IT Industry people, step in plz

[Apoc]

Yeah, but then you want to slit your throat every day....

I'd rather make less than work with people who are looking to get paid the most for the least about of effort.

[Steve85]

In the last few months the use of "lowest price technically acceptable" evaluation method has really accelerated and is being used for IT work more than I've ever seen in the last 5 years and several hundred proposals. LPTA means they take the 8 proposals received, stack them from lowest price to highest and then start at the top, reviewing until they find one "technically acceptable". Not superior, just...acceptable. This could mean 7 proposals never even get looked at. Be low, or risk not even having a chance.

This is putting downward pressure on the salaries of anyone not considered key. Incumbents are bidding their folks at 5-10% less than current salary, winning, and keeping the people. Those who refuse the pay cut are greened (replaced with a newbie). Things are being bid at razor thin margins and even those who took the cut and stayed, may be on the 2 year get well plan of further greening to control salary creep and protect margins. That doesn't mean they won't find other work, but it's like sitting on a fence with 30 other folks watching them get picked off randomly and wondering every day if it's going to be you.

I can guarantee the government employees they are working right next to, doing the same job, did not take pay cuts to stay on the project.

I don't know how much continued pressure there will be to use the LPTA evaluation criteria in the future, but if the trend continues, much of government IT work will be a commodity, and the salaries of the average Joe with a few certs trying to jump on a government contract may face downward pressure. Or at the very least, not escalate as they have in the past. There are of course other factors that could influence this, but it's what we're seeing now.

Higher end development seems to be insulated from this so far, but even on those proposals, support personnel (non-key) are having salaries pressured. We just worked a recompete where we have 17 FTEs that have been on the project for years, out of that 5 were considered necessary to perform, 12 were either on the low side salary-wise already or slated for replacement. Of the 5, two were named in the proposal, even putting pressure on the other 3.

This is in contrast to a best value criteria where you could be more expensive, and let the government know that all the people they like will remain on the project. Best value gave the selection committee an avenue for paying more to keep incumbents. In an LPTA contest, you don't get to tell that story unless you are low, low, low.

The government is doing everything it can to make it a race to the bottom...at least for the contractors.

Goody, too bad you don't want to combine your sales experience with IT, those peeps are making bank! And most don't know shit about IT (like me), and it's OK because neither does their customer POC. That's why they bring Evans and Geralds with them to follow-up meetings as "sales engineers".

[davej]

Goody, too bad you don't want to combine your sales experience with IT, those peeps are making bank! And most don't know shit about IT (like me), and it's OK because neither does their customer POC. That's why they bring Evans and Geralds with them to follow-up meetings as "sales engineers".

seriously, if you want to sell web up there (or in the valley) and learn some dev along the way, i know some guys...(totally not shady)

[CaptainHenreh]

Goody, too bad you don't want to combine your sales experience with IT, those peeps are making bank! And most don't know shit about IT (like me), and it's OK because neither does their customer POC. That's why they bring Evans and Geralds with them to follow-up meetings as "sales engineers".

seriously, if you want to sell web up there (or in the valley) and learn some dev along the way, i know some guys...(totally not shady)

Yeah, I had lunch with them. I woudln't say "totally not shady" but you're not gonna wake up in a bathtub full of ice with no kidneys.

[Evan]

Yeah, but then you want to slit your throat every day....

I'd rather make less than work with people who are looking to get paid the most for the least about of effort.

Well, there are still good people in government, and (usually) they rise to the top.
The incompetents are generally boxed off, their work taken from them and given to someone else (further incentivizing their incompetence), and moved somewhere else where managers dont have to look at them.

So the team you work with is still pretty good and competent, you just have a mess of people parked in offices with their doors closed who dont do anything and dont interact with anyone.
It sucks as a "this is my tax dollars at work" kind of thing (and when you think of how many smart hardworking people would love that job) but it doesnt affect your day to day work much.

[Apoc]

their work taken from them and given to someone else

Unless you're the catcher in this deal.

