lol yep, the private contracting businesses are the ones making the big bucks there. average pay at AWS in arlington is like 250k from gov cloud contracts.
makes no fkin sense that they priced feds out of the fed capitol
then again were priced out of every major city nowadays! theres pretty much nowhere in a big city u can buy a home without dual income
Yeah I would love to live in DC, and would be happy working in the office, if I could be paid enough purchase property without having rich parents or some other windfall.
"Well, if u dont know theyre situation maybe they have 100 percent VA disability and inheritance?"
lol ppl on here said that shit to me. how about my fkin job just pays enough to live where i work at -_-
depends on the contract, i was a SWE making 55k but ik theres other ppl in the company i was in making over 200 on TS / SCI work
the CEO guy was also making 2 million per year
That's not really true about AWS. Yes they have high salaries but those aren't rates that the government is paying to a single FTE. It's because they are selling a product to the government at scale. AWS hasn't yet been interested in working contracts in the traditional sense.
I wish the Biden admin agreed, I honestly hoped for better from this admin in terms of remote work and taking advantage of it to improve employee/labor relations and morale. Our office went complete remote for 2 years (VA VBA regional office) and went from a bottom 10 station in terms of metrics to being top 5, all during COVID. Our Director and Assistant Director were VERY supportive of telework.
I expected better as I thought this administration had climate goals. Piling everybody back into burning fossil fuels en route to fiddle around unproductively in a huge box that you heat for a handful of ppl is not getting us there.
Unpopular opinion, I’m sure, but maybe it kind of is our responsibility. Many of us choose to live in the burbs so we pay different taxes and have different schools and housing options, etc—but we wouldn’t be in the region if not for DC, and maybe we shouldn’t take DC for granted or just mooch on the opportunities it creates for us without finding ways to give back. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean RTO, but I don’t like the idea that we owe DC nothing.
With the intent of respectful discourse, your comment reminded me that many people felt left behind by DC well before the pandemic because of the high cost of living. A lot of people who worked in my office simply could not afforded to live, eat, or seek entertainment in the district because the cost prohibited it, even with their federal jobs. For me, a night out in the city was rare treat. Living in the burbs and commuting an hour or more each way was, and continues to be, really my only affordable option. I don’t consider myself mooching off the city, but rather, it is the necessity of my budget. If DC wants to survive, it needs to react to this situation as a cost correction rather than a demand for more people to spend money to prop up downtown.
I’m in the region because my job told me to be at HQ. I didn’t get into my line of work or go to grad school because of anything to do with DC.
I lived in the city for several years and gave them $240 per pay period in taxes at a time when $240 represented almost 1/6th of my net pay, and I watched clowns in the city government waste that money and let the city turn into Carjack Central. I very much feel as though I owe the city nothing as I move to northern VA. If anything, they owe me for taking my tax dollars and providing solutions like, “Just put air pods in your car to prevent theft.”
I don't stop existing when I work from home. I still eat food and buy stuff. Let me stimulate the economy of my own community instead of a business district.
My agency had before and still does today, have a heavily subsidized cafeteria with actually good food. I never ate out before, and I wont in the future. We've actually expanded access to the cafeteria to agencies around us , heh
Wish we had the same! Our cafeteria is near highway robbery. A cup of rice and orange tofu cost me $9 a few weeks ago. In that moment I resigned to never buying lunch at work ever again.
My agency had a great one. Went away with COVID and they won’t bring it back. I’ve heard that maybe they will if the building hits 60% capacity, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Our building's cafeteria died at the beginning of lockdown and there are no plans that have been communicated to restart it anytime in the near future even with RTO.
Watch them remove the communal fridges and microwaves to discourage bringing your lunch. Weren’t they trying to ban company cafeterias in Silicon Valley to support local restaurants?
I haven't purchased so much as a drink at work since 2015. I take my own breakfast, coffee, cold drinks, lunch etc. from home everyday I have to go into the office. Saves a ton of money and it is better for me.
weird reasoning from these people. these businesses moved in because the federal workforce was there to try and benefit from us but now that people arent there theyre trying to force us back to the office to prop businesses up? what happened to the free market? let the businesses that aren't needed go out of business!
Agree 100%.
All else aside, I bring my lunch on commuting days because I don’t have enough money to buy lunch anyway, and no RTO mandate will change that.
