[dontbenebby]

Yup. Money isn't the issue with nonprofits (well aside from paying your execs multiples of the max on the GS scale while whining if the low level staffers ask to be paid in line with the GS payscale)

The issue is they pay their executives $$$$$ while insisting low level employees take much less than they'd make as government employees while feeling entitled to shape someone's career for the rest of their LIFE if they leave the organization on bad terms.

Someone told me "no one gets fired on K street". I did. I moved in with my parents, learned to code, and signed a lease in line with my budget on an apartment in my home county, where yet another nonprofit profited from my knowledge while abusing me.

Ex: look at page 7 here:

https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CDT-2015-990-FINA...

Then look here:

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

The entitlement of these entities is astounding.

You can only repeat the same confidence tricks so many times before men with guns come into your house like it's Belfast in the 80s or you have civil unrest on an unprecedented scale.

I've interviewed places that went on to full on unionize, then applied again after the unionization thinking I could discard my previous extremely disrespectful experiences that were hand waved away, only to have people conduct the process like I'm trying to order a vodka mate at Waterfall[6].

(As in conducting the interview with dripping sarcasm and a tone like they're going to try to put a cigarette out on me, which is not something I want done, though thanks for the hole in my best black t-shirt because I decided to go to the club they didn't write about in LA Times or whatever.)

I'm gonna swing back to a research project I'm working on in a moment, but it says everything about thew state of nonprofits all the world over that when back before the 2020 election, I asked my bank for a safe deposit box and a funeral home for a pointer on someone who can draw up a will that it felt like the entire planet lost their minds. (They didn't help with either, since I'm not a boomer, and so I closed my account. Enjoy the bank run and stock crash, you rude little woman!)

The insurrection was illegal, and murder is bad, but unfortunately I think it took events like that, or the power failure in Texas[2] or the condo collapse in Florida[3] are what it took to teach folks that pairing no income tax at the state level with hatred of "feds" and sales tax will end with you sitting alone in your McMansion or condo, wondering if it will collapse in on you due to an extreme weather event, or a nuclear strike conducted by a rouge state you insisted via your purposefully terrible voting be handled with kid gloves[4][5].

At the end of the day, the world we are seeing on the news today is the one that folks from generations prior to mine (including GenX) very violently insisted on.

I'm on the autistic spectrum -- I know people sometimes say one thing and mean another, so all I can do is try to put enough information out there that people can try to make good decisions under uncertainty.

(I wrote the above while pounding espresso that I put on my Capital One[8] card, since based on my interactions with their employees I don't think they care if I pay my bill, and there's no cash in MY wallet.)

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-funded-think-tank-fires-google-cr... [2] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968577281/what-went-wrong-wit... [3] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/26/1031245430/surfside-condo-col... [4] https://www.npr.org/2022/05/21/1100547908/russia-ends-natura... [5] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/15/1072385995/north-korea-is-tes... [6] http://water-gate.de/de/contact/location/location.html [7] I changed my SSID, you're not as smart as you think :-) [8] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/woman-accused-of...

[WaitWaitWha]

the two pay scales you posted are not a complete picture. The CEO in the non-profit makes $397,684, while the top GS15 step 10 makes $176,300.

First, the more appropriate comparison would be the Senior Executive Service (SES) pay scale which tops out at $226,300.

Additionally, a non-profit executive takes retirement out of their earnings of $400K, while the government employee's retirement is guaranteed and does not come out of their $226K.

[dontbenebby]

Hi WaitWaitWha,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

>First, the two pay scales you posted are not a complete picture. The CEO in the non-profit makes $397,684, while the top GS15 step 10 makes $176,300. First, the more appropriate comparison would be the Senior Executive Service (SES) pay scale which tops out at $226,300. Additionally, a non-profit executive takes retirement out of their earnings of $400K, while the government employee's retirement is guaranteed and does not come out of their $226K.

You're correct my reply was not completely accurate with regard to numbers, so thanks for that.

But, to be clear the issue is the CEO justified folks payrates (mostly attorneys recently out of law school from across the T14) based on what a JD would make on the GS scale[0], while conversely the executives, as you can see from the data, made more.

This was also a smaller nonprofit, I've met folks with similar salaries but much larger teams or orgs.

Meanwhile, here it is clearly stated that someone with "3 years of graduate-level education leading to a Ph.D. degree or Ph.D. degree or equivalent doctoral degree" should make GS-11 (not clear on what step):

https://www.generalschedule.org/articles/general-schedule-ed...

Also, to be CRYSTAL clear:

I also did not CHOOSE nonprofits.

It was my perception they refused to hire me because if things like very openly stating I would not be applying to the NSA because I was worried I'd be asked to engage in illegal activities, based on my readings on cases like Jewel v. NSA[2].

When I was charting career paths I also (verbally) expressed concern about scholarship for service -- that a president might institute a government shutdown or otherwise interfere with folks ability to fulfill the requirements, causing them to be forced to pay the loans bqack, which IIRC happened during the Trump administration:

https://www.cyberscoop.com/government-shutdown-cybersecurity...

(In fact, one the last decent contact I had in the federal government stopped speaking to me when I tried to clarify whay became of that fiasco, it's not in any publicly available news source I could find)

So from my perspective, by the time I was at Center for Democracy & Technology, we were in a "fall of the USSR" situation. I had to repeatedly tell people "this isn't high school" as I was stymied despite having more intelligence capabilities than some small countries.

That meant that absent a VERY compelling reason, if there is never a context where someone opposes me when I've done nothing my entire life but work as what only fairly recently has been termed a "public interest technologist", it makes me question people's integrity, especially paired with things like words and phrases from private conversations making their way into CDT whitepapers after my departure and after the new CEO refused to even interview me.

It is completely unacceptable that across two different leaders this pattern of gatekeeping access to employment has continued.

I emailed the dean at Georgetown, William Treanor, about the above mentioned plagiarism issue, but didn't get a substantive reply.

I am not a lawyer, but speaking as someone who has not crossed an international border since the Obama administration, it's my understanding espionage is a capital offense... so on a long enough timeline if I cannot understand why people are making hiring decisions, paired with rampant illegal behavior, paired with refusals to connect me with work or compensate me for past harms, then all I can do is openly muse what motivates folks as I read and respond to publicly available information.

For context, I currently reside in the City of Pittsburgh.

I am tired of writing out long paragraphs like the above.

The last time I put this much energy into a post on the internet, a crowd formed outside the Mayor's house, and we got a new one. Then the Boy Scouts went bankrupt, and Mike Doyle (the cult adjacent[1] congressman) decided not to run for another term.

In closing, I feel that I was underpaid, illegally fired, then subjected to electronic and physical attacks by members of so called civil society.

I encourage anyone who desires to, to read the above and reply.

I'm happy to have a discussion.

I will do my best to be honest and accurate, but it may "trigger" some folks who aren't used to having hard questions asked in a public forum.

Have a nice evening, and thanks again for those numbers, sincerely.

[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/13/frat-house-for... [2] https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/jewel/jewel.complaint.pdf