I don't understand how the military cannot afford to compete with the private sector. This is where wars will be won now (or soon). It's pretty important to defend ourselves. And we have trillions of dollars...
Part of it is that the government doesn't want to, the other part of it is that the American people would shit their pants if they found out that a low-ranking Soldier was making 6 figures a year off of taxpayer money. People resent it when government employees make more money than they do. Also, in the Army, you make the same amount of money no matter what your job is. The people they used to have that were only qualified to do laundry 40 hours a week as a full-time job get paid the same amount of money as intelligence analysts and information technology specialists.
The NSA has no problem paying for top talent, but they do it by going through consulting firms. It's true that most Americans would shit their pants at 6 figure soldiers, but few military skills are so valued by the open market. As we're constantly told by the tech media, you should prefer five $200,000 people to ten $100,000 people, or—god forbid—50+ people writing PowerShell scripts for minimum wage.
>It's true that most Americans would shit their pants at 6 figure soldiers, but few military skills are so valued by the open market.
Infantrymen won't have marketable skills, but we are talking about military security analysts. These guys often do have skills equivalent to their civilian counterparts. You seem to be making the same assumption that many others in this thread have: that all Soldiers are infantrymen of less than average intelligence.
The link upthread of us shows that annual pay for federal cybersecurity professionals is about on par with industry [1], especially when considering geography/cost of living.
My surprise had more to do with learning that cyberwarefare reservists exist, let alone enlisted soldiers. (I'm not familiar with the military.)
>My surprise had more to do with learning that cyberwarefare reservists exist..
I can see how you would be surprised. It seems counter-intuitive, but its actually normal for reservists in technical fields to be better at their jobs than the military. The best example I can think of is the field of aviation. Many reserve pilots are commercial pilots that get to fly 1000s of hours each year. Their full-time military counterparts don't get to fly their fancy fighter jets very often, because its really expensive.
Doctors and pilots get paid reasonably well by the military (especially once training, liability, etc. is factored in). We could probably do something reasonable in infosec.
>Doctors and pilots get paid reasonably well by the military.
Doctors are officers. This means that they get paid much more than Soldiers, but its still a laughably low amount when you compare it to a civilian doctor's salary.
Pilots are also officers. Their salaries are closer to the civilian world, but they are still probably a little low.
I don't think the Army is about to convert tens of thousands of IT specialists and Intel analysts from enlisted Soldiers to commissioned officers. Even if they did, the majority of them would still be making well below market rate.
Even the officer ranks that pay competitively require 10-20 years of service. At that point you are going to have a salary that's comparable to a civilian security analyst with a couple years' experience.
The people I interacted with most were Healthcare Information Systems Officers (70D), who were generally O-2 to O-4. Given that they tended to be fairly early career and living in low cost areas of the country, with college paid, it was a pretty good deal for them.
I think flexibility is the real problem with military hiring, not absolute pay levels.
After allowances, they are making about 52-70k depending on which rank they hold. That's not bad for what they do, but if they were actual doctors it would be terrible.
Its also not a technical job in the traditional sense, 70Ds typically spend 8 years as a 70B (Even though a lot of them will be slotted as 70Ds much earlier than this) which is essentially a management position at a medical facility.
From the description of 70D, it could end up being a technical job depending on the particular assignment, but its more oriented towards healthcare management types.
Its not a bad deal at all if you are looking for a way to pay off your student loans.
if you're a military doctor not only do you save approximately $200k on the cost of your schooling you also far outearn civilian doctors over med school and residency. even top residency programs pay very little. until you make attending (or possibly fellow) you are probably making half of what your peers in the military are making. military doctors earn less for the last 4-6 years of their service but they more than makeup for it over the first 8-10
The base pay is the same, but don't they have all kinds of extra pay they can tack on for various reasons? There is combat pay, but I'm sure there must be more than that.
John is correct. There are different types of extra pay, but they don't have anything for tech related jobs.
The allowances in the Army are for things like jumping out of a plane, scuba diving, foreign languages, combat pay, etc.
The Army still has this attitude that if you aren't outside all day, running around yelling at people, then you must not be doing any work. I'm not sure if that will ever change.
