IT Hiring:  No, Government Doesn't Pay Less Than Business

Particularly in IT, it has always been assumed that government jobs pay less than business jobs so government has all the undesirable incompetents. However, this assumption is not true, not now and probably never has been.

Business always insists that it can do the work more cheaply than government (see IT Hiring: Government, Business, and Outsourcing). How could business do that if it was paying its workers more, since salaries are usually the greatest cost in business? No, business has to limit costs, thus salaries, because they have to be profitable.

Government can spend as much as it wants. It doesn't do this by printing more money because this leads to disastrous economy-wrecking hyperinflation (wheelbarrows full of money to pay for a loaf of bread). Instead, government takes out more and more loans (issues bonds), rapidly and ever-increasingly raising the national debt. Then the government just has to pay interest on this debt and hope that when the loans come due, in 30 years, after most of the responsible politicians have comfortably retired, the government will have enough money to pay off the loans, primarily through inflation.

So government can pay at least as much as business, which is a lot given it is for incompetents. This is especially true because government is trying to counter the assumption that it pays less than business.

As indicated in previous entries, all other IT hiring principles also apply about equally to both government and business (including the media) so they all are hiring IT incompetents. IT incompetence is a severe problem in all organizations.

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