The official government pay scales are orderly and consistent--consistently lower than private sector pay. They also contain a lot of hidden benefits.
Once you cross into contracting, there is no pay scale. The pay rules are largely set by the contracts. And there are thousands of contracts, all different.
The pay rates in these contracts are not necessarily connected in any way to current market rates, or indeed any portion of reality. They might just be numbers made up to sound plausible.
If you have a clearance as an employee of a contractor, and don't get extra pay for having it, you just leave. It's pretty common for the government to give your company $90 for every hour you work, then it turns around and gives you $45 of that. They keep the rest, sometimes for doing literally nothing except paying you your salary in their own name. This gives the company a lot of wiggle room on pay, because you seldom know how much they are actually charging the government for your work, unless your hobby is reading thousands of pages of government contracts. And never mind if you're an employee of a subcontractor.
Right now, I'm probably at around 70% of equivalent Silicon Valley pay, and 120% of same-region private-sector jobs. I want to move cities and get back to the private sector, but I don't want to go all the way to California.
I was once sent an accountant's spreadsheet by mistake at one of my former employers. They were paying me about $45/hr. They were billing the govt... significantly more than $90/hr for my time :)
If you are disabled, native-American, female, or a veteran, you can make quite a bit of money just by being 51% owner of a company that submits contract bids and subcontracts the actual work for anything they might win out to someone else.
Awarding of government contracts is explicitly discriminatory. The practice just creates figurehead companies, and all the same people end up doing all the same work, at a far greater cost, but without any more pay or benefits to the workers that might possibly boost productivity.
You don't want to look too closely at that business. Keep taking the blue pill. You absolutely do not want to even get a rough estimate of the ratio of money that goes to people who just know the right people versus the amount that goes to people who actually perform necessary and useful tasks.
Just don't go to work in that sector if you can avoid it. Ignorance is bliss.
I have literally overheard government employees saying to one another that they can't convert contractor-employees into government employees--potentially saving tens of millions of dollars out of the budget--because the exact people doing those specific jobs, with more than ten years of experience in doing those jobs, who would be more than happy to continue doing them, would not even show up on the first page of candidates due to "preference points", and they could not extend a reasonable offer to them anyway--which would be the exact amount they already earn doing that job--thanks to the rigid pay schedules. The system is broken by design, and there is an entire class of trough-feeding middlemen that benefit, without offering any sort of meaningful contribution. That's the very thing that Eisenhower warned us about, and the Reagan administration was probably the last that could have stopped it. But they chose to accelerate it instead. So now, barring some sort of catastrophic rebellion, it's here to stay.
That's why I'm somewhat amused by the furor over the Manning/Snowden leaks. There's already more than enough info to make you lose your faith in government forever, freely available as public records. No one even bothers to look at those, because they are mostly quick cures for insomnia. It's just like John Oliver said: the public has no way to relate to it on a personal level. For the classified leaks, you have to couch it in terms of the NSA looking at your dick pics. For the stuff already out there, freely available to anyone who might want to read it, I'm not sure there's a way to do that. There are so many legal ways to unethically convert public funds into private pocket money, and so many people doing it without a shred of shame or remorse, that there's really no way to psychologically connect to it.
Once you cross into contracting, there is no pay scale. The pay rules are largely set by the contracts. And there are thousands of contracts, all different.
The pay rates in these contracts are not necessarily connected in any way to current market rates, or indeed any portion of reality. They might just be numbers made up to sound plausible.
If you have a clearance as an employee of a contractor, and don't get extra pay for having it, you just leave. It's pretty common for the government to give your company $90 for every hour you work, then it turns around and gives you $45 of that. They keep the rest, sometimes for doing literally nothing except paying you your salary in their own name. This gives the company a lot of wiggle room on pay, because you seldom know how much they are actually charging the government for your work, unless your hobby is reading thousands of pages of government contracts. And never mind if you're an employee of a subcontractor.
Right now, I'm probably at around 70% of equivalent Silicon Valley pay, and 120% of same-region private-sector jobs. I want to move cities and get back to the private sector, but I don't want to go all the way to California.