If you doubled the pay you’d probably have more applicants than you could ever hope for. And why don’t you pay as much as Meta? The defense industrial complex can pay retired generals massive salaries to sit on boards, they can hire the most expensive lobbyists on the Hill. The defense department specifically can’t even pass an audit. They have so much money going out that they can’t even count it. And let’s take Raytheon for example, have you seen the operating margins? They’re huge. So even with these “critical shortages,” somehow they are immensely profitable. If shortages are affecting those margins, then there should be plenty of money to pay “critical” people more. Revenue per employee at Raytheon for example is almost $420,000. For typical manufacturing companies, a “good” number is $300,000. So a “critical” employee is worth a lot more than they’re being paid and there are probably a lot of employees that are dead weight and keeping them around means less money to pay the shortage areas.
I once applied to work a government project for a subcontractor and they were adding “headcount” simply because the terms of the subcontract required a specific number of people regardless of the amount of work required. They were essentially hiring people to do almost nothing. I spent over 3 months waiting for a response. Apparently their critical shortage wasn’t that critical because the hiring process was so long and convoluted and subject to “contract renewals,” that I simply gave up and went to work for someone else.
I could go on for days about the extreme waste and oftentimes outright fraud that happens in government contracting, subcontracting, and sub-sub contracting. And despite formerly having a TS/SCI clearance, any job in the “McLean Area,” pays less than most startups. And jobs in places like Huntsville pay even less. Even overseas work in “austere” environments pays less than a junior developer at Stripe. And you don’t get potentially shot at at Stripe — And I don’t have to work 100 levels deep for contractors or contractors of contractors on site using often circa 1996 development practices and lowest-bidder equipment managed by IT departments that seem to be led by dinosaurs and it can take weeks or months to simply requisition a dev server even within an unclassified cloud environment.
Why to do that for salaries/benefits that are lower than I could get as a janitor at Netflix?
Make the workplace/work environment and benefits compelling and you’ll get more applicants. Small startups literally have better benefits. You also don’t have to endure a Tier 5 investigation — the outcome of which entitles you to a job that pays so little comparatively.