Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for.
And any individual being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value.

The issue here is that private market salaries are set in an environment where there are countless different employers offering salaries independently and in pursuit of their own self interest.

If a big chunk of the non-profit industry is all being funded by the US government, there isn’t actually a functioning free market.

It is also clear that USAID wasn’t doing proper due diligence if it was awarding grants to “non profits” that were making their leadership rich while supposedly administering charity.

How could anyone pay the salaries shown in the documents posted earlier while claiming they are doing some humanitarian mission?

There are only 100 people in the company… how can you need 7 people at an average annual compensation of over $400k/year to run a 100 person nonprofit with a small budget?

At a minimum there should be rules put in place that any nonprofit receiving a grant from the US government pay no more than is allowed by the government pay scale.

This nonprofit was paying its CEO two thirds of a million dollars a year to run a 100 person entity with a $70million budget… meanwhile actual USAID senior leadership weren’t making much more than a third of that to run vastly larger entities.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for.
And any individual being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A nonprofit? Wasn't USAID an agency? What am I missing?

OP are you ok? USAID isn't a nonprofit.

What was she doing for $272K a year that someone else couldn't do for say $120K or even $100K?

I do belive there are a ton of people being way overpaid in large cities like DC.

Do you live in DC? Do you have any idea the COL here? 100k would be criminal exploitation for an educated, experienced employee.

Based on what? Credentialism alone shouldn’t guarantee you a high paying job. What do you DO that commands a high salary? If you are fungible or easily replaceable for cheaper, tough luck.

$100k would get you someone with four years of experience here. You seem completely unaware of the job market here.

You are still focused on credentialism and rubrics rather than the value of what she actually DOES. You've been lost in the sauce for too long, you can't even see it. The whole premise of the thread is asking whether her skillset and was she DOES was actually worth it. Nobody is entitled to a high salary just because they went to some nice-sounding school and racked up years of service doing not much of anything.

No, I’m actually not “lost in the sauce,” I’m just aware that you can’t find someone to do senior-level nonprofit work in DC for $100k, which is laughable. Senior roles in nonprofits have significant responsibilities that take time and experience to be able to do. You can’t find someone that can do that for $100k. It’s not hypothetical. I know nonprofits here. No one is getting someone with the relevant skills and experience to manage large budgets and teams for $100k.

Again, you clearly don’t live here so not sure why you are commenting on what the job market is like.

You are lost in the sauce and still talking about an "job market" based on credentialism, cronyism and gatekeeping within a circumscribed, non-transferrable bubble. I know this world well and a lot of the senior people are absolutely useless, but they hid out in government, NGOs or contractors. It was turtles all the way down; the work isn't hard. The issue now is the rug has been pulled out from under that. What you are calling "skill" is really only germane to a niche that has been decimated and not really transferrable. It would appear that "program management" "strategic planning" and "budgeting" aren't as valuable as those of you lost in the sauce thought they were.

Imagine thinking "budgeting" was an irrelevant job skill. Have you ever run anything larger than a lemonade stand?

The companies (NGOs) collapsed and melted away. That doesn't mean the jobs these people were doing were fake or unskilled. After the 2008 crisis nobody declared "banking" a niche skill without value, even though bankers couldn't get jobs. When a tech company collapses and a lot of programmers are out of work all at once, you don't say they were overpaid before because they can't find jobs now.

PP has a problem with "government, NGOs, and contractors" which is a huge swath of the economy to declare fake. Tells us PP, which jobs qualify as "real" jobs - just the one you do?

You still don't get it. The reason it's in quotes is because they are not actually that skilled in it. Many places are notoriously, horribly mismanaged and that is being exposed. Not exactly masters of resource management, innovation and lean service delivery models here.

How do you know this?

Citing tech workers and bankers is also dumb. People assume those jobs knowing layoffs are part of the game and the jig could be up at any given moment. No one is writing reams of think pieces profiling Jared the Managing Director from Morgan Stanley or Chad the Principal Engineer from Meta and lamenting the difficulties of his job hunt and begging for sympathy. Plus, a lot of software engineers out of a job simply freelance or coast until they find a job of their liking because...their skills are in demand.

