The shortage of developers with clearance is exacerbated by the number of people with clearance who want to exit the defense contractor ecosystem, because it's a military-industrial clusterfuck from top to bottom. They hire us for our brains, and then tell us not to use them.

Except we can't get out because of two factors:

  1. The non-defense ecosystem won't fix their insane hiring processes.
  2. If you do actually get an offer, it is 80% of what you currently earn, or less.

There is not a glut of highly qualified engineers in the private sector. There is a glut of barely adequate engineers, and the employers out there seem unwilling to pay reasonable rates for anyone better, aside from some exceptions in the tech hub cities.

I'm stuck, too.

I would jump ship in an instant if only someone would offer me 102% of my current pay, 40 hours a week, and the opportunity to do more fulfilling work.

This is fascinating. I work for a research lab and have a clearance, but we all make below private sector industry standard. I've never actually looked at defense contractors and thus had no idea what the pay scale was like.

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.

You have summed up my thoughts exactly.

I was under the impression pay for devs in the defense sector topped out at the 80-120k mark. Which is definitely good but very comparable to unimpressive mid-senior level devs at many development shops.

If you wouldn't mind, in your experience what is the general range of pay for development work in the defense sector?

In my previous job, on an Army project that required a TS clearance, I was making the San Francisco equivalent of $202k according to Wolfram Alpha, as a W2 employee, This was with ~10 years experience.

The catch is that the work is terrible, and your coworkers will likely be pretty unqualified.

Some friends and I refer to a clearance as 'Golden Handcuffs' because the money is good, but you end up trapped since you're still writing code for Java 5 or 6, deploying in weblogic or jboss 4.

I think you are mistaken. I have friends in that industry and my impression is they wouldn't even bother with the interview unless the salary was at least $150k and closer to $200k is not uncommon in a locality that Wolfram Alpha says has a 30% cheaper cost of living than SF.

> Every couple of years (ok, at least every year) I'll try to apply to non-defense jobs, and I get the impression that there's a glut of highly qualified engineers in the private sector -- "Sorry, we're being deluged with applications right now, we'll totally get back to you someday." And the interviews generally involve 3-4 rounds of hazing via Knuth. In the defense sector, they verify your clearance and credentials, check for a pulse, then show you to your desk.

> Some are interested until they hear my current salary "You'd have to be a 10x RockNinja to make that kind of salary here." Yes, even Silicon Valley companies (and I live in an area with a relatively low COL).

Its finding the company willing to sponsor and foot the bill for the clearance that is the trick. But yeah, I've noticed outside of E-Commerce, Defense & Finance, I'd like to leave my current position too...but I want something other than those three. I'm tired of being responsible for other people's financial data [e.g. Credit cards] or having a guy flip out because I got up to go to the bathroom and forgot to lock my screen. xD

Problem there is you can't just go get a security clearance - you have to be ... sponsored(?) - is that the word - by a company already. At least, that was my reading of the situation a few years back. I gave up applying to defense positions years ago because every one required existing security clearance. It's the defense industry version of "you have to have experience before we'll hire you to get the experience".

Right after I graduated with my BSCS in 2002, I went into the Army for four years (which is how I got my clearance). The only employers willing to even look at me ("if you love programming so much, why haven't you been doing it for the past four years?") were defense companies, and only because I already had a clearance. :)

We sometimes hire fresh grads without a clearance, but experienced hires are generally expected to already have them. It's not cheap (and definitely not fast) to get someone a clearance. Though, some companies/contracts/projects are probably more flexible on this, especially if they have something unclassified you can work on while they wait for your clearance to come through.

Out of curiosity what's your take on people who had a clearance and then let it expire? They go inactive after 2 years so getting back seems like an issue.

"We sometimes hire fresh grads without a clearance, but experienced hires are generally expected to already have them"

Sounds like the problem is one entirely of your company's making.

They will say existing security clearance required, because that greatly speeds up their hiring process. However there really is a severe drought of qualified developers with clearance, to the degree that even the worthless ones don't really get fired if they show up and don't anger security. And while for some of the jobs that may indeed be a hard requirement, for most of them its more of a preference. If you are a good programmer and fairly confident you will be able to be cleared, then they will sponsor you through the clearance process. Pro-tip just don't lie about shit and should be able to get clearance, they will look over most past issues if you acknowledge them and state that they are no longer an issue.

Interesting. Is there no way to pay the same fee a company would pay to apply for clearance for yourself?

Clearance requests must be accompanied by a justification, which basically means "needed to work on Project XYZ". You cannot get a clearance unless you actually need it to do work, and should not be cleared any higher than is necessary[1]. This leads to the chicken-and-egg situation with cleared positions: you need a clearance to work on these programs, but you can't get a clearance for the first time until asked to work on one of these programs.

[1] Some companies will try to put you through for higher clearances than you actually need right now in anticipation of future work, but they aren't supposed to.

What's the rationale for that? Clearance is surely a lot of work to obtain, but that's what the cost of the investigation should offset.

I would think even with clearance you can't actually get information you don't need to know, such as information on a project you're not working on.

The rationale is to minimize the number of clearances. Even though you can't get information without a need-to-know, the government still likes to limit the number of clearances.

That still isn't a rationale; that's a stated requirement, but what problem is actually solved by limiting clearances?

Fewer people they need to monitor with the level of scrutiny, people with clearance safely assume they are being monitored at.

Interesting, I didn't realize it was considered an ongoing process. I guess that makes sense; otherwise a bad actor would just apply for clearance, get cleared, and then start doing things they shouldn't.

They don't actually tell you explicitly it is an ongoing process, but everyone with clearance I know seems to acknowledge they are probably being kept tabs on at least a little. I mean it would seem kind of irrational to have all these watch lists and not watch the people with privileged information.

That happened to me in a similarly restrictive field. I eventually just quit my job so that I would be forced to reinvent myself. That led me back to a graduate program in analytics, where my programming background was enormously useful. While the ~ 9 months in the program were expensive and stressful, the degree made me very employable, and the programming background gave me a huge advantage during the recruitment process.

We have a rockstar programmer.

No, really. He put out CDs and all. Technically he's a former rockstar I guess, but close enough. He rocks.

We still lack a ninja. We have been unable to find one who could do low-level programming and get a US (not Japanese!) security clearance. So far we've had to settle for Nerf dart skills, which really isn't up to ninja standards.

> If you think finding a good developer is hard, try finding a good developer who also holds a security clearance.

Maybe it's harder to find in the States. I had a Canadian clearance for ten years (it wasn't a low level one either), and could never get a job, even with experience in whatever stack they were utilizing. The reason? Couldn't speak french. Even thought the coding language is all either English or math, and from contacts I have in the industry it's completely English, no dice.

Then again I can't get work for any defense company in the states because I'm not American so that's always fun too.

If it were the difference between getting the job I wanted and not, I would learn French.

If I had the skills to learn French, it would have been done by now (you're forced to take it for at least five years in Canadian schools). Don't know what it is, I can pick up coding languages easily enough, but human languages? No dice.

Completely off topic, but I'm dying to know- how concerned are you about the OPM hack?