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.
They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.