DP but no, it’s actually not dumb. If your argument is that an inability to find other work when your industry gets wrecked means you don’t have valuable skills, then that applies to other industries where it has happened too. I’m old enough to remember what the job market was like after 2008 for people in finance and it was terrible. It didn’t mean they were suddenly all useless-skilled deadweight. Same thing happened with more tech more recently, and with law in the early 2010s as a knock-on effect of the financial crisis.

But Musk fanboys are too young or too brainwashed to know any of those things.

+1. No one is inherently safe from this.

The pushback against well-paid former USAID or USAID-adjacent people isn't because they didn't spend a decade in grad school and training. Neither did software developers. And it's not because they're taxpayer-funded. Doctors are not just highly-subsidized, their wages are artificially high because of the AMA labor cartel. It's because you dislike their politics and you assume you're smarter and more competent than them based on about the same level of information as the people who killed USAID had.

Disagree with the bolded. These people actually *know* these non-profit folks are smarter and more competent which is a big part of the reason why they hate them.

It was my impression when I conducted evaluations for USAID that the agency's way of working was highly niche. People would need to become experts in USAID, not simply development, because that seemed secondary in many ways. I don't think USAID staff or contractors/consultants are more competent or more intelligent compared to say, those who worked in diplomacy or cooperation, though I do believe many considered themselves more evolved. I think the work mattered, but it was undermined by the US-based implementers, the politics, and the misplaced prestige of offering social services and packaging it as foreign assistance.

You just diplomatically called that poster a self-important clown.

“That poster” didn’t work for USAID and the people hating on them aren’t diplomats - they’re more likely to be used car salesmen or Walmart cashiers.

If you were a bit smarter maybe you would have been able to follow along without the handholding, dear.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for.
And any individual being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A nonprofit? Wasn't USAID an agency? What am I missing?

OP are you ok? USAID isn't a nonprofit.

What was she doing for $272K a year that someone else couldn't do for say $120K or even $100K?

I do belive there are a ton of people being way overpaid in large cities like DC.

Do you live in DC? Do you have any idea the COL here? 100k would be criminal exploitation for an educated, experienced employee.

Based on what? Credentialism alone shouldn’t guarantee you a high paying job. What do you DO that commands a high salary? If you are fungible or easily replaceable for cheaper, tough luck.

$100k would get you someone with four years of experience here. You seem completely unaware of the job market here.

You are still focused on credentialism and rubrics rather than the value of what she actually DOES. You've been lost in the sauce for too long, you can't even see it. The whole premise of the thread is asking whether her skillset and was she DOES was actually worth it. Nobody is entitled to a high salary just because they went to some nice-sounding school and racked up years of service doing not much of anything.

No, I’m actually not “lost in the sauce,” I’m just aware that you can’t find someone to do senior-level nonprofit work in DC for $100k, which is laughable. Senior roles in nonprofits have significant responsibilities that take time and experience to be able to do. You can’t find someone that can do that for $100k. It’s not hypothetical. I know nonprofits here. No one is getting someone with the relevant skills and experience to manage large budgets and teams for $100k.

Again, you clearly don’t live here so not sure why you are commenting on what the job market is like.

You are lost in the sauce and still talking about an "job market" based on credentialism, cronyism and gatekeeping within a circumscribed, non-transferrable bubble. I know this world well and a lot of the senior people are absolutely useless, but they hid out in government, NGOs or contractors. It was turtles all the way down; the work isn't hard. The issue now is the rug has been pulled out from under that. What you are calling "skill" is really only germane to a niche that has been decimated and not really transferrable. It would appear that "program management" "strategic planning" and "budgeting" aren't as valuable as those of you lost in the sauce thought they were.

Imagine thinking "budgeting" was an irrelevant job skill. Have you ever run anything larger than a lemonade stand?

The companies (NGOs) collapsed and melted away. That doesn't mean the jobs these people were doing were fake or unskilled. After the 2008 crisis nobody declared "banking" a niche skill without value, even though bankers couldn't get jobs. When a tech company collapses and a lot of programmers are out of work all at once, you don't say they were overpaid before because they can't find jobs now.

PP has a problem with "government, NGOs, and contractors" which is a huge swath of the economy to declare fake. Tells us PP, which jobs qualify as "real" jobs - just the one you do?

You still don't get it. The reason it's in quotes is because they are not actually that skilled in it. Many places are notoriously, horribly mismanaged and that is being exposed. Not exactly masters of resource management, innovation and lean service delivery models here.

