alt Hacker NewsYes I’m sure your anecdotal bubble is more statistically valid than telling a 22 year old if they have a choice between working at BigTech making $160K+ a year or work in government and make $70K, they are going to choose to work for the government.
Myself personally, I worked on the other side of the consulting - government divide. I saw a lot more people jump on the consulting side than the government side. I never heard one person say “I would love to take a 40% cut in pay and go into the office and deal with government shut downs. Sign me up!
But why in the heck would anyone want to work for a government that constantly insults them, forcing RTO and making people move to South (where I am from).
Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.
I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).
This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.
Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).