So a couple of the comments here have been mentioning the high pay of people with specialties like this in the context of LM and other defense contractors. My impression from Glassdoor and general conversation with software developers has been the DCs pay pretty low for software in general compared to FAANG or even other engineering companies. Is it true that people with obscure specialties at places like LM can command high salaries? Or have I been misled that LM pay is on the lower side? Or is it all relative?
(Reposting at the top level because it makes more sense to hopefully get more discussion)
Defense contractors are similar to other companies that (strongly) do not believe that software is their product and do not value it any further than that it is a small component in the large system they are delivering. There's a lot of old-school attitudes still present: for example, I've heard software developers referred to as "software typists" a number of times.
Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things. These people can get paid very well.
On the other hand, a "software developer" is much more likely to be a support function. Lots of maintenance of legacy stuff more than anything, and what actual development work exists might be nothing more than taking an algorithm directly from a standard and implementing it in whatever language is required by the project. These roles are not particularly well-paid and have a lot of turnover.
> Basically there are two entirely different paths here. For example, the person who writes all the software to drive the cockpit displays is probably called something like a "cockpit avionics engineer" and is organizationally in the department that's responsible for building such things.
I don't know how Lockheed organizes, but I assume it is similar to Raytheon. Raytheon had a matrix organization where the rows are functional groups (e.g., software engineering, digital electronics engineering, RF engineering) and the columns are program teams (e.g., radar power supply, radar antenna, radar signal processor). The title you describe would align with a program group, but your "official" title would come from your functional group (which would be software engineering in this case).
> These people can get paid very well.
In the absolute. For software engineers, it's pretty average. I was writing some pretty cutting-edge embedded signal processing software when I left Raytheon in 2012, and I was getting paid $85,000/year with 9.5 years of experience. Based on my trajectory, I would have been at around $120,000 now had I stayed. This was in Dallas, so it was good money compared to the COL, but I could have made slightly more at just about any other larg-ish employer in the area. That said, I both sucked at and hated the internal political games at Raytheon, so perhaps I could have done better if those weren't true.
In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work.
But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands on the technical career track). You would typically find a Level 5 engineer serving as an engineering technical team lead, a Level 6 as a site deputy chief engineer, and a Level 7 as a site chief engineer. A few years ago, LM Aeronautics offered all Level 5 and above engineers an early buyout/retirement and got over 1000 engineers to leave the company that way. Those engineers were largely not replaced, either in skills (hard to replace that level of expertise), billets (those jobs were not re-filled), or promotions (the sudden vacuum at the top end of the technical career pyramid was not filled by promoting large numbers of level 4 engineers to level 5, etc).
Not fired, that would indicate termination for cause. This was an early buyout. Engineers at those levels were offered a severance package that included some number of weeks of pay per years spent with the company (up to a maximum of 6 months of pay) and a base amount on top of that.
This was the precursor to layoffs -- LM hoped to avoid layoffs by offering buyouts to these engineers. The wisdom of all of this... I don't see it.
Their goal was to reduce total amount spent on salaries.
This came at the time that the F-35 flight test program began its long wind-down. Other companies were hiring in large numbers because they had just begun big test programs (NGC had just won the B-21 contract and was testing its Triton UAVs), the net effect was that a HUGE amount of engineering knowledge and talent went out the door within a year. I can only speak for what it did to the F-35 test forces -- basically made them start over in terms of learning how to execute their jobs.
Companies do this all the time for all levels. It was basically an early retirement buyout. There’s a big Lockheed plant in my area and I’m pretty sure all managers, engineers, plant workers, etc were all offered buyouts. Everyone with 3 or so years until retirement.
The larger defense contractors have issues paying software engineers remotely close to private industry nowadays. In certain regions of the US the software market is dominated by defense though.
Back in the early 2000s I know of some J2EE architects that pulled $200k as defense contractors once they got a Sun certification. The certification and diploma mill market in the US is driven squarely by big federally funded institutions that value paper over experience because they don’t know how to measure ability any better than SV Leetcode questions would assess.
Of defense contractors I’ve seen pay tables for in the DC area, LM and Raytheon paid worse for senior engineers than slightly smaller, more specialized companies but they certainly had a lot more overhead and administrative positions available that were possible to reach just by having a PhD even if it’s not related to engineering or STEM in general at all (political science obviously makes sense here as valuable, for example).
But under DHS you can hit $200k+ as a contractor for anything that has “cyber” attached to its name these days. But for the most part, the high payout days for software engineers in defense are over which is what led me to leaving the DC area years ago to stick with better pay and work environment with private sector. A TS is a pain and the pay bump is a joke compared to RSUs. I’ll take leetcode grinding for months to get a stack of RSUs and marketable engineering skills over the demonstrably useless charade of the DoD security theater practices with none of the employment benefits besides some smug, self-assured sense of patriotism.
Most of the higher paid contractors in DoD aren’t engineers - they’ve usually been intelligence officer trainers and skilled and experienced warfighters (well past $400k, much of it untaxed).
You can get the pay increase associated with "cyber" in the name without having to live in the costly DC area. That works for me, supporting 12 kids on a single income. The work-life balance is to be appreciated as well, with 40-hour weeks (or paid overtime) and flexible hours.