How do you know this?

Citing tech workers and bankers is also dumb. People assume those jobs knowing layoffs are part of the game and the jig could be up at any given moment. No one is writing reams of think pieces profiling Jared the Managing Director from Morgan Stanley or Chad the Principal Engineer from Meta and lamenting the difficulties of his job hunt and begging for sympathy. Plus, a lot of software engineers out of a job simply freelance or coast until they find a job of their liking because...their skills are in demand.

DP but no, it’s actually not dumb. If your argument is that an inability to find other work when your industry gets wrecked means you don’t have valuable skills, then that applies to other industries where it has happened too. I’m old enough to remember what the job market was like after 2008 for people in finance and it was terrible. It didn’t mean they were suddenly all useless-skilled deadweight. Same thing happened with more tech more recently, and with law in the early 2010s as a knock-on effect of the financial crisis.

But Musk fanboys are too young or too brainwashed to know any of those things.

+1. No one is inherently safe from this.

The pushback against well-paid former USAID or USAID-adjacent people isn't because they didn't spend a decade in grad school and training. Neither did software developers. And it's not because they're taxpayer-funded. Doctors are not just highly-subsidized, their wages are artificially high because of the AMA labor cartel. It's because you dislike their politics and you assume you're smarter and more competent than them based on about the same level of information as the people who killed USAID had.

Disagree with the bolded. These people actually *know* these non-profit folks are smarter and more competent which is a big part of the reason why they hate them.

It was my impression when I conducted evaluations for USAID that the agency's way of working was highly niche. People would need to become experts in USAID, not simply development, because that seemed secondary in many ways. I don't think USAID staff or contractors/consultants are more competent or more intelligent compared to say, those who worked in diplomacy or cooperation, though I do believe many considered themselves more evolved. I think the work mattered, but it was undermined by the US-based implementers, the politics, and the misplaced prestige of offering social services and packaging it as foreign assistance.

You just diplomatically called that poster a self-important clown.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for.
And any individual being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value.

Yet we constantly hear on DCUM that PE bros and CEOs are overpaid and teachers and social workers are underpaid.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know some people aren't going to like hearing this but USAID wasn't just feeding poor kids in Africa. That was only a tiny percentage of USAID work and actually still goes on under State.

Most of USAID was pet projects and donor causes f9r liberals and an entire NGO industry grew up around it, often started by former USAIDers. And when something like that happens, you find a lot of cronyism. It's sort of comparable to big city government machines finding plum jobs and sinecures for their supporters. And it went unchecked and unregulated, so admin salaries at the NGOs exploded. Some founders became quite rich acting as contractors. And while some good projects happened, a lot of it was dubious and just another way to slosh billions around consultants and contractors with people feeding from the trough both in DC and on the ground overseas and the % that actually ended up being used for genuinely good outcomes is much smaller than most people realize. And USAID was definitely used to indirectly send money undercover to entities overseas.

USAID did become a liberal sinecure entity, using taxpayer dollars to effectively reward liberal supporters and connections. It's why the Trump administration moved so fast to shut it down. And it's also why no one is missing USAID. Only maybe 1% genuinely ended up helping villagers in developing countries.

I'm sorry for the people in the article but the whole industry was rampant with cronyism and out of touch.

If you are going to talk smack. Bring receipts:

The above nonprofit she worked for was CNFA. She wasn’t anywhere near the highest paid.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521447902/202511399349301581/full

CNFA (Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture) demonstrates strong financial efficiency, directing approximately 82% of its $70M budget toward program services and direct aid. With an overhead ratio of roughly 18% (14.4% management and 3.2% fundraising), the organization maintains a healthy balance between mission delivery and administrative stability. CNFA holds a Gold or Platinum Seal of Transparency on Candid and a three-star rating from Charity Navigator, making it a highly transparent and efficient choice for donors focused on global food security.

The money is spent on boots-on-the-ground technical training, equipment grants for small businesses, and infrastructure (like warehouses and irrigation) across approximately 16 countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

The USAID budget is public, please list how it was spent on “libs” pet projects.

