I know a number of Fed workers, and it would be wrong to whale on them. It takes a number of years to reach 150+K. Like 20 years. Their starting salaries are a lot lower than their private counterparts of comparable requirements. A private engineer/software writer will make more money over ten years than a fed engineer/engineer, except the fed worker has a stable slowly increasing salary while the private worker goes thru ups and downs as his company is brought out, or job is outsourced and cannot maintain a steady increasing salary as interruptions occur in his/her employment even when the economy is booming because private labor is competing with global labor. Once you hit 20 years in private industry, skill obsolencence and age discrimination becomes a factor that prevents private workers to demand for higher salaries unless he happens to have skills/experience that is in very high demand or he made it into executive management. An average fed engineer will make more than his private counterpart at the 20 to 25 year mark and definitely more at the 35 to 40 year mark. That is already shown in professional journals. Fed workers get less at the beginning but will build up in the end, while the private worker make more in the beginning and does have opportunities to make it big (ie exec management or start a very successful tech company and sell it off), otherwise will make less in the later years in the career. It is a trade off.
The disparity between retirees in the public and private sectors is going to cause tremendous problems in the future as the availability of private pensions decreases. These same private workers who are funding the Gov't workers who are set for life are eventually going to become very upset.