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Higher Pay For U.S. Federal Computer Jobs
nemo writes: "The United States government is giving a raise of up to 33% to all workers employed by them in the tech industry. The are apparently doing this to lure younger people into these positions and to compete with private tech companies. Read more here." Still sounds like a substantial salary gap, but the benefits of a Federal job can be pretty sweet incentive. Anyone out there on a Federal paycheck care to comment?
I don't know (m)any Government workers who put in the 'standard' 60-100 hour work week that seems to be the norm in Silicon Valley. I do know people with Gov't jobs who work 40 hours a week and less than 5 days a week, tho.
Come to think of it, maybe a 33% pay cut for a 40% hours cut isn't so bad.
Actually it's all our own faults that companies have come to assume that workers will put in 60-100 hours a week. We did it once, so now companies think we can continue to do it eternally.
But there are a few problems:
- the dot.com gold rush is over, and reality is setting it about get-rich-quick schemes. People's motivation for working long hours is decreasing
- IT workers are maturing. Someone straight out of college with no significant other may *like* working 80 hours a week, but take someone with a family and they probably would rather spend their time at home with their children
- there is no labor pool. Vacant positions go unfilled for months, and companies have stressed their staff out to the limits for too long. Now the *ENTIRE* industry is getting collective burnout all at the same time
My best friend just left the same contractor I work for to go work for the U.S. Army. While he was slowly slogging through grad school in engineering management, he now has enough time to really pursue his Ph.D. in EM at our alma mater. They're paying for it, and they'll give him a paid year off to work on his Ph.D. stuff. Cool.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
Morally inferior are not the right words. Rather, I would call it inherently unamerican in management.
As you and your wife are well aware, every little government-run agency and program, including our schools, are headed by management who know what the budget means to their jobs. You simply do not want to go over budget, or you get fired. If the organization does not meet its alloted budget through thriftness or smart spending, the budget for all of next year will get cut.
Here is part of the unamerican part I mentioned. The management for a federally funded drug prevention program office had a good deal of money left over in the budget. To avoid cuts that year, they purchased 10 computers (from my former employer) that they simply did not need, and used them to replace 10 computers that were only 2 years old. The older 10 computers went into storage somewhere, probably never to be seen again. I'm sorry, but they just squandered what I consider to be equal to a few years worth of federal income tax payments just so they wouldn't have to worry about loosing cash in their budget next year. They took my money and wasted it. These people that my tax dollars pay for and are supposed to be serving me are making horrendously selfish decisions that force me to serve them instead. IMHO, that money could have gone a long way in paying my own college education.
You hardly see this type of waste in well-run companies, big and small, because there is no bottomless pit of money that you can count on, and accountability is a key. Nobody inside the federal government cares when waste of federal money is concerned. Ernst and Young CAN'T EVEN AUDIT the US Department of Education! The USA's consficatory tax system provides federal agencies to spend like there is no tommorow with no attention to results, with the exception of this: "Did you meet the budget?".
The big problem is not the paperwork, but that nobody looks above the bottom line.
The efficency problems of the federal government starts at the top. They know the boss (that would be you and me) is asleep at the desk and we left our wallet by the door.
My 'boss' knows nothing about Unix, but promotions in the government tech field are done by seniority, not by skills.
I think that's the crux of the problem in government jobs. All you have to do to survive, and advance, is show up more-or-less on time and kill time for eight hours a day.
I was a contractor at a federal agency for two years, and I saw a lot of lazy, incompetent programmers who kept showing up, warming their chair for 8 hours, and getting paid (albeit at a sub-market rate), and if anyone tried to light a fire under them, they had the union to answer to. I heard horror stories. A colleague of mine found he couldn't get one developer to do what he needed, because the guy said he was "too busy," but every time my colleague went to talk to him, the guy was reading the newspaper. So finally he just figured it out and did the task himself... and promptly got slapped with a grievance: the union claimed that the work my tech-writer coworker had done in his spare time had threatened the livelihood of two full-time union programmers...
I got out of there, partly because my contract rate was at least 20% below market, but largely because I loathed seeing mediocrity accepted and promoted. I saw good hardworking IT people around me who got a 3% raise when dead wood got 2%. I kept doing good work because I care about my work--but had I stuck around much longer, I think I would have deteriorated. When I caught myself pondering a decision on a project and thinking, wearily, "oh... whatever," I knew it was time to get out. "Relaxed atmosphere" is one thing, but this was downright depressing.
> I suggest visiting a good online job search site but be warned, if you've been languishing at Uni for too long you'll be considered damaged goods. Get out while you still can.
;-)
LOL! I've been in Uni for almost 10 years, so I must be "damaged goods". Ironically, *I* dont need to go looking for a job, because I get job offers quite frequently from companies, who are very keen to employ me.
It isn't surprising that these companies don't share your bigoted and bizarre opinion of research. You sound bitter, did you fail to make the grade for graduate school?
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
The efficency problems of the federal government starts at the top. They know the boss (that would be you and me) is asleep at the desk and we left our wallet by the door.
Amen. Our politicians hired these managers. And we hired the politicians.
One thing I always detest (in the private or public sector) is the boss who despises the people who work for him. Before I went back to coding (hallelujah), I always hired the best people I could get gave them them clear goals and maximum leeway to accomplish them. When other managers complained about their useless employees my attitude was that if you had any leadership skills you wouldn't be in that position.