I'm sure there are a lot of really bright people, especially in defense, but I spent two summers interning at HUD in Philly and I couldn't handle it. My dad tried to convince me early on that spending 35 years with the feds like him meant you could be a superstar without *that* much effort and you'll retire with a fat pension. All these things are true, I just knew it wasn't something I wanted.

[davej]

Goody, too bad you don't want to combine your sales experience with IT, those peeps are making bank! And most don't know shit about IT (like me), and it's OK because neither does their customer POC. That's why they bring Evans and Geralds with them to follow-up meetings as "sales engineers".

seriously, if you want to sell web up there (or in the valley) and learn some dev along the way, i know some guys...(totally not shady)

Yeah, I had lunch with them. I woudln't say "totally not shady" but you're not gonna wake up in a bathtub full of ice with no kidneys.

and dicksonfaces.com is "totally not a porn site" (but still in dev)

[davej]

Goody, too bad you don't want to combine your sales experience with IT, those peeps are making bank! And most don't know shit about IT (like me), and it's OK because neither does their customer POC. That's why they bring Evans and Geralds with them to follow-up meetings as "sales engineers".

seriously, if you want to sell web up there (or in the valley) and learn some dev along the way, i know some guys...(totally not shady)

Yeah, I had lunch with them. I woudln't say "totally not shady" but you're not gonna wake up in a bathtub full of ice with no kidneys.

and dicksonfaces.com is "totally not a porn site" (but still in dev)

[.RJ]

I'm sure there are a lot of really bright people, especially in defense, but I spent two summers interning at HUD in Philly and I couldn't handle it. My dad tried to convince me early on that spending 35 years with the feds like him meant you could be a superstar without *that* much effort and you'll retire with a fat pension. All these things are true, I just knew it wasn't something I wanted.

Nearly all of the agencies that are funded out of the congressional budget are like this. I have spent time in quite a few and it makes me want to slam my dick in a door.

[HAULN-SS]

After reading some of the later posts, maybe learning a programming language is the way to go. You can be a developer by just knowing a programming language. If you're not good at math, or some other engineering discipline,you will just probably be limited to the types of projects you're going to work on (Front end web-dev, vs. a big data number cruncher).

Maybe I don't have the same idea of what is good pay or not compared to some of you who have lived here a long time. I have yet to work on any project that got cuts, of any sort, related to any part of the IT infrastructure or development effort. I guess I could see that happening on projects that get to an O&M phase, but I dont know anyone that wants to work on those, and usually they are staffed with people fresh out of college. I have changed jobs twice in 6 years, but I stayed with Lockheed the longest. I got a raise every year, and left the company the first year that was <5%. Right now I am making approximately 3x what I started at out of college. Maybe some of that will change by the end of the year - as far as not seeing cuts, but hasnt happened in any appreciable way since I've been in the work force up here.

[.RJ]

You can be a developer by just knowing a programming language

Thats rich.

[HAULN-SS]

It's definitely true. Ive seen many developers get OJT and Learning Tree courses to get a job done. There's a difference between being an implementer and code monkey, and being a computer scientist. I'll eat my hat if you can find me a C# developer that can solve a differential equation programmatically without using a premade lib.

[.RJ]

If you want to dig and and make basic bug fixes, sure. Past that, not so much. If you dont have a good engineering/problem solving mindset, have experience/training in design, usability, functionality, requirements, testing, etc you wont be a very good developer, at least not for front end stuff, which is where most of the contracts/jobs are now. I think you have a pretty unique job, most of them dont require the math background you have, at least from my perspective in gov & web products.

[HAULN-SS]

If you want to dig and and make basic bug fixes, sure. Past that, not so much. If you dont have a good engineering/problem solving mindset, have experience/training in design, usability, functionality, requirements, testing, etc you wont be a very good developer, at least not for front end stuff, which is where most of the contracts/jobs are now. I think you have a pretty unique job, most of them dont require the math background you have, at least from my perspective in gov & web products.

