[gwright]

> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles.

I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post.

What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.

[jupp0r]

There are salary tiers that are the same across all government employees. A new grad software engineer with a master's degree will earn the same as a new grad biologist, even though the outside government salaries for the two might differ by a factor of 2. There is no practical way of paying somebody more than this narrow wage band even if it's impossible to fill the position with somebody competent. You end up not having good engineers working for the government, unless they are willing to take an extremely steep pay cut.

[gwright]

OK, I'm not sure I would describe that phenomena as an "equality principle" though. That is just a misleading label for a misguided bureaucratic rule.

[jupp0r]

Sorry for the confusion. Not a native english speaker here (although I've been living in the US for a few years).

[gwright]

Don't feel bad. Native-born Americans are having a hard time agreeing on what words like "equality" mean these days...

[dmoy]

Equality among tiers of government employee. A similar though less pronounced issue exists with the US and the General Schedule. Entry level SWE who get lucky and enter at like grade 9 make maybe 50% of what they could at FAANG as a new grad. For seniors it's even worse.