<p>Exactly by smile. Go back to school and become an engineer. You’ll be making a cool six figures before you know it. No recession in defense lol.</p>
<p>Folks have to do a cost-benefit of whatever job they hold. H’s hours are not as long as CountingDown’s, but longer than many in private industry. He has stayed because he mostly likes his work and coworkers and feels good about what he’s doing.</p>
<p>The attorneys I know who decided to work for the government (county, state and federal) weighed the pros & cons before doing it and are happy with the tradeoff they have made. It’s similiar to my MD relative who chose to work for a HMO instead of getting higher pay and longer hours in private practice. He’s happy even tho he turned down much higher paying jobs and earns enough to be satisfied.</p>
<p>Bashing one group or another or saying some are over or under paid makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>Well said NYSmile. It’s tiresome to hear people constantly bash others for what they have.</p>
<p>Yup, as I suspected: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 28,000 lawyers in the District of Columbia, making for a density of lawyers about 10 times the national average, and making lawyers the largest single job category in the District. Their average salary of $163,000 is a little below that of the 210 dentists ($165,000), 280 surgeons ($240,000), 160 internists ($231,000), and 1,790 “physicians & surgeons, all other” ($176,000), but they were fifth in average salary. I’m not sure how many DC lawyers work for the government, but I’m quite sure the average salary for government lawyers is nowhere near $163K. It’s the private sector lawyer and lobbyists who bring up the average.</p>
<p>After scouring the BLS data, however, I’m pretty skeptical of some of the figures Bloomberg is reporting. There are only a few job classifications in the District of Columbia that come anywhere near the figure Bloomberg is reporting as the average for federal employees, and many of them of them are likely in the private sector (like a lot of the doctors and dentists and a large fraction of the lawyers).</p>
<p>Here are the job classifications that are at or above the $120K level Bloomberg reports as the average for federal workers:</p>
<ol>
<li>Management occupations (including CEO, General and Operations Managers, Advertising Managers, Marketing Managers, P.R. & Fundraising Managers, Computer & Information systems Managers, Financial Managers, Purchasing Managers, Human Resources Managers, Architectural & Engineering Managers, Natura Science Managers, Managers-Other)</li>
<li>Financial Examiners</li>
<li>Nuclear Engineers</li>
<li>Engineers-Other (excluding Aeronautical, Biomedical Chemical, Civil, Computer, Electrical, Electronic, Environmental, Health & Safety,Industrial, and Mechanical Engineers, all separate categories below the $120K threshold)</li>
<li>Physicists</li>
<li>Physical Scientists-other (excluding a bunch I won’t lsit here)</li>
<li>Political Scientists</li>
<li>Lawyers</li>
<li>Dentists</li>
<li>Family & General Practitioners</li>
<li>Internists</li>
<li>Psychiatrists</li>
<li>Surgeons</li>
<li>Physicians and Surgeons-Other</li>
<li>Veterinarians</li>
<li>Air Traffic Controllers</li>
</ol>
<p>That’s it. Apart from Political Scientists (which surprised me), these are just the kinds of high-skill, high-wage occupations you’d expect anywhere, and as I said, many of them look more likely to be in the private sector than government jobs . And apart from lawyers and some of the management categories, there just weren’t very many people employed in most of these categories. The BLS data show an average annual wage for the District of Columbia’s 639,390 employees of $73,440 (May 2010). </p>
<p>So some of the claims in the Bloomberg story–as well as a lot of the political spin some people are trying to put on here about overpaid government workers—just seem completely bogus to me.</p>
<p>sewhappy - I think you forget I bashing of public sector workers went on a few months ago. A NJ radio station bases its morning format on just that. People always think the other guy has a better deal. nysmile is right-</p>
<p>
<br>
is it BLS data? I was searching the census.gov website. I could not for the life of me find median household income by MSA for 2010. I found the national figure - $50,046, but could not get the census website to spit out figures for MSAs… oh well. Keep in mind Bloomberg is talking about family income, and I think there are many 2 income households in the DC metro area. I guess the data is there to support that claim if I could find it.</p>
<p>I worked in the private sector (I was a “job creator” and entrepreneur), and I have worked in government. I can tell you that in my experience, government is generally speaking far more efficient, more cost-effective, and more cost conscious. When I would look for printing (for my publishing company), 14 separate sales reps, with 14 separate support operations, would compete for my business, all offering the same product. They would all wine-and-dine me, send me presents, take me on junkets to the factories, send me birthday cards and Christmas cards. All offering the same product/service, which was priced far, far higher than it needed to be simply by virtue of what they thought necessary to get, and retain my business. The government printing office could always do the same work (even with higher paid, unionized employees) at a fraction of the cost.</p>
<p>(I should add that the private sector got tired of competing. They were allowed to compete for any government printing job. But they’d never get it, regardless of how poorly they compensated their workers. So they paid off legislators to get them close the government print shop and “farm out” the work.)</p>
<p>What government can’t do is innovate. You don’t want them to. That’s not what it is there for.</p>
<p>At my current government job, I get paid a fraction of what I could command in the private sector. Our state government has stopped doing market comparisons - because every time they did so in the past, they felt obligated to raise our pay.</p>
<p>The last announcement I saw for a new attorney in the Attorney General’s Office paid $42,000. They had hundreds of applicants for one position. My wife, a nurse with an AA degree and RN and three years experience, makes more per year (and has benefits) than the top salary rung in the range for a job being offered to an ARNP nurse care manager to be hired by the state.</p>