You can get extra money for all kinds of things. Knowing another language, certain career fields (i.e. special forces and contracting) still have re-enlistment bonuses, etc. etc. None of the "cyber" career fields, in the Air Force at least, get any sort of extra money that I'm aware of.
But they would not be low ranking soldiers all IT professionals would have to start at officer level - I did work at one ex civil service tech company and our grades still had a mapping to military and civilservice ones.
>But they would not be low ranking soldiers all IT professionals would have to start at officer level.
Officer income is higher than Enlisted income, but it still starts at around 34k for a single person. Depending on where you live, its probably going to be about 46k for someone that's married. That's still pretty low for the type of people they are looking for.
The military lost the war with the private sector some time ago, and that's why "defence" spending is in the trillions.
My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009579 applies again. The 'cyberwar' does not matter, or at least not in a way that threatens the existing power structure. To the extent that there are duelling hackers out there, they're operating in the financial realm, which is very far from the military and extremely resistant to being told what to do.
Besides, conventional war is over between major powers. There's colonial policing, guerilla warfare, secret ops -- and then straight up to nuclear exchanges. NATO's eastern border is Poland; Russia's western border is some way east of Donetsk; in the middle is an ugly unacknowledged skirmish using Ukraine as a buffer zone. The skirmish will continue unescalated because neither side can afford to stop the gas pipelines flowing through Ukraine.
(The Russian missile launcher was tracked by, among other things, geotagged selfies on Instagram posted by one of the operators. Does that count as "cyberwar"?)
I think this is a prime example of how pay scales recruiting policies are very difficult to apply across a multi million person organization. If you change the rules for cyber positions, you must consider changing them for all positions. Rank and pay scales are the same across any GS position and across military ranks at this point - perhaps we should think about paying those with key skills more money, but that argument is extremely tough to implement and get legislated.
Result: "Forget it, let's just hire some contractors."
>If you change the rules for cyber positions, you must consider changing them for all positions. Rank and pay scales are the same across any GS position and across military ranks at this point..
This isn't entirely true. Unlike the military pay scale, the GS pay scale does have ways to pay certain fields more money. Its not very much in most cases, but its there. IT jobs generally get you 10% more than other fields.
The only GS jobs I know of that get a substantial about of extra money are the Scientific and Medical jobs. There are special codes that allow them to add at least another 50k-100k to their income, depending on the specific type of position that they hold.
It's difficult to "opt out" of GS pay scales, and even then if you do you then have to follow different recruiting patterns and are subject to fairly strict guidelines. They do have special scales for special positions, but from what I understand that takes awhile to establish and still has strict guidelines. (http://apps.opm.gov/SpecialRates/2014/index.aspx)
Federal recruiting can be quite a minefield, which is a significant problem in fast-moving professions. According to this article the NSA don't opt out of the GS scale, but that's not to say they don't offer temporary positions with slightly different criteria: http://work.chron.com/nsa-pay-scale-16399.html
I'm unsure if it's different on the military side but typically that pay / Basic allowance for housing / etc is also clearly defined in advance.
The NSA doesn't opt out of pay scales -- all general employees follow the GS pay scale with GS 10 removed (GS 9 promotes to GS 11). For those with a degree in certain fields, they follow an increased pay scale but along the same grade. For instance, someone with an electrical engineering degree would follow the GE pay scale, which still has the same path (GE 9, 11-15) but makes something like 2-10k more per year.
The biggest difference, is that their promotion structure is split into two parts: there is a technical route to promotion and an administrative route. This means that you can either be good at being in charge of people and get promoted (administrative), or just be good at what you do (technical). It leads to interesting situations where a GS12 is put in charge of divisions comprising GS15 veterans of 20 years experience, but all in all it is by far the best government run organization I've worked for.
Ah I seem to remember an article that said they did probably wired or a similar publication getting the wrong end of the stick.
The UK scientific civil service has similar problems in that for generic management roles they are paid fairly well for high end technical skills not so much.
Even worse once you get into roles for the TLA's - it will end up like the 30's where the only people that the security services could recruit where those with private incomes or ex military on pensions.
