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by jcrites
1756 days ago
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Until the government is willing to pay technologists market wage salaries, they're better outsourcing technology work. For some reason, they're willing to pay massive prices for contracts to firms, but not hire employees at compensation levels on par with FAANG companies. I'd probably be earning 10% of my current income if I worked for the government. (The other unfortunate problem is that outsourcing firms are not typically where strong engineers want to work: they want to own their own and build their own products. So outsourcing companies aren't a good solution either.) My personal theory? Offer FAANG companies an incentive to put together strike teams to solve government technology problems. (Isn't that how HealthCare.gov got fixed? A bunch of Google people got involved?) There are certainly technologists and scientists of equivalent or greater skill level who are happy to serve the public with such compensation, but if the government really wants to get things moving then they need to assess their compensation versus the prevailing wage for high-talent jobs in competitive areas of the country, and pay that wage. That means your top performing engineers make more than the US President (whom I believe is the most highly compensated government employee -- not considering all the perks he gets). Doesn't seem likely to happen. I don't think it's reasonable to expect technologists to accept compensation that's 10-20-30% of what they're able to make at private companies to work for the government. Maybe our government would be more effective if it paid market rates for important scientific and technology jobs. |
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As to your proposal of giving government contracts to big Silicon Valley players, they already do that. Amazon already runs all the government cloud infrastucture, with Microsoft trying to get a piece. Google may have dropped the Project Maven thing, but they have plenty of other government contracts.
Congress is never going to make pay rates for engineers directly employed by the government comparable to private companies because they have to answer to voters, and voters kick, scream, and shout if they find government employees are earning high salaries. We're in the middle of a 40-year drive to cut taxes and privatize all government functions. You're not just going to turn that around.
On the other hand, give out big money to private contractors who pay their engineers well and Congress can go brag about they brought money and jobs to their home state.