Governments just can't come to grips with how much money software engineers make.

Paying a contractor $x million? Yeah no problem, projects are projects, they cost what they cost. Does that $x million pay for 5x fewer people than it would in construction or road repair? We don't know, we don't care, this is the best bid we got for the requirements, and in line with what similar IT projects cost us before.

Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."

Variants of this story exist in practically every single country. You can make it work with lower salaries through patriotism, but software engineers in general are one of the less patriotic professions out there, so this isn't too easy to do.

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tsimionescu 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."

I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers).

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alberto-m 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers

Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).

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miki123211 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.

	▲	tsimionescu 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers. However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.

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Nextgrid 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).

	▲	angry_octet 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Many people don't want to live in America. I know that if you're American that sounds crazy.

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Nextgrid 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not just governments, that same kind of greed exists in private companies too.

The only way to make good money while being an employee is to have your buddy spin up a "vendor" offering overpriced bullshit and shill it within your company. In exchange, you also spin up a "vendor" and your buddy shills it at his company.

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Imustaskforhelp 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This might explain why there are sooooooooo many vps providers/cloud providers, this might be one valid reason as to why.

I am sure that this might not be the only reason but still, its a valid reason for many. Do you know of companies/people which do this and how widespread this practise is?

To me it still feels like malicious compliance tho for what its worth.

	▲	Nextgrid 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I said this in jest as a reaction to what post-tax SWE salaries in Europe top out at, all while the same companies have no problem burning insane money on vendors. There is zero incentive to do good work as an employee as it won't be compensated anywhere near what even a shoddy vendor gets paid. But given the rise of many SaaSes selling exactly the same thing every full-stack web framework used to provide for free - think Auth0, Okta, etc, it may very well be happening.

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debugnik 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Paying a junior employee $100k?

In Southern Europe? More like $30k gross.