Our people go on to work at (eg) SpaceX and to found exactly the kind of startups that we're all dog whistling about. (Lars Blackmore?). Lean, focused, fast and providing valuable services to gov and private industries.
This discussion about how 'the government' cannot 'do this' is a vague rorschach blot that reveals people's own motivations only, and ignores the completely different priorities gov has. Do you believe the deep technical expertise that gov-funded experts are surely providing to Ukraine would be posted on Twitter?
It's just taxes, we definitely could.
The fact that we don't has a lot more to do with government culture and a post-Reagan idea that the government should be a thin and highly reactive operation than the money not being there.
Even if Congress corrected for that, they'd still be locked into slow moving pay raises, and they'd probably become a political target at some point, when some anti-spending congressperson begins harping on how there are so many federal employees make a quarter million dollars a year.
Being a military contractor, for better or worse, inoculates you from a lot of politics. So, yes, the government could pay competitively, but I would be leery about accepting such a position.
I get that space and defense are apples to oranges, but there is no reason to think it is significantly different.
Can a SpaceX employee comment here? Work at SpaceX looks stressful. Elon Musk looks like a workaholic asshole expecting all their employees to do the same, but without getting rich. Maybe government work is boring by comparison, but you get a personal life.
All to avoid pension liabilities, allow downsizing that can't be blocked by a union, and provide a layer of indirection to coders being paid anything close to market rates. We need a way to hire more full-time govies, but the culture has swung so hard to contracting that there are only small pockets left of in-house talent.
The maximum amount any federal employee can earn is $170k, with zero equity.
There is also the fact that they have more take home pay then you might expect, because government salaries are exempt from FICA taxes
When I've been a contract developer, I've probably been making more than board members in some countries, but that seemed to be accepted over the short term. There's also an issue where enterprise companies wouldn't trust their IT departments, for historical reasons so the good people left or they got consulting businesses in and that made everything worse...
They can recruit very good software engineers out of the Southeast & Midwest for under 170k just fine. It's still going to cost them 6 figures, but they are going to be able to hire good talent.
I will admit though, they're going to have trouble retaining the tippy top of the seniority ladder at 170k.
[1]https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...
If you don't want to pay for that because the government is then expensive, fine, but eventually you'll have an incompetent government that is slow and still expensive due to the mishaps it leads to, for itself and it's constituents.
Federal government can pay enough to get software engineers. FAANG salaries are an outlier. They could easily target some midwestern state, put the headquarters for federal software agency there, find a feeder school, and get employees fed to an agency making a comfortable 6 figures in a low cost of living area. Will there be some attrition? Sure. But plenty will stay cause thats where family is, and where they have their house, and thats where there kids go to school and etc.
I can guarantee you that the contractors they hire from Accenture and IBM are using devs that arent making FAANG salaries. Its kind of a meme how bad some of the government contractors are, its pretty well known you can just be a body that sits at a desk if you can get a security clearance and make easy money just manually running an SQL script once a week on some of these government contracts.
The real reason nothing gets fixed is because the federal workers get free salaries and benefits packages that far outstrip their value that oversee these projects, and the contracting firms get easy money.
However, the same military has been unable to complete its stated objectives in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. 10 times out of 10, the situation has remained exactly as it was before, or worse.
If the military fails at a core mandate that we mostly agree to be a reasonable one... what makes you think they could maintain complex code?
the military is under civilian control. The US military is very very good at killing people and breaking things. I have no doubt, given the orders, the US military could kill everyone and break everything they've been ordered to kill and break. Politicians direct the military, if objectives were failed to be met then politicians determined those objectives were no longer politically viable.
Now I agree the airforce or some branch could do this, but that would be a military intervention.