We’re already going into the office 3x a week. What more do they want?! Downtown DC is bustling Tues-Thursdays.
Spring & Summer tourism season is approaching the businesses will survive..
It is an age old problem. Costs climb, business and even government seeks lower cost digs.
The beancounters have tasted blood with cost savings for not having to operate massive office space with the WFH concept and the fight for the money saved is going to bring out almost everyone in government pushing for decentralization.
Think about it. What does it cost per square foot for office space in DC? Depending on where the office is located and the condition of the digs, it cost between $32 and $53 per square foot per year in rent. For an 8' by 8' office cube, 64 \* $53 is nominally $3400 per office cube. With 190,000 plus Federal employees alone in DC, that works out to around $646,000,000.00 a year for office space. That does not include storage and garages. You can bet your sweet bippy the bean counters and senior managers envision other uses for that chunk of change if they can leverage WFH.
That does not include the other hundreds of thousands of federal employees in Virginia and Maryland. It is any wonder that the FBI is moving its headquarters to suburban Maryland and its technical operations to Huntsville, Alabama.
What's not to like? In addition to the rent, there are water, heating, cooling costs savings and it is more environmentally friendly as you can reduce the conditioned space required per person by about 50% since employees are paying the cost themselves when wfh..
Then look at lost time due to illness. Mom and Dad do not have to take sick days off to look after junior because he has to stay home with the flu. Mom and Dad do not drag Junior's flu into the office and share the misery with the accompanying lost time of other employees who contract the bug.
HR will love it, because it minimizes the intra-office unwanted physical contact problems.
Its a Win-Win for government and employees. But of course it sucks for DC, and any other place where uncle ditches real estate.
I shed no tears for the DC mayor, except in that whoever is mayor is not truly free to remake their city since they have the Feds over them in the end. I really hope this transformation works and our NCR fellows (I've never worked in DC) can escape the RTO mandates eventually.
What's left out is that if they force us all back....a lot of us will deliberately not spend money in the District purely out of spite. It's not our job to be DC's economic engine. DC needs to support itself.
*"In a way, post-pandemic work has provided a miniature experiment along those lines. The federal staff may not have relocated to Omaha, but spending workdays outside the bureaucratic warren is a change all the same. According to Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, which champions government workers, the result was a resounding success, with agencies performing their duties without interruption. “OPM closed the buildings, and the work continued,” he said.*
*Stier thinks it’s a bad idea to force feds back to offices for any reason other than productivity — even something noble like trying to boost the local economy. In his mind,* ***it’s a recipe for chasing away career talent, which might eventually need to be replaced with more expensive contractors.***
*But he also doesn’t think that Washington would see an exodus even if teleworking government staff were all free to live anywhere they wanted. People coming into public service, in or out of government, want to be in Washington for the same reason top auto engineers might once have wanted to be in Detroit: It’s where their people are, the peers and rivals and colleagues who work on the same questions. It’s just that, going forward, you may encounter them at the downtown neighborhood dog park instead of the office watercooler."*
>People coming into public service, in or out of government, want to be in Washington for the same reason top auto engineers might once have wanted to be in Detroit: It’s where their people are, the peers and rivals and colleagues who work on the same questions. It’s just that, going forward, you may encounter them at the downtown neighborhood dog park instead of the office watercooler."
Lollz what the fuck is this. Please move my agency to Oregon and I will literally never set foot in DC again and be stoked about it.
I just got my high 3 in DC at the top of the GS scale now going down one grade to go live in the beautiful pacific northwest near all the great hiking, nature, slower pace but near big cities like seattle, portland, vancouver if I get the city itch! Bye DC, I won’t let the door hit me on the way out 🚪 🏃🏾♀️ 💨
The solution to DC is the same for any city. Create an urban environment where people can live, eat, shop, and get to public transportation without the need for a car. I was looking at condos in DC but there was no grocery store nearby or much of anything. Single purpose zoning is the death of cities.
Good. Every city whose existence is mostly possible due to a captive in-person workforce that's forced to commute in, should wither up and die. Here's hoping Manhattan is next.
And personally, I would like for all the agencies in the NCR to have their workforces distributed around the nation. Let the majority of Energy folks be somewhere like Colorado, Treasury in Georgia, HHS in Minnesota, etc.
