[chfalck]

I mean, they probably would if public services paid their engineers Google salaries. Do you think someone who can make 150k at Google is going to take a public services eng job for at minimum 50% less pay? Of course to have public service jobs like that we’d have to pay more taxes… and thus you end up with overworked engineers who are probably ok at their job but not on the same level as the big private companies

[xyzzyz]

Imagine we start paying government employees Google salaries tomorrow. Could we then start firing incompetent employees and replace them with the competent ones lured by high pay? Everything I know about how politics and public sector unions work tells me that the answer is very much no. This means that this “pay them and they will come” plan can only expect to see any success many decades down the line, once enough incompetent workers leave on their own. And this is assuming your plan actually works: who’s to say that the high quality employees won’t get lazy themselves if they get Google pay with public sector job security? Overall, this means that before we entertain your idea, we need to bust the public sector unions and fire the incompetent employees. I suspect that once you do that, you won’t even have to raise the pay so much to get large increase in public sector competence.

[rayiner]

Google-level salaries are a recent thing in engineering. There wasn’t that much of a difference in engineering salaries between public and private sector say in the 1990s. But public services still sucked.