We hire politicians who rail against the decent people who try to get the work done, and then hire the people above them who cynically build their personal empires by wasting precious resources and tying up the workers in red tape.
The big problem is not the paperwork, but that nobody looks above the bottom line.
Well, it is a big problem that there is no incentive to save. However, there is an astounding amount of paperwork that has to be done to do the simplest kinds of things like hiring an intern. This is is the black hole that is created by, on one hand, the incentive to CYA, and on the other the lack of incentive to be efficient.
I am frustrated because I have a choice of one party that confuses the public good with the bureaucracy, and another that doesn't believe in the public good at all. Take Amtrak. I believe it is an important component in addressing air congestion especially here in the northeast corridor. One party coddles the unions to the point where the enterprise is economically unsustainable. The other is hostile to the very idea of publicly supported rail travel.
The question is, does it have to be this way? Do we have to accept that our public priorities have to be addressed in this dehumanizing and inefficient way?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One of the major reasons for this action is the aging of the federal workforce. Currently, the federal government has had such a hard time attracting tech employees that the average federal employee is approaching retirement age and there just aren't any younger workers in the pipeline to replace them.
This isn't the first action taken to correct this issue. Up until last year, retiring military officers (young when compared to the federal workforce, around 42-45) lost about half their military pension when they went back to work as federal employees. This was overturned last year to encourage more retirees to take mid grade federal jobs.
The situation is actually pretty bleak for attracting federal tech workers. Programs like internships to attract college graduates are few and far between. Add to that the cumbersome federal hiring system and lower wages and the inflow of new workers becomes a big issue. On top of that, the good workers who do hire on are often forced to worked with some senior employees that have long since reached obsolesence before retiring because its hard to fire a federal employee regardless of performance and letting even a substandard employee go only exaccerbates the problem.
This will help but probably won't solve the problem.
Not sure if this is something new, but when I was in college the best paying job on campus was working in the Computer Labs (the school kept a decent size lab with about 18 computers in about half a dozen locations for the student body, 8 PS2s and 8 Macs, with 1 each for the lab attendent to play on^H^H^H^H^H^H^Huse).
:)
:)
Trust me, they advertised that they payed best, but they were still having problems attracting CS or EE majors to help work in it (think 'First and Second line tech support where your in the same room as clueless users'
I think I was the only CS major who worked there, the rest were all English and Poly-Sci.
Of course the best part of working there was that your student ID was keyed to open the doors to all the dorms so you could get to work in any of them (which made it easier to visit friends) instead of just the one you lived in, but I remember being amused that it would unlock the janitorial closets also
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
As a computer science cooperative education student at Drexel University currently on fall/winter coop, I just went through the process of hunting for jobs (and getting a LOT of rejections, this is only my second year in school and my first "real" job) and had a very relevant experience.
I received a job offer from the Navy that was awfully tempting: a chance to learn and practice CGI programming, Java/JScript, IIS, Cold Fusion, and program handheld devices. The salary? $300/week.
I also received an offer from a private-sector company that would basically be IT gruntwork, and maybe a chance to do some C programming for the set-top boxes the company is designing. Not as attractive as the Navy, which would have put me on track to be a successful web developer. But the salary was exactly double what the Navy was paying. Needless to say, I took the private-sector job.
A higher salary would definately help gov't jobs seem more attractive to people like me who have trouble seeing past the $17k tuition due in a few months. Unfortunately it appears that these raises in salary are not across the board, which is what the government needs to do to keep attractive the best workers.
-the wunderhorn
-the wunderhorn
#define OH_YES_INDEED 1
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
It's a lot worse in a lot of places. The USA, and its companies and legal/social conventions, still have the most sway in the world in terms of the technical economy, so it's not all that surprising.
Research Assistants in the Design,Engineering and Computing department at my University have a starting salary of a whopping £10,000. (Thats about $14,500)
At the start of this year, I worked as a research assistant in a New Zealand university for a grand total of NZ$12/hour (Call it US$4.80, or maybe UK £3.30). I would have had a little less if I'd only had a BSc instead of a PGDipSc, and a bit more if I'd survived BSc(Hons), or stayed on an extra year for a Masters. Granted, it's a pittance by your standards, but the cost of living for most staple goods tends to be about a third of what it is in the UK.
The other important thing to note here is that the [state-controlled] education sector often gets treated quite differently by governments from other departments (Treasury, Inland Revenue, Agriculture and Fisheries, or whatever). Although you could consider that as an RA at a public university you're an employee of the government, your wages are most likely coming out of an education budget, and it's the university that will be setting the figures as part of its budget. So even if the government were to allocate more to paying its technical staff, the chances of it trickling down to tutors and RAs is pretty slim.
I bet in the US you would earn more saying 'would you like fires with that' in McDonalds
Fires? Why does that strike me as passive-aggressive behaviour akin to "F*** you for calling the $Company Helpdesk, how may I help you?" :-)
Geez, all all you people really in it for the money? money? money? money? Buy that SUV or BMW, tailgate and swerve around people, show the world what a superior primate you've become.
This is directly contrary to the spirit of the GPL and most of what the green party stands for.
I'm a centrist for the most part, but I'm just taking a moment to point out that greed is not always good.
Although I don't have links, there are several websites that point out (with proof to back it up) that american corporations often waste money on worthless projects, with do-nothing people, and no chance of success, on a scale that would make Lincoln break dance in his grave.
