<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>giaour</author><text>There are a few ways to get an IC role that pays more than the GS salary cap, but they are fairly rare. Some jobs have an &amp;quot;ST&amp;quot; level that is classified above GS for senior individual contributors in scientific or technical roles, and some agencies (like the CFPB) have their own pay scales that go beyond what the GS schedule allows.&lt;p&gt;I only worked with one computer scientist in an ST role during my two years at USDS. He was an ACM Fellow and had a PhD from MIT, so it&amp;#x27;s not something anyone should expect to get just because they had &amp;quot;senior&amp;quot; in their title at a FAANG.&lt;p&gt;Contractors don&amp;#x27;t have the same statutory caps on how much an individual role can pay, but salaries are part of contract bids, and a bid can be rejected if an individual salary is too high.</text><parent_chain><item><author>tristor</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t think it could be that bad, and then I went looking.  Apparently to get a pay level that aligns with typical base salary in tech for senior level IC positions, you&amp;#x27;d have to be an agency director of a large agency or in the Cabinet.  And that doesn&amp;#x27;t even take into account losing RSUs and smaller bonus payouts.&lt;p&gt;This actually goes a long way in my mind of explaining why the US government does so much contracting of people for work as well.  It&amp;#x27;s probably not possible in the current legal framework to pay high quality tech workers a fair compensation for the market, but they could hire a firm as contractors for a project and that firm could pay fair compensation.  I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.</text></item><item><author>xxpor</author><text>Until the GS salary cap is something that doesn&amp;#x27;t look like a bad offer from a decade ago, it&amp;#x27;ll be extremely hard to swallow the pay cut of working for the feds.&lt;p&gt;I get the &amp;quot;public service&amp;quot; discount, but it&amp;#x27;d have to be something like 30%, not 70%.</text></item><item><author>giaour</author><text>Really happy to see this on the front page!&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind if you&amp;#x27;re interested in joining: the Digital Corps is for early career technologists, so if you have much experience in tech, you might want to apply to USDS (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usds.gov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usds.gov&lt;/a&gt;) or 18F (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;18f.gsa.gov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;18f.gsa.gov&lt;/a&gt;) instead.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The United States Digital Corps</title><url>https://digitalcorps.gsa.gov/about/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>killjoywashere</author><text>This is one of the great accomplishments of the &amp;quot;small government&amp;quot; efforts in politics: all the money leaves the system. Imagine a business that losses all it&amp;#x27;s money, every year, by design.</text><parent_chain><item><author>tristor</author><text>I didn&amp;#x27;t think it could be that bad, and then I went looking.  Apparently to get a pay level that aligns with typical base salary in tech for senior level IC positions, you&amp;#x27;d have to be an agency director of a large agency or in the Cabinet.  And that doesn&amp;#x27;t even take into account losing RSUs and smaller bonus payouts.&lt;p&gt;This actually goes a long way in my mind of explaining why the US government does so much contracting of people for work as well.  It&amp;#x27;s probably not possible in the current legal framework to pay high quality tech workers a fair compensation for the market, but they could hire a firm as contractors for a project and that firm could pay fair compensation.  I just wish more firms were honest rather than milking the government.</text></item><item><author>xxpor</author><text>Until the GS salary cap is something that doesn&amp;#x27;t look like a bad offer from a decade ago, it&amp;#x27;ll be extremely hard to swallow the pay cut of working for the feds.&lt;p&gt;I get the &amp;quot;public service&amp;quot; discount, but it&amp;#x27;d have to be something like 30%, not 70%.</text></item><item><author>giaour</author><text>Really happy to see this on the front page!&lt;p&gt;One thing to keep in mind if you&amp;#x27;re interested in joining: the Digital Corps is for early career technologists, so if you have much experience in tech, you might want to apply to USDS (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usds.gov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.usds.gov&lt;/a&gt;) or 18F (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;18f.gsa.gov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;18f.gsa.gov&lt;/a&gt;) instead.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The United States Digital Corps</title><url>https://digitalcorps.gsa.gov/about/</url></story>