These financials show a “non-profit” where the compensation packages for the president ($675k) and next 6 highest paid employees total $2.85 million/year. (Avg $407k)

This is for a “non-profit” with only 100 employees. These aren’t lawyers, or doctors… these are the “executives” of a 100 person “non-profit.”

With $70M budget. And programs around the globe.

If you think a $70million budget and “programs” in several countries is impressive you haven’t done much.

That is a comically tiny budget/program to be managed by a team of highly paid executives with fancy titles.

+1. Paying the president $675k for overseeing a $70 million budget is insane.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know some people aren't going to like hearing this but USAID wasn't just feeding poor kids in Africa. That was only a tiny percentage of USAID work and actually still goes on under State.

Most of USAID was pet projects and donor causes f9r liberals and an entire NGO industry grew up around it, often started by former USAIDers. And when something like that happens, you find a lot of cronyism. It's sort of comparable to big city government machines finding plum jobs and sinecures for their supporters. And it went unchecked and unregulated, so admin salaries at the NGOs exploded. Some founders became quite rich acting as contractors. And while some good projects happened, a lot of it was dubious and just another way to slosh billions around consultants and contractors with people feeding from the trough both in DC and on the ground overseas and the % that actually ended up being used for genuinely good outcomes is much smaller than most people realize. And USAID was definitely used to indirectly send money undercover to entities overseas.

USAID did become a liberal sinecure entity, using taxpayer dollars to effectively reward liberal supporters and connections. It's why the Trump administration moved so fast to shut it down. And it's also why no one is missing USAID. Only maybe 1% genuinely ended up helping villagers in developing countries.

I'm sorry for the people in the article but the whole industry was rampant with cronyism and out of touch.

If you are going to talk smack. Bring receipts:

The above nonprofit she worked for was CNFA. She wasn’t anywhere near the highest paid.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521447902/202511399349301581/full

CNFA (Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture) demonstrates strong financial efficiency, directing approximately 82% of its $70M budget toward program services and direct aid. With an overhead ratio of roughly 18% (14.4% management and 3.2% fundraising), the organization maintains a healthy balance between mission delivery and administrative stability. CNFA holds a Gold or Platinum Seal of Transparency on Candid and a three-star rating from Charity Navigator, making it a highly transparent and efficient choice for donors focused on global food security.

The money is spent on boots-on-the-ground technical training, equipment grants for small businesses, and infrastructure (like warehouses and irrigation) across approximately 16 countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

The USAID budget is public, please list how it was spent on “libs” pet projects.

These financials show a “non-profit” where the compensation packages for the president ($675k) and next 6 highest paid employees total $2.85 million/year. (Avg $407k)

This is for a “non-profit” with only 100 employees. These aren’t lawyers, or doctors… these are the “executives” of a 100 person “non-profit.”

With $70M budget. And programs around the globe.

If you think a $70million budget and “programs” in several countries is impressive you haven’t done much.

That is a comically tiny budget/program to be managed by a team of highly paid executives with fancy titles.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Get back to us when your whole industry goes away, OP.

This. The job market in this geographic area is damaged by DOGE and the job market in her specific field was destroyed. That doesn't mean she was overpaid for the work she did before that happened. It means the world changed.

It was a fake job market, a big scam to funnel money to an industry that shouldn't exist except to fund itself.

Anyone who doesn’t see the benefit of USAID is naive or stupid.

Sure, there was some waste built in. Some people were overpaid (though I argue everyone in finance or law is overpaid and they make people’s lives worse not better), some programs weren’t cost effective, but there was real, measurable, meaningful net gain. Even if you don’t think that fighting HIV, treating TB in millions, educating girls, empowering women to not get pregnant until they want to, building roads, etc is good in and of itself (which, if you aren’t a psychopath, it is) AT LEAST you must acknowledge that those programs curb Islamic extremism, slow climate change, and actually supply the American government with an incredible amount of sway over the countries whose programs we were in.

Y’all some idiotic ayn rand stans in here or something.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A nonprofit? Wasn't USAID an agency? What am I missing?

OP are you ok? USAID isn't a nonprofit.

What was she doing for $272K a year that someone else couldn't do for say $120K or even $100K?

I do belive there are a ton of people being way overpaid in large cities like DC.

Do you live in DC? Do you have any idea the COL here? 100k would be criminal exploitation for an educated, experienced employee.