Personally, I thought there was already an infrastructure in place that tried to keep civil service salaries in line with locally employed private sector people, but I guess I'm thinking about something else.
Anyway, I applaud people who work hard and have their efforts pay off, but to simply go for the juiciest bait without any focus on what YOU PERSONALLY WANT TO CREATE IN YOUR LIFE seems awfully ludicrous and un-geekly.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Umm... yes? I'm sorry it doesn't matter how much time you get off if the overall time you spend at your job is so intolerable compared to the salary it doesn't offset the stress level.
I think that governments should compete with private industry in pay scale. You don't want industries ever monopolozing something that a government needs - just think of all the ghastly consequences of that.
-*-*-*-
I'm a little segfault short and stout
this is my handle, this is my spout!
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
They have begun. For reference, check out the Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract . As a IS worker who has recently left his government contracting job, largely due to this coming, I can say that the government is at least TRYING to do this. The contract basically gives all handling of computer and related tech to contractors. From providing the systems/hardware, to desktop support, to cell phones and PDAs. It has slowly begun to take effect. I jumped ship from my contractor company before it directly affected my job (which would be gone soon, due to this). I wasn't a captain .. no reason to stay aboard as the ship sank. :)
You are right about the gov. computer admins not coming in after hours and such. The one admin who was in charge of our department would regularly leave after his nice little 8 hour day (well... if 7 AM to 2 PM counts as 8 hours). Often we would be explaining to him the big problem we were in the middle of, and he would simply say somehting like "Wow, what a mess. Oh well, I will see you tomorrow."
Shortly before I left, we were in a mad rush to have a major project done, and one user needed a new machine which had been purchased and configured for him, to be set up on his desk and prepared for his use (NT Domain system.. users couldn't log in local, so we had to join the thing to the domain for him, etc.). Anyway, in the middle of this rush, our gov. admin tells the user "Nope, can't do it .. we are too busy." .. then our admin promptly returns to his game of solitaire.
This is not isolated, I am sure. The biggest problem with US gov jobs is that the employees are not fired. Once the initial 90-day evaluation period is passed, it pretty much takes commission of a felony crime to be dismissed. And even that isn't a sure thing. Employees who are not performing their job are not incompetant or failing to perform their duties. It is the job. The job is "not defined properly for the employee". In other words, the gov. needs to give them something more suited to their abilities. Like play-testing solitaire (from my own experience, this was a popular job task).
Now don't get me wrong, there are many government employees who do their job (and the jobs of their co-workers). However, it is the large amount of non-productive workers who are the problem. This is why the government has contractors. If the contractor does not perform, they can be replaced. Quickly (relatively).
Wow, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant... guess I have more pent-up hostility about my former job than I thought. Time for some therapy... where is my baseball bat?
Zzyzzx
There have been several columns on this in the Washington Post over the last few weeks.
Federal Personnel Offices have several drawbacks. . .like not getting back to a candidate at all, or waiting 6-8 months to tell him/her that they have got the job. . . Even with up to 33% more pay (and this is targeted mostly at the entry-level IT types. . . Hell desk and such. . . )
Now, I work as a contractor to several Federal agencies (we have a number of contracts), and I don't see this measure doing much at all: 95% + of all the IT is already being done by Contractors: most of the Feds, in my experience, are in Sr. I.T. Management.
IMNSHO, another proposal full of sound and fury, but in the end, signifying nothing much. . .
and the pay is alot lower than other Solaris admins but...I get two paid days off this week for election and veterans day, I work 8 hour days with a one hour lunch break (no one cares if you take a two hour break on slow days). I get exellent health benifits including dental and eye care (two free pairs of glasses for computer ops).
The bad parts (asside from the lower pay) we are just budgeted for tech equipment and software, not furniture. The chairs and desks I sit on a re about 15 to 20 years old. If you are neither a democrat or a republican you have to keep your mouth shut about politics (I never talk about politics where I work anyway, but it still sucks not being able to say what you want) My 'boss' knows nothing about Unix, but promotions in the government tech field are done by seniority, not by skills. So he never shows up unless the VAX needs a backup and I do the rest. And I work for a State, not the Feds, so I don't get a sweet raise. But I hope one trickles down.
All and all I like my job and its relaxed atmosphere, but I will take a higher paying private sector job as soon as I put in one years time here, unless I get one of those big raises..
Usually this would mean a 33% increase for entry level programmers and a diminishing increase with years of seniority. The idea is to fill up the entry level positions, its less critical to make the more senior level people happy, since presumably they are at least not unhappy enough to have taken a better paying job elsewhere.
Being one of Uncle Sam's current wage slaves (except that I wear a uniform) I can say without a doubt that this will have little to no effect because any techie worth his salt won't work very long for the government. Why is that, you may ask? Because government projects that involve computers are almost always administered by someone who knows nothing about them and is more interested in servicing their own career at the expense of the system they're dealing with.
For example, I'm currently a sysad for a system that's had $25 Million dollars poured into it and we're still not even close to being fully operational and we're lucky that this thing works at all. If you want a good example of the people that the government listen to for their computing needs, check out Mitre. These guys are renown for designing crap (they're the ones who came up with the brilliant idea of keep all the user directories on our busiest file server, not to mention running 900GB through a single OC-12 card on a shitty ATM network under WinNT).