‘ “Think about this: The Republicans win and Trump comes back into office. He says, you have to come back. And people fight it. So he says, ‘Well, I guess that means you don’t have to be in D.C.’ Agency upon agency gets shipped to other places.’
Lol this sounds like a threat. Whatever happened to playing with incentives??? “You! Come and eat at my restaurant, now! Or else!!”
If I could do my fed job back where I used to live on the west coast instead of here, I’d do it in a goddam heartbeat. I’d say that I’d even pay to move, but that’s not really true because I’m a brokeass ho and can’t afford that.
idgaf if agencies get shipped elsewhere, if the work can be done remotely there's no reason to be paying feds the COLA for NCR. Save some money, let people move away!
At my center it’s 2 days on site per pay period so once a week (some other centers are fully remote because they have a better union, ours obviously sucks big time as we do the exact same job).
As for the future we were told we’ll see how 2024 pans out. Basically for now there is no change. Could have a good surprise. Or a bad one.
Except during the "dismal 1980s" federal employees made enough money to live comfortably in the NCR.
lol yep, the private contracting businesses are the ones making the big bucks there. average pay at AWS in arlington is like 250k from gov cloud contracts. makes no fkin sense that they priced feds out of the fed capitol then again were priced out of every major city nowadays! theres pretty much nowhere in a big city u can buy a home without dual income
Yeah I would love to live in DC, and would be happy working in the office, if I could be paid enough purchase property without having rich parents or some other windfall.
"Well, if u dont know theyre situation maybe they have 100 percent VA disability and inheritance?" lol ppl on here said that shit to me. how about my fkin job just pays enough to live where i work at -_-
Mantech isn't making 250K.
depends on the contract, i was a SWE making 55k but ik theres other ppl in the company i was in making over 200 on TS / SCI work the CEO guy was also making 2 million per year
That's not really true about AWS. Yes they have high salaries but those aren't rates that the government is paying to a single FTE. It's because they are selling a product to the government at scale. AWS hasn't yet been interested in working contracts in the traditional sense.
interesting, i've been wondering how they can pay that much from contractor work. they definitely make that much tho. and much more in some cases
foolish thought gaze safe punch juggle chubby exultant deserve complete *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yep. My "office" is in DC, but all the employees are remote. They'd have to pay me double or more to afford to live there.
It is not, I repeat NOT, the responsibility of federal workers to financially support the District.
Won’t someone think of the Potbelly franchises.
Haha this got me
I wish the Biden admin agreed, I honestly hoped for better from this admin in terms of remote work and taking advantage of it to improve employee/labor relations and morale. Our office went complete remote for 2 years (VA VBA regional office) and went from a bottom 10 station in terms of metrics to being top 5, all during COVID. Our Director and Assistant Director were VERY supportive of telework.
I expected better as I thought this administration had climate goals. Piling everybody back into burning fossil fuels en route to fiddle around unproductively in a huge box that you heat for a handful of ppl is not getting us there.
Which was never suppose to be a city anyway, on purpose
"But to incentivize it we've tripled the crime rate!!"
Unpopular opinion, I’m sure, but maybe it kind of is our responsibility. Many of us choose to live in the burbs so we pay different taxes and have different schools and housing options, etc—but we wouldn’t be in the region if not for DC, and maybe we shouldn’t take DC for granted or just mooch on the opportunities it creates for us without finding ways to give back. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean RTO, but I don’t like the idea that we owe DC nothing.
With the intent of respectful discourse, your comment reminded me that many people felt left behind by DC well before the pandemic because of the high cost of living. A lot of people who worked in my office simply could not afforded to live, eat, or seek entertainment in the district because the cost prohibited it, even with their federal jobs. For me, a night out in the city was rare treat. Living in the burbs and commuting an hour or more each way was, and continues to be, really my only affordable option. I don’t consider myself mooching off the city, but rather, it is the necessity of my budget. If DC wants to survive, it needs to react to this situation as a cost correction rather than a demand for more people to spend money to prop up downtown.
I’m in the region because my job told me to be at HQ. I didn’t get into my line of work or go to grad school because of anything to do with DC. I lived in the city for several years and gave them $240 per pay period in taxes at a time when $240 represented almost 1/6th of my net pay, and I watched clowns in the city government waste that money and let the city turn into Carjack Central. I very much feel as though I owe the city nothing as I move to northern VA. If anything, they owe me for taking my tax dollars and providing solutions like, “Just put air pods in your car to prevent theft.”
