What "grade" would a senior dev be at?

Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Senior devs are usually gs-15, step 10 which is about $195k in DC

I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.

Where have you seen gs-15 senior devs? That oddball org that turned into DOGE? Seniors developers top out GS-13 without supervisory responsibilities.

Before DOGE it was USDS and they had lots of gs-15s. Especially back when they would just straight up match private sector salaries.

In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.

My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.

I've seen GS-12 and 13 advertised commonly. That's still good money and as much or more than I make.

Yes, but sometimes you do actually want the $500k Googlers.

I promise you never want that.

I've worked with several of them and yes I do occasionally find that they would be the best suited for the work.

Matt Cutts went from Google to the US Digital Service and did some amazing work. Maybe he’s an outlier, but I don’t think so. There are a lot of supremely talented people willing to take a massive pay cut to do good, meaningful work.

Three things:

1. Exactly zero companies, much less startups, are like the US Government.

2. He had 2 years at the NSA prior to his Google run.

3. I'm pretty sure he's one of the highest profile google engineers, you're not getting that for $500k.

And you can have them. Once they're done making tons of money you have a chance to get the mission oriented ones.