The government mismanges ever piece of silicon they have and until the culture of management changes, even money won't be enough to keep talented people around.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
For all of you out there giving the gov a hard time, you might want to let up. I looked at the schedules posted by opm... I'm coming from a GS-11 position (entry level with a degree) in upstate NY.... In january, I get a $6800 raise. (That includes the 3.7% raise across the board for all federal employees.) Also, as a condition of my 'civilian' job, I am a member of the National Guard, as all these federal employees are ( our official job class is 'Federal Technician'). Include an extra $5000 from that paycheck. That equals out to $53,800 a year, which is about $2000 more than your average CS/CSE degree makes in their first year or two in the area. On top of that, the benefits rule.... 50% matching for retirement funds, good health insurance, every other monday off.... any training I ask for...
"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu
My last day as a Federal Computer worker was on Friday and even this news was not enough to make me stay. The 33% is for the most junior positions and decreases to minumial up around the GS12 grade. It wasn't so much the money that made me leave more the frustration. I would have been better off being a contracted worker for the agency I worked for, my salary would have been better and my training would have been paid for by the agency and not out of my pocket. I have spent years watching all the IT positions be contracted out in the name of down sizing goverment. By eliminating the the Federal workers with any technical skills to provide over sight, all we have ended up with is millions of dollars being spent on poorly designed systems that never work correctly.
This country needs a non-profit to produce the software to run this country... Mostly for municipals and states.
Think about it like this:
We have greedy contractors producing software for one state, keeping the copyrights, and selling the same technology over and over to other states. A non profit, can pay techies $100+ an hour, and produce free software for all the states/cities to use. End the duplication... and the waste of money.
Anyone game?
There are two pragmatic reasons to join the military:
1) To get or pay for training you otherwise couldn't afford.
2) You want to do things you couldn't do ANYWHERE else - drive a tank, fire a missile, legally kill people.
Of course, there's that selfess patriotic bit about serving your country, but that's not too pragmatic.
Uhhhmmmm, the Fortune 500 is publically owned... Ever hear of stockholders???
That doesn't meet their definition; they want laws in place to prevent any significant fraction of the stock being held by one person.
The more radical among them (you know, the kind of people Nader would appoint to cabinet posts and Supreme Court positions) want the government to own the majority of the stock, and thus directly control the companies, "in the public interest".
-
I spent six years in the USAF. I started with an AFSC of 30xx (Communications Electronics Maintenance) but got an AFSC of 4924 (Computer Programmer) after the 30XX career field merged with the 5iXX career field - based on the fact that I'd taken BASIC and FORTRAN programming classes in college (my degree is Applied Physics).
Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning this is to give some sense of the upheavals the USAF (at least) has gone through in the area of managing high-tech people.
I'm out now, but my lasting impression of DoD civilians is that most of them respond only the presence or absence of light, water, and food. I found them in general to be perfect bureaucrats - pygmies running giant machines (thank de Balzac, not me).
Some DoD civilians are dedicated, as are some military officers, and do a good job. In general, however, the officers are obsessed with promotion (it's an up-or-out world), while the civilians are obsessed with protecting their butts.
You know, this reminds me of the USAF response when it started losing pilots at the end of the Reagan/Bush era: they handed out brown leather jackets to all pilots. Similarly, the Army's now handing out black berets (normally reserved for Rangers) to everyone.
Bottom line: the DoD is a typical government bureaucracy, an environment that the motivated flee screaming. Money's not going to change that.
Pat
--
Then get the hell out of University.
Go get a real job and the salary that goes with it, IF you can handle the the work.
I am a government worker (GS-9) and I wear a uniform. I am one of three network admins that support three sites on opposte ends of the state. I we not see this raise (wrong GS series). The web admin in the desk next to me will, yeah she is the one that refuses to learn HTML and still can't master frontpage. She calls me over all the time to fix the sloopy M$-HTML frontpage pukes. Our "Information Security" person will. What does he do you ask, sit in a locked room and sleep all day. He's waiting for retirement and doesn't know a firewall from his..., well anyhow. Our helpdesk people will, they are both former secretaries and still think they work someplace else. One barely speaks English (german), the other won't answer the phone and is never where he is supposed to be. Now all four of these people make much more than I do, and I spend all of my time doing their work for them. If this were anything other than the government they would all be fired, instead they get raises... nice. I'm outta here...
Point being, even if you factor in the incredible benefits and the new higher salaries, it still would not be enough to make working on a government job worth it. Not unless along with the new salary policies they fired the vast majority of the current federal employees to make room for some people who actually cared about the work they were doing.
My wife is a dedicated public employee. She works at a local agency whose mission she believes in. When she got out of her (prestigious) grad school, she went looking for a job in public service, not because she wanted the benefits of public service, but because she had skills she wanted to employ for the public good. Unfortunately, the standard joke around the office is when somebody asks "So how many people work around here?" to answer "About half." A fraction of hard working employees have to do the work of the rest.
Of course, this is also true to a lesser degree in the private sector, but the question is, how do you expect things to get better if you tell people that if they care they shouldn't participate?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It'll probably be factored into future contracts. When they set up grants and stuff, they actually plan every position with an estimated salary, so now the standard salary for tech positions (like mine) will be expected to go up by a third, though that's not going to be enough here in Boston, or in SF, New York, etc. /jpowers/
-jpowers
-jpowers
Postal workers start with more than a month of vacation, and when your company told you they gave you "100% medical," they meant "with an HMO that's only 50% as good as Blue Cross." Also, your job's safe with them, and even if it goes away, you get plenty of warning and severance and stuff.
