pay scale, they're making ~half what they were in their prior industry jobs. The government just doesn't pay that well, and as far as I know the pay scale is congressionally managed.

sehugg 11y ago
If you stick around for the long-term, you can make $130k-150k as a GS-15, work eight-hour days, and get a sweet pension at 55 instead of the Logan's Run layoff-crystal going off when you turn 30.
- jsolson 11y ago
  As I understand it they both started at GS15 step 10, which even with the cost of living decrease moving to DC still puts them around half where they were before.

renegadedev 11y ago

"You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty" Sounds like a modern day Shackleton job posting

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

Well you can't pay for good software these days, so maybe they are on to something.

rbanffy 11y ago

> I'd happily take 300 people at market rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-; I mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again here. There is the best talent money can buy and there is the talent no money can buy. If I could, I would apply without thinking twice.

mesozoic 11y ago

What a sales pitch!

yoz 11y ago

I was hired into 18F last year. I work out of San Francisco, where we have a team of about 15 working in the center of the city (UN Plaza). It's the second-largest office; the largest is DC, but we have smaller offices in Chicago and NYC, as well as many people working remotely in other parts of the country. I have 20 years of software engineering experience, and the salary I get is competitive with similar salaries in SF. The benefits are decent, plus you get loads of discounts of things just for being a Federal employee. There were several reasons I joined, but patriotism isn't one of them: I'm actually a British citizen who relocated to the USA almost a decade ago. Having kept in touch with friends back in London, I'm amazed and inspired by what GDS has achieved: they are, quite literally, setting the high water mark for user-centered design and research. Then I looked around the state of US government websites, and I felt what is one of the most common motivations for an engineer: seeing something broken that you know how to fix. Not only are the people here fantastic, but we're getting to use better tools and services than I have previously. We started deploying using AWS and all its associated services, but have recently set up Cloud Foundry, and that's made fast development and deployment so much easier. (Yay, that wonderful feeling of deleting huge swathes of configuration you just don't need any more.) The project I'm on uses Mandrill and Twilio, plus Snap CI for testing & deployment. (Other projects may use different tools. Not much is mandated.) We all work on MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt Displays. (Some of us run Linux on those MacBooks.) Part of what makes this work so well is that, while 18F does bill clients for our time, our primary motivator is quality rather than profit. We get to do the right thing because it's the right thing. If we find a better way to build, we switch to that. I've worked with plenty of startups but I've rarely worked with any team that was able to improve its working methods so quickly. Everything we build is open source by default, available on Github. Plus, we contribute to other FOSS projects (such as the aforementioned Cloud Foundry). I've ended up making PRs back to plenty of libraries and other projects while working on this one to fix minor bugs or add useful features. No, my day job here is not totally free of strange and frustrating bureaucracy, but there's far less than you'd guess, and plenty of freedoms that make up for that. I could bang on about my beliefs about the role of government and politics and how all this should work, and that is all important to me, but it's less relevant to the day-to-day work. And so far, that work is immensely satisfying.

toomuchtodo 11y ago