Big time. I remember hanging out with the AI team here in Toronto before deep learning took off. Then it took off and Microsoft just bought the research team out from under UoT's feet. It was a sky high payout.
Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at least until AI replaces us then who knows.
Here in the US, politicians, especially on the right, love to highlight and criticize public employees, especially if their salaries seem too large. But Federal employees salaries are not too large, barely competitive with the private sector. If you want government to work well, attract talent by paying them what they'd earn outside of it. But all that just comes from an ideological interest in shrinking government so they can drown it in a bathtub. If you make sure government doesn't work well, then you have an excuse for eliminating it.
I think the problem is the distribution. SOME government employees (at least in Canada) are seen as being paid too much because the pay is clustered really closely together and often don’t reflect market pay.
You get software engineers that get paid 70k a year but also janitors that get paid 70k a year with the same number of years in.
From what I've heard, another part of why the government struggles to get good IT workers is that the processes for getting anything done are Kafkaesque, even compared to large enterprise roles.
There are other things governments could do though.
Coming from a US perspective, the biggest one would be to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government. I'd probably be willing to pick up some contract work to do on the cheap, but I can't because of my employment contract.
Another is that the government already has access to a lot of things I don't, and I'd be willing to trade my time for access to some of those things. Free flights on army cargo planes would be a great perk. I would totally do some work if they'd let me drive a tank for like 30 minutes and fire the cannon down the range a couple times. They probably have access to HPC clusters that would tempt some (I don't have the skills to have the interest, but I'm sure many do).
Government pensions are another option, although they'd have to require less than 40 hours a week of work to qualify. It might end up being more expensive than just paying more.
Tax breaks are another option. Someone would have to figure up the demand curve, but a 10% cut to my effective tax rate would be tempting depending on the amount of work required.
Free education would be another option if they could offer it for part time work.
I don't feel that the government has gotten particularly creative in trying to attract talent. The pay is bad, the job is a bureaucratic nightmare, and the perks kind of suck other than the pension.
The downside is that a lot of those are likely to piss off the rest of the government employees.
You wrote: <<to pass some kind of law that employment contracts can't prevent you moonlighting for the government>>
This is a brilliant idea. In some sense, the gov't is the biggest non-profit in any modern nation. Large corporations love it when you "moonlight" at a non-profit. Your are idea is not so far-fetched! I'm sure lots of techies would love to pitch-in and help to improve an online gov't service -- be it local, regional, or national.
There is red tape, yes, but there are upsides to doing contract work for them too. The sheer scale of impact is daunting. Millions of people looking for work and you help them figure out the areas their recommender system needs improvement? That's tens of thousands of homes that now have employment where they wouldn't have. Just think of the cascading impact.
I don't know how to do it in the US, but in Canada you should be able to get these types of short-term gigs if you do a bit of networking in Ottawa and mention that you're a specialist in X, and that you want to help out here and there to give back. Wont take long. People want to bring in experts that will take occasional lower pay for impact.
Edit:
Also, the servers are BEEEEFY, haha. They might be cloud first these days, but when I was there it was still all on-premises and man alive are those machines huge.
I think the Public Service in Canada also suffers from extremely opaque hiring practices. Unless you're aware of what they're looking for in a resume or the PS style cover letter, you're just sending in your resume to the void. FSWEP is the unofficial actual hiring route. Then the average time for a lot of hiring outside of getting "bridged in" is 9 months or more. Most people find that absurd.
I do know some CCs and branches are trying to make changes but the PS in general is an absolute dinosaur for hiring and shows no signs of improving to match the bleed they'll have as people start retiring out.
> Then the average time for a lot of hiring outside of getting "bridged in" is 9 months or more
I recall someone I hired had also applied for a government job while completing his degree. They called him back a little more than a year after. Of course, his salary out of college was 4x what they were offering but can you imagine what candidate the government ends up with? The people who are still looking for a job in tech a whole year after graduation…
Yeah I don't know what it's like going in the front door. I just sounded smart at a lunch with someone that worked for the Prime Ministers Office. When they were having trouble with something I got a really random email haha.
> But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
No need to look at a few prestigious positions. Aren’t doctors on government payroll over there? There’s already a precedent to paying some government employees market rates it seems.
> Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
It also changes the dynamic to fixed price bids where the government has to understand its own needs well enough to write such a bid. Probably the best case-study of that going extremely wrong is, ironically also Canadian, with the Phenix pay system. The government gave the contractor what they understood to be their payroll rules but it turns out they were not what was agreed to. The whole saga lasted almost a decade and cost billions.
> But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
Pay your consulting firm 100x more than they would pay any one government employee, and not ask questions about how much of that goes to each consultant.
Same thing for the government too. I'm civically minded, so I've taken a couple contracts here and there to help out the Government of Canada, but man is it a pay cut. But what are they going to do? Pay more than the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court?
Sometimes governments try to work around this with contracting companies so that they don't have to see the salaries directly. But this is just padding extra waste and cost.
But this is what exponential tech is going to look like, at least until AI replaces us then who knows.