Government is competing with FAANG for employees. There isn’t a good reason to exclude them from comparison. Even so, working for a startup without equity is often more lucrative than working for the federal government. The situation is even worse at the state and local level where you also have to fear your pension being raided via government bankruptcy.
I’m talking about actual government employees, not contractors. The actual government employees who manage those contracts are not paid well. You can see the results of this too in things like the F35 program where the government had no idea what it wanted and repeatedly redirected and added crazy requirements (to be fair, Lockheed is also incompetent).
You’re right though, painting even a majority of public employees as incompetent isn’t fair.
Government employees who manage contracts can be paid very well, depending on their grade. A GS-14 makes over $120k base, with pension, significant healthcare contribution, etc. A GS-15 is $152k base. I get that that may not seem like much, but it is 2-2.5x the median household income in the US.
Aside from that, a contract manager/Contract Officer is typically not an engineer and if you're lucky, may be someone that can fill more of a product owner role. It's not really comparable in those terms.
F35 really isn't a great example of poor engineering talent, that is an example of a crap acquisition strategy in general and was pretty much destined to be problematic from the start due to politics, conflicting/competing requirements, etc. You could have hired the best engineers in the world and they would have likely ended with the same results, because the majority of the issues with the F35 had little to do with engineering.
I’m talking about actual government employees, not contractors. The actual government employees who manage those contracts are not paid well. You can see the results of this too in things like the F35 program where the government had no idea what it wanted and repeatedly redirected and added crazy requirements (to be fair, Lockheed is also incompetent).
You’re right though, painting even a majority of public employees as incompetent isn’t fair.