No ping-pong tables, though. Can't have it all, I guess.
-jpowers
-jpowers
The government (at least in my area) is willing to hire tech workers with much less documentable experience than private contractors. Once you're in, they'll let you take on as much as you can handle, but there's absolutely no incentive for you to do so.
In a nutshell, the best way to take advantage of the situation is to get hired in, get as much experience and training as you can for the first year or two, then get the heck outta there before laziness sets in.
The NAF entity I work for bleeds talent like crazy. They're afraid to develop anything new in-house, because they know that anybody good enough to do the job won't be staying for long.
I'm on my second government job. Looking forward to the end of my first year when I can start sending out resumes to private industry again.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I worked for 7 years in a government job. All supervisors are worthless(A moron that has that job just because he/she was there the longest does NOT mean he/she knows squat..), the red tape just to do something simple is insane, and Government jobs are union because of the poor treatment of the workers.
I am now in corperate america, and this place really is cool compared to the gulag called a government job.
Don't take the bait. Government jobs suck. Take it from one that was in that trench for way too long.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Kind of, RA's are *well paid* grad students!
The majority of grad students are paid through the research councils (ie EPSRC), and get (IIRC) about
£5500 a year, so just more than half an RA.
As a funded graduate student your "job" is to do your research - nothing more, no marking, no helping your supervisor prepare his papers, just do your own thing. Of course, you can generally pick up extra money doing those things...
As a RA (Research *Assistent*) you are payed to *assist* your supervisor. Exactly how bad that is depends on your supervisor, but it's a noticable difference.
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
If you work for the Federal Government you're much more likely to be a contractor than an actual employee. I've worked twice for the TVA, both times as a contractor. Federal agencies are under constant pressure to appear to be reducing head count, so they often shift work to contracting agencies because those moneys come from different funds. But as a contractor you probably won't see any of these raises talked about here.
> Then get the hell out of University.
> Go get a real job and the salary that goes with it, IF you can handle the the work.
Not to mention if you can handle the stupidity of "company practices", halfwit managers, and bizarre political decisions from 'on-high' etc.
There's a reason why people dont get paid much to be graduate students - it's an opportunity that money can't buy. If you can cope without the cash (and in the UK most graduates won't have worked full time, so are used to near poverty), then it's a real chance to do something cool. Of course, if you just want the money, get the hell out of uni., it's rarely worth it.
As the "IF" jibe, I doubt you have a PhD. Putting in ten hours a day in industry is one kind of work, as is stacking boxes in a warehouse. Having your brain almost explode from the constant 24 hour a day pressure of thinking at the limit of your intellect is also work, and probably a lot harder than you think.
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
You make a bunch of money at computer companies, but what are you really doing? Most of that stuff's useless toys or the same thing the other guy's making. Most government jobs actually do (in my case indirectly, since we only TEST cancer, AIDS and MS treatments for FDA approval) support and benefit the population, and of more than just this country at that. Trace the history of what you do back fifty or a hundred years, at critical points you'll probably find the US government helped it along with a grant or some related research in another area. You provide the economy, but I'm telling you some public expenditure is necessary to keep things stable, and to catch you when you fall. It's the height of fucking hubris to assume you, your company, your schools, or your field of study and work haven't benefitted from the government at all.
-jpowers
-jpowers
They really dont care how much they have to pay their employees, just so long as the government covers it plus profit margin.
I work at a gov't contractor, and in fact they just lost me to a commercial company. Reason: I have essentially hit the ceiling of what the government says you can pay a programmer with no college degree. They would loved to have kept me here, and told me as much- they just didnt have any room left to give me a raise.
Its so hard to get decent programmers these days, that companies are really willing to pay whatever it takes to retain them. Take advantage of it while it lasts. Ive managed to quadruple my salary over 1 year.
Go ahead and call me naive, but what ARE the benefits of working for the US government, aside from diplomatic immunity and access to the secret underground White House Sex Cave?
Seriously, it used to be job security. Now that has even gone out the window. My mom has been a systems analyst for the federal government for over a decade (DOD until last year and now Social Security). The benefits are pretty hard to beat. Their medical insurance (Mail Handlers) seemed to cover an awful lot. I think she said she gets like 10 weeks a year of time off. She also can work semi-flexible hours (a little under 9 hours a day for 9 work days and then 1 day off). Sadly, she makes little more than I do. She has told me about the programmers who only know COBOL and sleep at their desk waiting for an early retirement package to come along. If you don't care too much about actually accomplishing anything, can deal with the bueracracy, and don't mind the huge paycut, it's not too bad. You could do worse. I guess it depends on your priorities (time verses money).
-Jennifer
Unfortunately, the standard joke around the office is when somebody asks "So how many people work around here?" to answer "About half." A fraction of hard working employees have to do the work of the rest.
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs.
Salaries for computer people here are a joke. My wife and I (both programmers, mid-to-late thirties; both "retired" from the Bay Area since '94) routinely get calls from headhunters offering 2-3 times what we make now. Not including stock, of course.
Then there's the bureaucracy. We struggle to get work done despite the cretins who try their utmost to grind you down.