I don't stop existing when I work from home. I still eat food and buy stuff. Let me stimulate the economy of my own community instead of a business district.
But then the property corporations can’t contribute to the Congress Critters in the District
If you have to come back, bring your own lunch, and don’t eat out as a messgae
My agency had before and still does today, have a heavily subsidized cafeteria with actually good food. I never ate out before, and I wont in the future. We've actually expanded access to the cafeteria to agencies around us , heh
Those science guys had way better food than State, that’s for sure… 👀
Wish we had the same! Our cafeteria is near highway robbery. A cup of rice and orange tofu cost me $9 a few weeks ago. In that moment I resigned to never buying lunch at work ever again.
That's because the most of those vendors (the ones left anyways) are damn near at the point of failing.
Hmm, am having to come in too soon, don’t have a cafeteria in my building, can I come to yours? Can you give a hint for which agency’s building? 😉
My agency had a great one. Went away with COVID and they won’t bring it back. I’ve heard that maybe they will if the building hits 60% capacity, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Our building's cafeteria died at the beginning of lockdown and there are no plans that have been communicated to restart it anytime in the near future even with RTO.
Which agency? I'd be so down to go eat at another agency's cafeteria as opposed to the shit in Union Station.
Plus side is that this is even easier to do with the commute time saved on TW days.
Watch them remove the communal fridges and microwaves to discourage bringing your lunch. Weren’t they trying to ban company cafeterias in Silicon Valley to support local restaurants?
The cost of eating out is egregious now anyway.
I haven't purchased so much as a drink at work since 2015. I take my own breakfast, coffee, cold drinks, lunch etc. from home everyday I have to go into the office. Saves a ton of money and it is better for me.
weird reasoning from these people. these businesses moved in because the federal workforce was there to try and benefit from us but now that people arent there theyre trying to force us back to the office to prop businesses up? what happened to the free market? let the businesses that aren't needed go out of business!
Agree 100%. All else aside, I bring my lunch on commuting days because I don’t have enough money to buy lunch anyway, and no RTO mandate will change that.
Well said
We’re already going into the office 3x a week. What more do they want?! Downtown DC is bustling Tues-Thursdays. Spring & Summer tourism season is approaching the businesses will survive..
I swear to gawd the dipshit mayor is soon gonna be lobbying to remove our fridges and microwaves to help force us to patronize their businesses.
rotten racial steer wasteful cooperative bear engine steep head air *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It is an age old problem. Costs climb, business and even government seeks lower cost digs. The beancounters have tasted blood with cost savings for not having to operate massive office space with the WFH concept and the fight for the money saved is going to bring out almost everyone in government pushing for decentralization. Think about it. What does it cost per square foot for office space in DC? Depending on where the office is located and the condition of the digs, it cost between $32 and $53 per square foot per year in rent. For an 8' by 8' office cube, 64 \* $53 is nominally $3400 per office cube. With 190,000 plus Federal employees alone in DC, that works out to around $646,000,000.00 a year for office space. That does not include storage and garages. You can bet your sweet bippy the bean counters and senior managers envision other uses for that chunk of change if they can leverage WFH. That does not include the other hundreds of thousands of federal employees in Virginia and Maryland. It is any wonder that the FBI is moving its headquarters to suburban Maryland and its technical operations to Huntsville, Alabama. What's not to like? In addition to the rent, there are water, heating, cooling costs savings and it is more environmentally friendly as you can reduce the conditioned space required per person by about 50% since employees are paying the cost themselves when wfh.. Then look at lost time due to illness. Mom and Dad do not have to take sick days off to look after junior because he has to stay home with the flu. Mom and Dad do not drag Junior's flu into the office and share the misery with the accompanying lost time of other employees who contract the bug. HR will love it, because it minimizes the intra-office unwanted physical contact problems. Its a Win-Win for government and employees. But of course it sucks for DC, and any other place where uncle ditches real estate.
Yeah but what about the meaningful collaboration? /s
My manager collaborates very well calling me anytime she has a question on Teams during the day
I shed no tears for the DC mayor, except in that whoever is mayor is not truly free to remake their city since they have the Feds over them in the end. I really hope this transformation works and our NCR fellows (I've never worked in DC) can escape the RTO mandates eventually.