What I mean is that for someone like goodspeed looking to get into an industry, digging around on existing code and making bug fixes sounds like a pretty reasonable way to get a foot in the door, doesnt it? In my previous post maybe that wasn't as clear. I havent done a whole lot of that stuff, but I had to learn Grails at my last job, knowing zero about web products, and was able to get a site up and going. A lot of the new convention based frameworks out there are more installing software to get to the basic level, than they are having to know anything about how it works. Saavy googlers and document readers could easily install everything needed to get a site like that up and going. I think it seems like goodspeed has at least some eye for design and such (just purely based off past videos and whatnot), and its not that hard to drop some javascript widgets on a page to start getting stuff done. Now whatever data is displayed or sent to the server from that page may go to something more hardcore in the back end, but what I'm getting at is that the front end development stuff is, these days, more based on knowing conventions and such than anything engineering based.

Disclaimer: As I said, I only have a little bit of experience with that stuff, but thats how I saw it. When I was finished that last job, I handed it off to a guy at the company who had been a geography major, and had taken some learning tree courses. He seemed competent enough to fix the bugs as they were found.

disclaimer2: im about half hungover from company christmas party last night and might have too much interest in other peoples career decisions :lol:

[Evan]

I'll eat my hat if you can find me a C# developer that can solve a differential equation programmatically without using a premade lib.

Its funny that you say that like its a good thing. You're a shitty developer if you waste time, money, and introduce bugs reinventing the wheel when you can use a reliable, fast, and well tested library instead.
It also means you're too stupid to be able to grasp the more important higher level architecture and engineering problems and would rather focus on a smaller easier academic problem.

[.RJ]

its not that hard to drop some javascript widgets on a page to start getting stuff done

[.RJ]

[whatever data is displayed or sent to the server from that page may go to something more hardcore in the back end

Oh yeah, I forgot about that too. If your relational database & sql queries dont scale well with your database growth, you're gonna have a bad time. Add that to the list.

[HAULN-SS]

I'll eat my hat if you can find me a C# developer that can solve a differential equation programmatically without using a premade lib.

Its funny that you say that like its a good thing. You're a shitty developer if you waste time, money, and introduce bugs reinventing the wheel when you can use a reliable, fast, and well tested library instead.
It also means you're too stupid to be able to grasp the more important higher level architecture and design problems and would rather focus on a smaller easier academic problem.

Thats not at all what I was saying. You're definitely a shitty developer if you don't use an existing library out there that's better than your own. What I am saying is people sometimes think that being a developer has a high barrier to entry because of all the maths. That's basically true if you're going to get a degree in it. What I am saying is that most employers are NOT working on those types of projects, so if you can show some competence with a language or web dev framework, they are not going to care that you're not up on your calculus. If you generally know how to display data from a database on a webpage, you're like at least 60% done. (Assuming the company has people doing the DB side)

I just don't see the barrier to entry being any higher than becoming an "IT guy" for most projects, and it sounds like from some of the other discussion here that it's probably more stable and maybe better paid.

edit 2: I just checked NVCC and for this program: <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.nvcc.edu/academics/programs/cat2012/programdetail.aspx?prog_id=1200&subprog_id=0&level=1">http://www.nvcc.edu/academics/programs/ ... =0&level=1</a><!-- m --> there are only 2 math courses,and reading the syllabi for those they look like what used to be called "business calc" because the business majors had to take it, and it didnt involve proofs. If you HAD to have a piece of paper to get in the door as a dev, you could probably knock some of this out pretty fast. Just a possible alternative to the CCNA route.

[.RJ]

I just don't see the barrier to entry being any higher than becoming an "IT guy" for most projects, and it sounds like from some of the other discussion here that it's probably more stable and maybe better paid.

You can get your foot in the door with help desk/support work with minimal experience and an unrelated degree if you want to be an "IT guy". Much harder to do if you want to work as a developer - you'll need a CS degree or some other way to demonstrate proficiency (i.e. paid side work) to get an entry level job.

[HAULN-SS]

I kinda want to whip up some fake resumes and see how many hits you might get with some different scenarios..is that legal?