No money. Almost daily hassles from the Work Preventers. Why do we stay? The area, for one. Los Alamos is our ideal retirement community. But a close second, surprisingly, is the work. Many people here are brilliant, highly competent, and fun to work with. My job -- analyzing data from various & sundry Earth satellites and Deep Space exploration missions -- is exciting and challenging. Finally, I don't have to work 60-80 hours just to keep pace. A regular work week lets me excel (I'm not the type who's satisfied with mediocrity) and still have a life.
I'll get fired one of these days, most likely. The rules I have to break in order to get work done are often firing-level offenses (stuff like neglecting to fill out paperwork or ask for permission before doing some things). Or maybe I'll just get fed up. I'm pretty close right now anyway, after a 4% raise. After LANL, you can be sure it's back to the Real World (industry) for me.
Oh, and those "33%" raises? Hah. My wife is in a Computer group, so she'll get one -- but the word from up high is for noone to expect more than 10%. I'm one of two lone programmers in a Space Physics group, and we both expect to fall through the cracks.
I was a contractor for the US Army Corps of Engineers for 2 1/2 years. I was making a ridiculous amount of money (in the 6 figures) which was only a third of what the Corps actually paid for me. With all that I still quit the job because I couldn't deal with all the political crap. I've seen a 50 BILLION dollar project get pushed through even though tests said it was unneeded but the Corps needs a mission to keep the "Good old boys" around. I've seen the Hardest workers put down and blantantly lied to about benefits they would recieve which eventually destroyed 4 years of there work life and put them in a worse position then when they left college. I've seen so much crap from this government and now I have to choose one of these pricks to vote on and people feel that wasting more taxpayers money on a 33% increase in pay for n house computer sepecialists is going to help? I have news for you.. 80% of the IM force in the corps of engineers is contractors and each one costs +300k. I would never in my life work for the government again. Or not until Nader sits in the oval office.
You know what, i have a student computer job and I won't see a cent of this I bet.
But, It's understood (on my campus atleast) that student workers for certain tech jobs get higher pay.
I only work this job so I have it on my resume.
I wonder if this will cause students to get paid more?
It a lot worse here in the UK
Research Assistants in the Design,Engineering and Computing department at my University have a starting salary of a whopping £10,000. (Thats about $14,500)
I bet in the US you would earn more saying 'would you like fires with that' in McDonalds
I think they're worried that the federal workers are going to realize their stock options are worth nothing and jump ship for someplace more profitable. :-)
--Kai
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
We just filled 3 Application Programmer positions, so we won't be hiring for a bit. We're a UNIX shop as far as development, so if you want to work for us (or a place like us, they're all over Boston) in the future, learn some shell tricks, some PERL (perl and some jscript run the new web frontends we're painting on our old apps), and lots of C and SQL(ingres). Brush up on yer emacs, too. Since we do statistical analysis, and we can't pay anywhere near market for SAS Dev (one of the best things to know these days, private companies and government agencies alike will cheerfully kill for good SAS gurus), if you really wanted to work here, that'd be your best bet.
-jpowers
-jpowers
tell these flakes that you are too busy. DONT do their work. Or better yet screw one of them with a "hoest" mistake that is not traceable to you.
I used to file grieveances against my boss weekly when he would try to force someone elses work on me, "do thisa Tim, because dave is too busy thumbbing his butt to do it."
No my last year there I made everyone there hate me, my projects done in record time, I would not help the other toads, and I made sure my supervisors, supervisor knew that I did it correctly instead of the wrong way that butthead was trying to get me to do it. (I burned that bridge so hard when I left, I think the walls are still scortched.)
Get the hell out, if you are good a nice stable Corperat company will give you benefits that match (I got 1 week vacation 3 days after starting at company X) and is just as stable.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I had a contract with MITRE in NJ. They were total liars. I was told it was a 5 month contract; it was really a 4 month contract. Four weeks into it they started pressuring me to go full-time, at HALF my consulting rate. (A rate which they determined, BTW.) I finished 2 projects in 10 weeks and they whacked me, supposedly because the NSA didn't want a contractor working on their project. (They loved my work though.) I was told later by EDP/Source (the company I went through) that they were no longer working with MITRE because they did that to other people, in one case after the guy had come from California and already taken an apartment and moved stuff. When an agency won't take your business, that's pretty bad.
They made NO backups, ever.
The "techs" (that would fix their aging Macs) were two former secretaries who were extremely dangerous with a screw driver and bitchy as hell. I couldn't touch the machines, and actually had to leave the room a few times as these women essentially beat the poor Macs with the blunt end of the screwdriver.
When I got out of the meeting where they made me the full-time offer, the woman I worked with (who had a recent CS degree but tons of security policy experience) asked if they offered over $50k! She was making about 40. Everyone I ran into bitched heavily about pay, except the managers. The people there were basically cool, but management was twice as evil as usual.
Three months later they called asking if I had made backups of my stuff because a disk died. (I had stored the projects in about 3 places because there was no real tape or disk backup available.) They wanted me to help - for FREE. They explained they were using my 10 wks of work for their entire year-long NSA contract.
The work WAS interesting.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Simply look at some of the job requirements on various Government websites. Including agencies like the NSA, FBI, and ATF... They want to pay you next to nothing for your 4, 6, or 8 year degree. Something needs to give, and for a long time, it's rarely been big-brother.
