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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
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.
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. . .
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?
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 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
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.
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
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.
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....."
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.
;)