Based on what? Credentialism alone shouldn’t guarantee you a high paying job. What do you DO that commands a high salary? If you are fungible or easily replaceable for cheaper, tough luck.

$100k would get you someone with four years of experience here. You seem completely unaware of the job market here.

You are still focused on credentialism and rubrics rather than the value of what she actually DOES. You've been lost in the sauce for too long, you can't even see it. The whole premise of the thread is asking whether her skillset and was she DOES was actually worth it. Nobody is entitled to a high salary just because they went to some nice-sounding school and racked up years of service doing not much of anything.

No, I’m actually not “lost in the sauce,” I’m just aware that you can’t find someone to do senior-level nonprofit work in DC for $100k, which is laughable. Senior roles in nonprofits have significant responsibilities that take time and experience to be able to do. You can’t find someone that can do that for $100k. It’s not hypothetical. I know nonprofits here. No one is getting someone with the relevant skills and experience to manage large budgets and teams for $100k.

Again, you clearly don’t live here so not sure why you are commenting on what the job market is like.

You are lost in the sauce and still talking about an "job market" based on credentialism, cronyism and gatekeeping within a circumscribed, non-transferrable bubble. I know this world well and a lot of the senior people are absolutely useless, but they hid out in government, NGOs or contractors. It was turtles all the way down; the work isn't hard. The issue now is the rug has been pulled out from under that. What you are calling "skill" is really only germane to a niche that has been decimated and not really transferrable. It would appear that "program management" "strategic planning" and "budgeting" aren't as valuable as those of you lost in the sauce thought they were.

Imagine thinking "budgeting" was an irrelevant job skill. Have you ever run anything larger than a lemonade stand?

The companies (NGOs) collapsed and melted away. That doesn't mean the jobs these people were doing were fake or unskilled. After the 2008 crisis nobody declared "banking" a niche skill without value, even though bankers couldn't get jobs. When a tech company collapses and a lot of programmers are out of work all at once, you don't say they were overpaid before because they can't find jobs now.

PP has a problem with "government, NGOs, and contractors" which is a huge swath of the economy to declare fake. Tells us PP, which jobs qualify as "real" jobs - just the one you do?

You still don't get it. The reason it's in quotes is because they are not actually that skilled in it. Many places are notoriously, horribly mismanaged and that is being exposed. Not exactly masters of resource management, innovation and lean service delivery models here.

How do you know this?

Citing tech workers and bankers is also dumb. People assume those jobs knowing layoffs are part of the game and the jig could be up at any given moment. No one is writing reams of think pieces profiling Jared the Managing Director from Morgan Stanley or Chad the Principal Engineer from Meta and lamenting the difficulties of his job hunt and begging for sympathy. Plus, a lot of software engineers out of a job simply freelance or coast until they find a job of their liking because...their skills are in demand.

DP but no, it’s actually not dumb. If your argument is that an inability to find other work when your industry gets wrecked means you don’t have valuable skills, then that applies to other industries where it has happened too. I’m old enough to remember what the job market was like after 2008 for people in finance and it was terrible. It didn’t mean they were suddenly all useless-skilled deadweight. Same thing happened with more tech more recently, and with law in the early 2010s as a knock-on effect of the financial crisis.

But Musk fanboys are too young or too brainwashed to know any of those things.

+1. No one is inherently safe from this.

The pushback against well-paid former USAID or USAID-adjacent people isn't because they didn't spend a decade in grad school and training. Neither did software developers. And it's not because they're taxpayer-funded. Doctors are not just highly-subsidized, their wages are artificially high because of the AMA labor cartel. It's because you dislike their politics and you assume you're smarter and more competent than them based on about the same level of information as the people who killed USAID had.

Disagree with the bolded. These people actually *know* these non-profit folks are smarter and more competent which is a big part of the reason why they hate them.

It was my impression when I conducted evaluations for USAID that the agency's way of working was highly niche. People would need to become experts in USAID, not simply development, because that seemed secondary in many ways. I don't think USAID staff or contractors/consultants are more competent or more intelligent compared to say, those who worked in diplomacy or cooperation, though I do believe many considered themselves more evolved. I think the work mattered, but it was undermined by the US-based implementers, the politics, and the misplaced prestige of offering social services and packaging it as foreign assistance.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for.
And any individual being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value.