As a prior employee of the Federal government, I can tell you that a raise of $7,000 - $10,000 is nothing. Most engineers I worked with made under $60k and Senior Admins made under $50k. Most left within 4 years (4 years working for 'the man' always looks good on your resume). After they left they could almost double their salaries in the private sector. Thats what I did. Not to mention all the HASSELS you don't have to deal with (i.e. random monthly drug testing, extensive background checks, way overboard security policies, meetings, OH the meetings!). One thing you will learn right away when working for the government is: they don't worry about wasting all day in meetings discussing whatever people want to talk about (I remember once we renamed a directory on our web server where we stored some older acrobat forms, fifty of us spent three hours discussing it - a meeting where basically nothing was accomplished, but if you do the math, it cost about six grand in time for the labor there, of course it's not like they are worries about loosing sales or NOT making a profit in the next quarter). Working for the government bites. The pay really bites. A minimal increase in pay will do nothing for them. I mean, if I have the choice of working in a near militaristic environment where you have to beg for money to upgrade RAM on the servers while getting paid less than average while working in an old delapidated building when I could work for a hot new company with a vision and goal, people my own age group who are wide open and not stuff old government persons, in a nice new office park, making almost double, and not having to worry about the time I got arrested taking a leak in a parking lot in college (which I might add almost cost me my job when they found out), I mean, is it REALLY that hard of a choice?
-Sternn
I will not be seeing a raise like this this year, although I do know a fair chunk of people that will be seeing a larger than average raise. I am probably one of the few people out there who thinks his salary is pretty fair. I don't live in the bay area. The cost of living where I live is low (2 bedroom, 1100 sq ft for $550/month). Granted, it's not a cultural mecca or anything, but my spouse's salary plus mine is way more than enough. The gov't though does have a salary problem. I make the same as a person who is in a much more expensive part of the world and in the same gov't position.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
"Hey, look, extra money laying around! Yay! We made it! We're not going to sink along with the dot coms! Quick, pay people more before they disappear."
.startup offered me $60K plus stocks plus guaranteed $10K raise for five years.
.economy tanks, I've still got a job. Here in Boston folks are still skittish from 7-10 years ago, so that's a big deal. Right now jobs are so easy to come by, you think you can just lose one and pick up another, but when there are less jobs than people...
You better bet I'm worth it, too. My job's federally funded. I'm a "Network Coordinator" for an NIH-funded research nonprofit in Boston. Started two years ago at pretty low salary, but not bad for an English major. This year a
The company I work for offered me near $50K to stay and I took it, since the startup had some inconsistencies in their job description. There are some benfits that startups (I got lots of offers) couldn't compete with: 4 weeks vacation, 4 weeks sick (which I can actually use), a week of personal time, 0 interest loans for a new computer, no dress code (I mean some of the coders show up in their pajamas), set your own hours, no deadlines, full medical, dental, and I'm insured and invested every way you can imagine. Plus everybody goes way out of their way to get along, there's very little politics, and most importantly: if your new
I learned everything I know about linux and unix and perl and c and java and NeXT and BeOS and even a little win2k registry stuff just during the slow periods (read: when I have everything running efficiently and no one breaks anything). We're slightly understaffed for some stuff and there's a lot of non-IT people here who don't have it as easy as I do, plus some of the larger IT decisions are made by folks a little behind (everyone is still using Word Perfect), but overall, I've had a bunch of tech jobs (state gov, fed gov, private sector, nonprofit) and this sort of pseudo-fed job's the best, the pay being the only issue (and one I can live with).
-jpowers
-jpowers
It is time consuming, but quite possible to fire civilian government employees. I'm an Army officer and have personally fired two civilians. Talk to your Civilian Personnel Office and read the regulations. More importantly, study the rules of their union. Specifically, the union says you have to counsel them with witnesses present each time they fail to meet an objective you have set for them. Eventually, you develop a paper trail indicating poor performance and they get canned. Admittedly, it takes a while and everyone hates you for it, but if you are in a leadership position that's part of your job.
The reason there are such stringent rules is that a) they have a union that fights for them (techies take note) and b) there is a serious over-sensitivity in the government to what may be considered abuse, harassment, or discrimination.
Learn from the government sector because any sufficiently large bureaucracy tends to get that way. The lesson here - know the rules and use them to your favor. It's like hacking!
They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately.
There's a theory that says that therefore there aren't any outstanding employees, because they cannot be monetarily incented.
I believe that people in the public or private sector who give over and above do it for other reasons -- professional pride, technical interests, and a plain habit of excellence. The pay issue is just an insult.
But this theory does makes public employees a convenient whipping boy. My wife spent last week at a scientific conference that she had to attend because of her job. She had to pay for it herself, because of a state policy making it illegal for her agency to pay out of state travel. This policy was put in place because the politicians were caught taking junkets funded by lobbyists during which they attended none of the meetings. Notice that neither the people who misbehaved (the politicians) and the problem (their being bought by the lobbyists) are addressed by this policy.
I really get irked when politicians attack IRS employees. Sure, there are overzealous, lazy and corrupt ones, but most of them are courteous and professional. And more to the point, it's the tub-thumping politicians who need to bring pork back to their districts who create the incentive to predatory behavior, through their tax code, their budget, and their decisions about staffing levels.
Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs.
