Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?
>But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year.
And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector.
Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.
That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started.
They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that.
It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector.
I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qualifications to architect out a whole system. And while we all want to act like we could whip up this entire thing with VueJs in a weekend, pretty sure there's some God forsaken legacy system it needs to hook into.
Since most engineers don't want to work with legacy systems for less than market pay, the engineers who end up working on this stuff tend to not be all that great.
Tell that to the people on this thread trying to justify how 45M is reasonable for a project like this because "software development is just a small part of the process". If a state can use freaking Eventbrite for this, clearly they are wrong.
Also, the core benefits (health insurance, retirement, etc) are better than most companies. Sure, you don't get the perks, but the core stuff is there.
For example, I'd rate access to Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program health insurance for you + spouse for life and kids through 26 as worth 2-3k per month, and invaluable if you or a dependent has a serious health condition.
I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment.
TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax."
With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly.
Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.
As far as federal employees go, making their salaries tax-free would cost the government lost tax revenue. It would also make a lot of voters angry because they still pay taxes, but "those bureaucrats in Washington DC exempted themselves from taxes." I can see the speeches now.
Approximately 50% of American politicians are anti-government as an ideology, and use the argument of "cutting overpaid government salaries" as a plank in their economic policy, so having well-paid gov't staff is just "waste" in their minds.
As far as teachers go, they are not employed by the federal government. In most states they are county-level employees and the counties obviously do not have authority to dictate federal income tax levels.
It is primarily state employees (police & teachers) that are exempt from social security if they have a different state funded pension plan. Take a look at table 2 and chart 1 of this report from the social security administration[1] for some examples of rates in different states.
>In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job
I find this offensive because one of the main functions of SS is to subsidize the retirement of low earners at the expense of higher earners. As a private citizen, I don't get to opt out of this social obligation just because my 401k gets a better return.
Not only that, but as a tax payer, I will be on the hook for bailing out the public employee pension funds when they go belly up.
As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms whose sole purpose is to fleece the government.
Can you imagine how much better it would feel to work on important and needed systems than working on the 100th food delivery app or yet another social media facism incubator?
The public sector has a whole layer of complexity that doesn't exist at all (edit: as much) in the private sector, and I can promise you it frequently does NOT feel good at all.
It is difficult to explain but people tend to use the word "bureaucracy" as a catch-all for several dozen discrete problems that crop up in different combinations depending on what level of govt you're operating.
Typical examples might be :
-a developer not having the authority to work on a system
-a developer being ordered to work on a system, but not being given permissions to the necessary tools (even if they're available), or they may prohibit certain common-sense tools, or they may force you to use certain tools.
-a developer being ordered to work on a system where the design is severely irrational, maybe impossible, and but he or she has no authority within the hierarchy to push back on requirements
-a developer being ordered to work on a system that some powerful person wants to see fail
Imagine the "client from hell" that many of us have dealt with before, who doesn't know what they want. Now imagine that person is like 3 levels higher than you, calling the shots, and you're not even allowed to speak to them, much less push back against their crazy expectations.
There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about.
I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
But why does it have to go through a contractor system at all? Why can't they keep developers on staff, who among other things can retain institutional knowledge?
One weird thing we've discovered working on VA.gov for the last five years is that we on the contractor side actually have retained a lot more institutional knowledge than the VA has. It's a problem! We think that knowledge should be on the government side, but the structure isn't there yet: USDS and 18F have rotational term limits that keep people moving through, and at the VA (not sure about other agencies) they're just in the last couple years building out an organization to do that long-term product ownership and institutional knowledge retention, even if implementation teams come through. It's moving in the right direction but it's slow, large-organization change, with a lot of extra slowness that's unique to government.
This would mean having elected officials, top-level managers, who knew what software development was, and prioritized those capabilities over extended periods of time.
The top 2-5 layers of management tend to be the types who want solutions, and they don't care how it works, and they don't really want to be bothered with the details.
To the extent they expend thought at all on systems, they tend to be focused primarily on questions like, "why is all this stuff so confusing?" "who do I blame when this thing goes wrong?"
Where I work, they go through cycles; a higher-up will say "Hey let's build a staff of in-house developers." And they'll do that for 2 or 3 years, until someone reads an article in CIO magazine about how outsourcing is superior. Then they'll start unfairly purging and firing developers, writing code is now "bad", configuration is "Good." This goes on for several years, until the cycle starts over. So as a developer, after you survive your first purge, you begin to see that invisibility is the only way to survive.
If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
As others have mentioned already, 18F and USDS are in this space. They do some work, but their scope and manpower is limited, and they try to multiply their impact through contracting. Part of that is helping federal agencies write better contracts to be able to source the kind of contractors they want --- ones who think in terms of product development, user research ("build with, not for"), and are using modern software development practices. Bringing in contractors helps them multiply their impact, especially with how difficult hiring people into government is. (and a lot of people in tech simply didn't want to work directly under the Trump administration, which --- as liberal as the tech field tends to lean, seems to be a factor on hiring at 18F and USDS).
I work at one of the contractors in the space (Ad Hoc [1]) and get to work with people from USDS every day. Like others have commented here, the government salary ranges are a problem for them to hire enough. Our last COO had been an administrator at OPM, and would say things like "on the government side, I couldn't ever hire the kinds of software developers that we're able to here on the contractor side."
Nothing against your company, but when smaller companies get good long term contracts, they get bought up by larger companies and the good people leave and start new smaller companies.
I'm reminded of a guy that used to go on Leo Laporte's podcast and had a program or joined a program where Silicon Valley tech people join government entities to make their tech and websites better. I'm sure they took massive paycuts to do this but they felt it was their duty, like military service. This guy and others like him are true heroes and patriots to me.
