Shit, I can't even find a SINGLE qualified mid-level software engineer with a clearance for a job that's already started and fully funded. Good luck bringing on 50 people in a short time frame. You might be fully staffed in a year if you have the world's most talented internal recruiting team.
This is a REALLY hard problem to solve and the government does not make this process easy. If we miss milestones, we don't get paid, so that $1,000,000 in salary that your team was paid for the last 90 days of work suddenly doesn't get paid. Your $100,000 in profit you forecasted suddenly turns into a $1,100,000 loss for that quarter.
When I started working in government way back in the early 00s, I too thought "I can just automate all these worthless idiots out of a job." If it was that easy, someone would have figured it out by now.
Most companies have to spend $30k - $50k just writing a proposal in the hopes they'll win some work. The problem at this size and scale is astronomical.
If you can think of a better way, I really would love to talk to you. Email is in my profile. :)
> Shit, I can't even find a SINGLE qualified mid-level software engineer with a clearance for a job that's already started and fully funded.
Two questions (on a tangent):
1. Define "qualified"
My experience, before I gave up on the DOD sector, is that companies that post Landry list reqs actually mean it. They are even worse than the larger industry at only interviewing candidates who look stellar on paper.
2. How much are you paying?
The few times I did get past the resume filter the salary was slightly below market, and none of these companies have anything resembling non-salary compensation.
50 people likely wouldn't be enough to TYPE the source code of the entirety of Microsoft products in five years. Assuming that you did no design, and simply had them copying source code as fast as they could.
