Vets Who Code

Tangent: I would love to see the US gov and military take coding seriously internally. It's nearly all outsourced to contractors, and the software is usually slow and buggy. I built some tools while in, but it was all bro-level.

The military could fix this internally if they wanted to. There are plenty of people who can write good code and don't mind doing push-ups and going to the range as well.

Dotgov is a lot harder. Salaries are artificially capped very low, and even one of these horrific contracting body shops will pay you 30% more than you'd make in the government, and you don't need to deal with all the bullshit that comes with working for the government.

It’s all part of an ideological attempt to stymie the ability of government to work effectively and then point to how government doesn’t work effectively to justify funneling money to politically connected contractors. It’s the modern version of patronage except that instead of getting jobs for the people in your clan, you get massive contracts for your donors which can be structured so that they’ll still be making money even if you don’t win re-election.

Of course there are some people like that, but if what you say were true I would expect to see wages go up significantly under the Blue Team and then fall back to low levels under the Red Team, yet that doesn't tend to happen. My whole life it's been consistently true that government salaries are much lower, but some people take them because they offer a lot of stability, great benefits, and often a pretty easy/laidback job compared to private industry.