[Bnichs]

I always figured that the DC area was wealthy due to mostly political corruption and creating government contracts that enlist a 30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice. I didn't know it was this mecha of tech expertise and problem solving.

[delecti]

Not sure if that was a typo, but the term is "mecca", not "mecha", referencing the place in Saudia Arabia, where Muslims are supposed to make a pilgrimage at least once in their lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecca

[pcthrowaway]

When you're talking about tech expertise, maybe it's a mecha

[hinkley]

Yes but what would a mecha of tech expertise look like? Jude Law? Voltron?

[delecti]

I think any mecha requires tech expertise. So a mecha of tech expertise is just any mecha.

[antisceptic]

A Gundam

[sandworm101]

>>30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice.

Talk to the carpenters and plumbers working on wealthy houses. Once you see people regularly dropping 200k+ to redo a bathroom, those government toilet seats don't seem all that extreme.

[hinkley]

I thought the toilet seat thing was explained long ago. Some of those bills were essentially money laundering for covert ops with extremely high security clearances. $50 for a seat, $1200 to pay salaries.

[lovich]

Some of it is also the logistics chain. A commercial enterprise can get away with purchasing a screw. A military airplane tracks the screw from its lathing, to rod forming, to steel production, to iron production + coke production, to iron ore and coke inputs. All this so that when a certain part fails all related parts can be checked for similar failures.

Apple is the only commercial enterprise I am aware of that attempts to have similar supply chain controls, and their products aren’t cheap.

[jschveibinz]

The area has the 1st, 2nd and 4th wealthiest counties in the US by median income. Marin and Santa Clara are 5th and 11th, respectively.

[alephnerd]

It's much more "middle class" than wealthy imo. For example, most lobbyists for top firms earn less than an L3 at Google and less than a GS-15 or SES1 employee, and with much less job security (for example, if you were an ex-Trump staffer, your political currency is useless on the Hill at the moment).

There definetly is old money in the city, but it's honestly about as prominent as Pac Heights old money in the Bay Area and absolutely gets dwarfed by out of towners.

[wahern]

Unlike San Francisco, Washington, DC was a backwater until the 1960s. For most of the country's history Federal policy was to avoid centralization of government administration to prevent Washington becoming as economically prominent as Paris, London, or countless other capital cities.

But things began to change during the Cold War, and then accelerated during the military buildup under Reagan. The Washington metro area began to explode economically as defense contractors that had once been spread around the country started moving to DC. The acceleration was compounded again under Bush with the war on terror attracting a broader range of security and IT companies wanting to cash in on Federal largesse. A big part of the reason for this is that Republicans preferred outsourcing Federal work to contractors, to avoid Federal unions. Federal policy didn't care where the contractors headquarters were located, whereas older agencies like the Social Security Administration, Federal Reserve, etc, had always been forced to locate most of their work elsewhere, both the labor and most of management--mostly only the political appointees were in DC.

What the government should do is return to the old policies of pushing administrative agencies back out into regional centers. Though it would probably look different in the sense that what's more important now is pushing agency directors and other political appointees along with their teams out of DC, whereas in the bygone era the emphasis was on the mass of Federal workers. You want the leadership teams out of DC because that's what's attracting the companies, not Congress.

But DC has probably grown too economically powerful to reverse the course of things.

[justinbaker84]

You figured correctly.

I understand there is some exaggeration here, but this take is far more accurate than the parent comment.

[kilgnad]

How so? Care to elaborate on how you know this?

Personally I've definitely heard arguments from both sides, but I've never known which one was "more" true.

[whitemary]

>30 person team over 5 years to design a toilet seat for a plane that will be used twice.

Just say "F-35"...unless your only purpose is more overly simplistic "free market" cheerleading typical of HN.

[ren_engineer]

>unless your only purpose is more overly simplistic "free market" cheerleading typical of HN.

yeah, people who actually create surplus value through their labor tend to get irritated by people who steal their wealth for themselves via political corruption. I'm sure Boeing and Lockheed earned their contracts fair and square despite SpaceX being 20x cheaper. Definitely wasn't their lobbying payoffs

[coldtea]

>yeah, people who actually create surplus value through their labor

How about people who time and again been bailed out by government, had friends in power pass laws and generally benefited from corruption, tax cuts, and special subsidies, or just piled up externalities cost on society and the environment?

You know, like most of the "surplus value creating" private sector...

[ActorNightly]

Its not. jschveibinz is straight wrong. I worked in the area for quite some time, with security clearance, and in the software sector for several contractors dealing with 3 letter agencies.

The wealth in the area (if you can even call it that) exists because of networking, namely people with connections to decision makers in the government are very valuable because they can bring in companies lots of money when they win contracts. The way you get promoted in the area into the high paying exec roles is solely though people skills. The amount of metaphorical dick sucking that goes on would make any sane person barf (on one occasion I was working in the Pentagon with setting up some software, as a civilian, and my boss who was there with me told me to stand up when some upper rank military guy came in the room to show respect, because otherwise it would look bad for the company). If you aren't connected or know anyone, you basically fit into the standard working class, and really don't make that much money factoring in high cost of living

And those people pretty much are working towards making in the 200s. My friend who was in "systems engineering" (i.e microsoft word/excel operations) got a position where he made 220-260 depending on bonus, and that was considered EXTREMELY good for the area. I didn't have the heart to tell him that a fresh hire at Amazon can work 2 years and make that much at a minimum.

The thing also with government contracts is that government sets rates for how much companies can charge the government for a certain person with certain qualifications, and companies essentially try to pay people as little as possible under that value to maximize profit. This also drives salaries down.

And because that area is filled with those type of people who by their nature tend to be pretty materialistic (in addition to a lot of foreign presence with Korean and Middle eastern people who also tend to be materialistic), seeing endless bmws/mercs/audis may make it seem like there is wealth in the area, but there really is not - you can easily do the math on cost of living versus salary and figure out that all that shit is financed at maximum length loan terms. Have been in conversations where people talk about having 30k worth of CC debt like its a normal thing.

As far as tech goes, there are 2 things that happen. First, a lot of the work gets subcontracted out by the 3 letter agencies to all the companies in the area, and 2, the work is VERY compartmentalized. So if you do end up working on something in the NSA or on a contract for the NSA it could be literally some basic shit, like a library to parse some stuff out of http, and you ship that and you never see it used or know what the bigger picture is. So no, working for NSA, other 3 letter agencies, or contractors of, won't give you an advantage in terms of experience.

You may get a clearance but that is only valuable to companies in the area since they will hire you because of your clearance then shove you onto a project that you may be ever so slightly qualified for, so they can collect money from the government while not having to pay for your clearance.

TLDR; that area sucks, no smart people ever go work for government or contractors of. Because smart people realize that they can not only make more money in the private sector, but have favorable living arrangement, especially with remote work, and can do engineering instead of circle jerking management to get promoted.

[eldritch_4ier]

I'm sure you're an otherwise intelligent person, but your view of the world has been so warped by living in the Bay Area that it's astounding.