What good is knowing their salary if you don't know what their skills and experience are? How can you say they would make more in the private sector? You're just trading one set of assertions for another and neither of you have data to back up your claims.
This report from the CBO is more balanced and accounts for the variables you mentioned (and more). [0]
"Compared with private-sector workers, federal workers tend to be older, more educated, and more concentrated in professional occupations. To account for those differences, the Congressional Budget Office limited its comparisons to employees with a set of similar observable characteristics—education, occupation, years of work experience, geographic ___location, size of employer, veteran status, and certain demographic characteristics (sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, immigration status, and citizenship)—in this report"
I mean 18F was essentially "hey you earn ~infinite money selling ads to people. Whenever you grow bored come here, you'll have the same kind of colleagues but get to work making this country work better". So yeah.. they recruited from Silicon Valley and they didn't pull the low achievers