They pay quite well if you measure that by how many hours of work you must do to pay a mortgage on a nice home. This is because:
1. It's typically a 40-hour week. They legally can't make you work 48 or more without paying overtime, and many will start paying overtime after 40.
2. You don't have to live in an expensive place like San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, or New York City. The worst cases are usually the DC area and San Diego, but typical locations are far cheaper. Instead of $2,000,000 for a house, you might pay $120,000 for a better house. Everything around you is cheaper too, from food to electricity. Gasoline is half the cost.
The choice is pretty clear if you hope to raise a family.
If you just look at salary comparison websites you will think the two have comparable salaries. 10 years of dev experience will put you in the 130k range before cost of living bumps. But FANG gives a lot or even most of the compensation as something besides salary.
Defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries. They can't, in general, because they're bound by labor categories and salaries set by the government, and the government isn't paying software engineers above what their GS software engineers get (max of about 128k in the DC area in general, if you're curious). There are a few jobs that can go a bit higher, but even they are capped around 150k as I recall.
I don't know what LM is going to pay for the skillset they ask for in that job announcement, I would bet that it's 150k or less, but the person w/ the skillset to answer it may be able to command a bit more as there aren't very many of us left.
Defense contractors set their own payscales but also compete on price. I know software engineers right now earning north of 150K. Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.
There is also the fact that finding ways to get more ads in front of people is not inherently motivating for some engineers when compared to building space systems or solving other interesting problems like deconflicting telescope laser alignment with satellite orbits.
> Also, overtime is paid and billed in defense. Thus, if you do work overtime, your defense contractor wants to bill it and you get paid for it. My first year out of school I made nearly 100K on a 67K salary because of billed overtime. This was in 2003.
When I worked at Raytheon (2002 - 2012) overtime had to be pre-approved (not every contract was eligible) and you had to work at least 8 extra hours in a week to get paid overtime (the 8 hours were paid if you hit the threshold; 7.5 and you didn't get anything extra). There was also an expectation, at least on my program, that you would be working overtime if it was authorized.
Companies have different rules and expectations. I was paid for every overtime hour I worked. Early in my career I was still learning and it was worthwhile, both financially and technically, right out of school. It can simply be a 9 to 5 job which is different than the commercial world I work in now where I don't get paid for extra time.
Amazon is a defense contractor.
Google is/was a defense contractor.
Apple is a defense contractor.
Microsoft is a defense contractor.
SpaceX is a defense contractor.
IBM is a defense contractor.
...
There’s a huge difference between having your primary business being services projects basically as an extension of the government and your revenue center being unrelated private sector funding. Your corporate structure and business incentives are completely different as a result. I know Lockheed spend many millions of dollars trying to build a DoD-centric IaaS as AWS was being built and it didn’t really matter in the end because so many projects are going to GovCloud. Sure, lots of TS projects are not ever going to be in AWS but boy are people trying. VMware was bought before to try to contain the sheer sprawl of configuration in the Pentagon (your cost is almost entirely around organizational complexities rather than compute / storage cost due to being so heavy on labor costs in most enterprise orgs so the math is fuzzier but usually results in layoffs / workforce optimizations if successful).
Not when talking about payscales. To say defense contractors don't pay FAANG salaries when FAANG companies are in the defense business is a failure of awareness. I was simply pointing this out.
None of the FAANG companies derive any significant percentage of their revenue from defense. None of them are defense contractors in the real sense of the concept. They're corporations who have a defense business on the side.
You either are or you aren't a defense contractor. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have been competing for a $10 billion dollar defense contract. Google just dropped out. Aside, Boeing is considered a defense contractor by many, but only 25% of its revenue is from defense. Where do you draw the line?
What constitutes a defense contractor to you and I are obviously different, but I don't hold that it is a matter of opinion or interpretation. If you've been awarded a defense contract, you are a defense contractor.
This is also a self asnwering question of sorts. If, let's say Lockheed would pay 'FAANG' salaries then it would be 'FLAANG' since the abbreviation is meant to encompass the top paying salaries.
Not true. Billable labor rates are negotiated with the customer. The actual pay that an employee gets is based on market rates and the perceived value of the employee. The one may influence the other.
You can pay your people whatever you want, but the gov will only pay your people what the DCMA says they are worth. If you pay higher, it comes out of profit (which is also metered by the DCMA) or some other source.
Source: A own a R&D engineering company that works for the DoD and IC.
I can pay a EE PhD $400k/year but the DoD will "only" pay me back around $175k for this person's time. I have to make up the difference.
Hence, for defense contractors, we "only" pay what the DCMA will let us charge.
In order, what matters are: tickets, experience, degrees, certs
It is extremely difficult to negotiate labor rates above a certain threshold; the government contracting officers can and will just refuse if they think you are demanding above-market rates. Sometimes you can justify some overage, but it's not easy, and it's not negotiated on a per-project basis.
Sure it is. The government is the customer, and the rates they will pay absolutely drive the rate the contracting company is willing to pay their engineers.
Defense contracting is a very different vehicle from any other. Source -- I am a DOD contract software engineer.
