Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ultimate responsibility for all the technical stuff makes 70% of what I do as a consultant working for the state.
This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k.
The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.
This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k.
The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.