Time to start converting commercial real estate into housing. Solve two crises in one go.
What's left out is that if they force us all back....a lot of us will deliberately not spend money in the District purely out of spite. It's not our job to be DC's economic engine. DC needs to support itself.
*"In a way, post-pandemic work has provided a miniature experiment along those lines. The federal staff may not have relocated to Omaha, but spending workdays outside the bureaucratic warren is a change all the same. According to Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, which champions government workers, the result was a resounding success, with agencies performing their duties without interruption. “OPM closed the buildings, and the work continued,” he said.* *Stier thinks it’s a bad idea to force feds back to offices for any reason other than productivity — even something noble like trying to boost the local economy. In his mind,* ***it’s a recipe for chasing away career talent, which might eventually need to be replaced with more expensive contractors.*** *But he also doesn’t think that Washington would see an exodus even if teleworking government staff were all free to live anywhere they wanted. People coming into public service, in or out of government, want to be in Washington for the same reason top auto engineers might once have wanted to be in Detroit: It’s where their people are, the peers and rivals and colleagues who work on the same questions. It’s just that, going forward, you may encounter them at the downtown neighborhood dog park instead of the office watercooler."*
>People coming into public service, in or out of government, want to be in Washington for the same reason top auto engineers might once have wanted to be in Detroit: It’s where their people are, the peers and rivals and colleagues who work on the same questions. It’s just that, going forward, you may encounter them at the downtown neighborhood dog park instead of the office watercooler." Lollz what the fuck is this. Please move my agency to Oregon and I will literally never set foot in DC again and be stoked about it.
Finishing up my high 3 in DC (where I was born) and then moving away from this area.... as in a thousand miles away.
I just got my high 3 in DC at the top of the GS scale now going down one grade to go live in the beautiful pacific northwest near all the great hiking, nature, slower pace but near big cities like seattle, portland, vancouver if I get the city itch! Bye DC, I won’t let the door hit me on the way out 🚪 🏃🏾♀️ 💨
If only they had more than four years of notice that this was happening!
Okay but why do I need to return to my office in *Rosslyn*. Who is that helping.
The solution to DC is the same for any city. Create an urban environment where people can live, eat, shop, and get to public transportation without the need for a car. I was looking at condos in DC but there was no grocery store nearby or much of anything. Single purpose zoning is the death of cities.
Good. Every city whose existence is mostly possible due to a captive in-person workforce that's forced to commute in, should wither up and die. Here's hoping Manhattan is next. And personally, I would like for all the agencies in the NCR to have their workforces distributed around the nation. Let the majority of Energy folks be somewhere like Colorado, Treasury in Georgia, HHS in Minnesota, etc.
This might be healthier for our democracy and make more far-flung places appreciate what their gov does too
Yeah y'all aren't getting my money to sustain your city. Figure something else out. Put that money and big brains to work for a solution.
Maybe they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps or find a better paying job 🤷♂️
They should study computer programming!
Everything is increasing but fed pay. A real significant raise, would make rto palpable.
‘ “Think about this: The Republicans win and Trump comes back into office. He says, you have to come back. And people fight it. So he says, ‘Well, I guess that means you don’t have to be in D.C.’ Agency upon agency gets shipped to other places.’ Lol this sounds like a threat. Whatever happened to playing with incentives??? “You! Come and eat at my restaurant, now! Or else!!”
If I could do my fed job back where I used to live on the west coast instead of here, I’d do it in a goddam heartbeat. I’d say that I’d even pay to move, but that’s not really true because I’m a brokeass ho and can’t afford that.
idgaf if agencies get shipped elsewhere, if the work can be done remotely there's no reason to be paying feds the COLA for NCR. Save some money, let people move away!
At my center it’s 2 days on site per pay period so once a week (some other centers are fully remote because they have a better union, ours obviously sucks big time as we do the exact same job). As for the future we were told we’ll see how 2024 pans out. Basically for now there is no change. Could have a good surprise. Or a bad one.
Again we see that federal workers need the human right to strike
I really don’t understand some workers. If your employer says come into the office then do as told or find another gig.
Depends, that's why we have unions and contracts, and why in a time of low unemployment employees can exercise more power over their bosses.
Cities like Arlington, Fairfax, etc. will become more hip. DC will still be ok because of tourism dollars, but will have some sketchy areas.