&gt; 1. Aren&#x27;t government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts?<p>Direct Federal hires could be underpaid compared to the private sector, yes. The government uses the General Schedule (GS) scale, which tops out at ~$160K after adjusting for cost of living (there&#x27;s a base salary and a CoL adjustment). There are rules over who can go in what grade and what step which would likely preclude most SE folks from being compensated appropriately. Those with PhDs and masters degrees would find it easier to get into the appropriate pay band.<p>Contractors can make good money, and, accounting for not having the middlemen, the Feds should be capable of paying higher salaries for technical fields and still save money. If we&#x27;re already magically reforming the government by bringing stuff in house (taking an act of Congress in many places; lots of agencies have caps on the number of employees, forcing contractor usage), then we should be able to also reform the pay scale.<p>&gt;2. Doesn&#x27;t that mean that &quot;government software&quot; would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software?<p>Sadly, that&#x27;s exactly what&#x27;s in place now. The developers in general are already worse than in the private sector. It&#x27;s not because of money, it&#x27;s because of incentives. The Feds aren&#x27;t good at killing bad projects or disciplining companies they hire.<p>What you&#x27;ll see on your typical Booz Allen, Leidos, SAIC, Lockheed, etc. team is a lot of highly educated and experienced people--the government highly incentivizes both education and experience in bidding processes--that are useless. The process beats them down. It&#x27;s not that they&#x27;re dumb; they&#x27;re usually not.<p>It&#x27;s difficult to get through the government processes, especially when getting into cleared work. The hiring processes tend to highly favor previous government work, so you end up with the same pool of people. You can&#x27;t easily hire new people, so you stick with what you&#x27;ve got.