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Anonymous wrote:My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. I'm sure that one will go over real well.

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Anonymous wrote:A nonprofit? Wasn't USAID an agency? What am I missing?

OP are you ok? USAID isn't a nonprofit.

What was she doing for $272K a year that someone else couldn't do for say $120K or even $100K?

I do belive there are a ton of people being way overpaid in large cities like DC.

Do you live in DC? Do you have any idea the COL here? 100k would be criminal exploitation for an educated, experienced employee.

Based on what? Credentialism alone shouldn’t guarantee you a high paying job. What do you DO that commands a high salary? If you are fungible or easily replaceable for cheaper, tough luck.

$100k would get you someone with four years of experience here. You seem completely unaware of the job market here.

You are still focused on credentialism and rubrics rather than the value of what she actually DOES. You've been lost in the sauce for too long, you can't even see it. The whole premise of the thread is asking whether her skillset and was she DOES was actually worth it. Nobody is entitled to a high salary just because they went to some nice-sounding school and racked up years of service doing not much of anything.

No, I’m actually not “lost in the sauce,” I’m just aware that you can’t find someone to do senior-level nonprofit work in DC for $100k, which is laughable. Senior roles in nonprofits have significant responsibilities that take time and experience to be able to do. You can’t find someone that can do that for $100k. It’s not hypothetical. I know nonprofits here. No one is getting someone with the relevant skills and experience to manage large budgets and teams for $100k.

Again, you clearly don’t live here so not sure why you are commenting on what the job market is like.

You are lost in the sauce and still talking about an "job market" based on credentialism, cronyism and gatekeeping within a circumscribed, non-transferrable bubble. I know this world well and a lot of the senior people are absolutely useless, but they hid out in government, NGOs or contractors. It was turtles all the way down; the work isn't hard. The issue now is the rug has been pulled out from under that. What you are calling "skill" is really only germane to a niche that has been decimated and not really transferrable. It would appear that "program management" "strategic planning" and "budgeting" aren't as valuable as those of you lost in the sauce thought they were.

Imagine thinking "budgeting" was an irrelevant job skill. Have you ever run anything larger than a lemonade stand?

The companies (NGOs) collapsed and melted away. That doesn't mean the jobs these people were doing were fake or unskilled. After the 2008 crisis nobody declared "banking" a niche skill without value, even though bankers couldn't get jobs. When a tech company collapses and a lot of programmers are out of work all at once, you don't say they were overpaid before because they can't find jobs now.

PP has a problem with "government, NGOs, and contractors" which is a huge swath of the economy to declare fake. Tells us PP, which jobs qualify as "real" jobs - just the one you do?

You still don't get it. The reason it's in quotes is because they are not actually that skilled in it. Many places are notoriously, horribly mismanaged and that is being exposed. Not exactly masters of resource management, innovation and lean service delivery models here.

How do you know this?

Citing tech workers and bankers is also dumb. People assume those jobs knowing layoffs are part of the game and the jig could be up at any given moment. No one is writing reams of think pieces profiling Jared the Managing Director from Morgan Stanley or Chad the Principal Engineer from Meta and lamenting the difficulties of his job hunt and begging for sympathy. Plus, a lot of software engineers out of a job simply freelance or coast until they find a job of their liking because...their skills are in demand.

DP but no, it’s actually not dumb. If your argument is that an inability to find other work when your industry gets wrecked means you don’t have valuable skills, then that applies to other industries where it has happened too. I’m old enough to remember what the job market was like after 2008 for people in finance and it was terrible. It didn’t mean they were suddenly all useless-skilled deadweight. Same thing happened with more tech more recently, and with law in the early 2010s as a knock-on effect of the financial crisis.

But Musk fanboys are too young or too brainwashed to know any of those things.

+1. No one is inherently safe from this.

The pushback against well-paid former USAID or USAID-adjacent people isn't because they didn't spend a decade in grad school and training. Neither did software developers. And it's not because they're taxpayer-funded. Doctors are not just highly-subsidized, their wages are artificially high because of the AMA labor cartel. It's because you dislike their politics and you assume you're smarter and more competent than them based on about the same level of information as the people who killed USAID had.

Disagree with the bolded. These people actually *know* these non-profit folks are smarter and more competent which is a big part of the reason why they hate them.