My wife likes to say "waste plus fraud equals a constant". The simplest things -- hiring or disciplining an employee or selecting a contractor for a very basic job, requires people in government to handle huge volumes of documentation and complicated auditing procedures to show beyond any reasonable doubt that they are being fair and unbiased.
The problem is that in the private sector, the only thing that really matters is getting the job done for a reasonable price. If I just call up my brother-in-law to get something done, my employer won't care so long as he gets the job done cheaply enough and well enough. If I do this in government, it (rightly) is considered a crime.
Here's the catch-22 of government spending. You are supposed to be completely fair and documentably beyond reproach, which requires an expensive and complicated procurement process. On the other hand, if you are less efficient than the private sector (which doesn't require this), you are somehow morally inferior.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does this have anything to do with the upcoming elections?
I asume most people in tech industries are democratic, so this is Bills last attempt to keep them voting on a democrat?????
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
I'm a US Marine in a tech job (computer specailist), and I tell you what, this is one area that won't be getting these raises. At $1450/month base pay for an E-4 with over 3 years in (read: someone about to get out), the lure of any half-decent paying tech job is almost irresistable to the lure of re-enlisting, something that technical Marines (and other service members) aren't doing: in droves. They wave stuff like bonuses ($30,000 max), jump school, "guaranteed" duty stations (nothing's ever guaranteed here), and other stuff at us like it was cool...but we keep getting out. 33%? That's a joke. How about quality of life, better training, and other "real" incentives that might auctually retain us. Instead, its..."10 more months and I'll be home, drinking beer and pissin' foam....."
After Congress moved to raise the President's salary to $500k and the VP's to somewhere in that territory, the federal salary structure finally got some relief. Federal law says you can't make more than the VP, and he's been making $175k. COLA's [Cost Of Living Adjustments] for the Supreme Court and some members of Congress were pushing the salary structure to the breaking point.
Working in a tight labor market [Huntsville, AL] with a high-tech workforce, I've seen federal salaries jumping a bit in an effort to grab people from the private sector. The pay's not what you'd get on the outside, of course, but the job security's usually pretty good. Also, as a contractor employee, I can tell you that the Federal guys rarely put in more than 40 per. Wouldn't that be nice.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
This is an endemic problem with working in the government sector. It is nearly impossible to fire anyone, and management has their hands tied regarding compensating their staff: They simply are not allowed, in general, to lower the salaries of those who don't pull their own weight, and they cannot compensate their outstanding workers adequately. In the end everyone gets paid (roughly) the same regardless of job content and performance. Furthermore, unlike in industry where a poor manager can get axed if his or her team doesn't perform, government agencies often have few reliable metrics by which to determine whether a team and a manager are doing their jobs
Another problem is that government bureaucracy tends to reward failure. If the situation isn't improving, obviously there's not enough money being thrown at the problem. For instance: the drug war, the DEA keeps getting bigger and bigger. Government education is another, the department of education keeps growing.
If I'm near the top of one of these big bureaucracies, and I get more money to play with, more people to boss around, and generally more power when the situation gets worse... What kind of incentive is that ? Say I'm in the DEA, if the drug problem went away, I would be out of a job! Job security is supposed to be a perk here, isn't it ? ;)
-Snoot
Isn't it amazing that the government manages to take half my income every month, but still can't pay their employees very well?
BTW, those of you voting for Nader, know that he won't help the problem; the Green Party has recently removed this from their platform in order to get him elected, but their platform used to include public ownership of the top 500 corporations.
That's right, basically every corporate job in our industry would become government work. So if you'd like to get paid this shitty, Vote Nader.
As for those who work in the corporations 501 through infinity, you'll just need to deal with the fact that your computers, automobiles, and consumer electronics will be built by the folks responsible for $600 toilet seats and $200 hammers. Also, that all your package delivery services would be run by the folks responsible for the sorry state of affairs in the Post Office.
-
It is only legitimate that States get the best and most competent workers of them all, after all, it's the taxpayer's dollars, and this alone warrants the best money can buy. This benefits EVERYONE.
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
You can bet this means your average IT contractor won't be seeing an increase in pay. And in the end, this means those organizations who rely on contracted IT won't be seeing an increase in quality IT workers.
If anything, those Government agencies will continue to loose their IT staff. The company I went to has been raiding government organizations across the board. We can provide benefits and training well beyond the budgets of most Governmental agencies.
So in all... what does 33% do for the average US Gov't IT worker? If you're one of the current dedicated workers, you might be lucky enough to get a raise. But will it attract additional staff? I doubt it.
I spent about a year working as a contractor at a government institution. After my first month on the job I had finished two of the seven projects that I was hired to help with and several of the fulltime fed employees came to me and asked me to not try so hard. The entire time I was there I fought constantly with the fulltime federal employees, because they were more concerned with not rocking the boat and eventually collecting their pensions then with getting projects finished on time and under budget.
When my contract was over my supervisor offered me a full time position, which even at the much lower salary then my contracting rates was very tempting because of the incredible benefits
I turned them down out of fear of becoming one of the suspender wearing status quo'ites that already filled the offices.
Point being, even if you factor in the incredible benefits and the new higher salaries, it still would not be enough to make working on a government job worth it. Not unless along with the new salary policies they fired the vast majority of the current federal employees to make room for some people who actually cared about the work they were doing.
No, I am not bitter; I just taste like it.
;)