We used to help guys get contracting jobs in the 100k-120k range in D.C. (300k for afghanistan).

Now the same contracts are hiring people on at 40-50k, and people are taking the jobs because they already gave up their government spot. The contracting world has pretty much turned inside out because of the upheavals over recent years. Most of the contractors I know are aiming for government jobs now.

The way government contracting is set-up, it was guaranteed from the beginning to end up this way.

There are so many re-competes and re-bids for contracts that are supposed to be multi-year, that pretty much every fucking year a new company comes in and under-bids a contract. The company isn't going to take the hit, so the employees basically get to re-apply for the same position at a lower salary.

The government claims that this system was developed to ensure fairness to the companies bidding on jobs, but it seems an awful lot like the real purpose was to drive employee wages down. Hopefully it doesn't start to drive down private sector wages in the DC area.

That sounds like a fucked company.

FYI, this doesn't happen at Raytheon SI. They're mainly in Florida, Maryland, Virginia, and Texas. They're hiring. Desired skills relate to reverse engineering, disassembly, emulators, JIT, hypervisors, compilers, binary static analysis, and embedded systems. It's a place with extreme flex time, T-shirts and jeans (or shorts even), normally 40-hour weeks with the option for paid overtime if you want it, your choice of desktop OS, real walls (most locations), and lots of mischievous bright nerds with maker attitude.

Its not just a fucked company, its most of the large defense contractors. The building I worked in had people from most of the largest companies. I don't think we had anyone from Raytheon, but most of the other big names were present.

A lot of the blame lies with the leadership of the organizations that are hiring the contractors. At some places, a government agency will stick with the same company as long as things are going well, at other places, they automatically accept the lowest bid every single year, even though doing it sabotages their own projects and puts people out of work.

Sounds like your company (or at least your part of Raytheon) is willing to fight for its employees. I made the move to private sector a little over a year ago after my entire team was laid-off. Things are so much better now that its hard for me to consider ever working for the government again, but if things change I'll probably look into Raytheon SI first.

While my corner of Raytheon was not nearly as nice as milspec's is, it was not the situation you describe either. Layoffs from my business unit were rare, though a former business unit had some serious problems after a number of contract losses and overruns. I got raises every year, though about half of them were shit.

We only got involved in big contracts, though. New business that wasn't measured in at least tens of millions was ignored, unless it was an add-on to an existing contract.

This is spot on. Everyone thinks contractors make more, this is no longer the case. A lot of contractors I know personally are going fed because of the stability and job security.