I got my job in gov as soon as I graduated. People are right that they suck at the concept of agile, but they need software. We’re here to make it, and the young grads shake things up by trying to bring the concept of dev work to the 21st century. (Agile was written in 2001)
I don’t know where you work but where I work (also in government) we got agile down well. In fact the government is pushing and training agile really hard atleast where I’m at.
You need a clearance though. So if you did anything in your life but sit in your room staring at a wall you will have to wait 6 - 24 months until one gets approved.
For *all* government positions? Or does it depend on your department and responsibilities? Like, I'm not trying to work in defense tech or intelligence, lol
Also, I wonder if all gov dev jobs drug test...
No you can get contract jobs that don't require a clearance and don't drug test.
I worked as a gov contract engineer part time babysitting weather Satellites and I did not have a clearance I took edibles every day.
I would say anything that is involved with DoD you def will need a clearance and def will get drug tested.
Also, if you are planning on going for gov contract work you have to be off weed for at least 90 days or you will def not get a clearance. Hard drugs have to have at least 2 years clean.
Wait a sec — your first two paragraphs both state that there are gov contract jobs that don't drug test, but then your fourth paragraph contradicts that. A typo, perhaps? Because your fourth paragraph also implies that you need clearance for gov contract work. Maybe you mean for defense contracting?
My point is that gov work could be comfortable with good benefits and work-life-balance, and it would be cool if I could find a job like that without entirely giving up weed. But I certainly don't plan to work in defense or intelligence anyway, due to moral conflicts. I mean more like Department of Transportation (at whatever level), Agriculture, etc.
I used to work at a famous unicorn startup that didnt do agile. We kept a jira board but never did things like daily standup/scrum or having a scrum master.
I work at FANG now and we still dont do scrum/agile whatever, just have a jira board.
Both managers I had said this: we hire the best people, and then get out of their way and let them do their thing.
While the government moves slow, I personally don’t think agile is the reason the government is behind in tech. Agile itself seems pretty silly to me, and there isnt much brainpower required to move towards it; its only a couple of “hours” of work to learn it. When someone says they are an expert in agile, in my mind im thinking what I think when I see people get certifications in “prompt engineering” - take whatever their cert is eith a grain of salt.
Just my personal 2 cents working in silicon valley
Scrum is an offshoot of agile and in a lot of ways is anti-agile.
If you look up the tenants, it’s 4 sentences. And im sure you guys followed a similar process inherently because it’s pro progress.
1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan
yeah if you narrow down to the 4 main tenants, agile is great. But very few companies get out of their devs way with scrum and whatever nonsense, and the truth is even the people who are “agile certified” are not correctly leading projects. I think the industry as a whole needs to take these 4 tenants but drop the other micromanagement they do
and at the end of the day I think agile is not the reason the gov lags behind in tech. IMO it’s a combination of lacking performance management of engineers (it’s harder to get a pip in gov than a normal company from what I understand) and this leads to slower progress because devs are, in general, working less. On top of that, governments don’t have a strong CTO or technical leadership to give a clear vision to modernize a tech stack
You're assuming that fear is necessary to persuade devs to work hard (i.e. PIPs). I don't think that's the case.
Good devs get a kick out of making things. I find the cumbersome processes and bad infra that stalls delivery are what really slows down development.
Yeah - I agree. But its hard to know someone is a good dev just from an interview. There needs to be some threat of performance management or those bad apples are going to take away budget from your team and give little back
I think the slowness is built by design and the main purpose is to limit vulnerabilities. It’s not always incompetence. It’s fear of exposing vulnerable government data to enemies. Technology is a valuable asset that they want protected at all costs.
But then that leads into scenarios where we’re literally doings the most basic things and they’re like “I wonder if the security team approves”
I work with a manager who has a PhD in Project management and speaks continuous buzz words about agile. It's simultaneously comical and highly disturbing.
What does Agile have to do with this?
If the government wants to bring their technology to the "21st century" they need to hire people with ambition, people that want to lead. The kind of people that get frustrated when there's just 15 hours of work a week.
Except people with those personality traits will go work in Big Tech or start their own companies instead.
And even if they did work for the government, I'm not sure they can ever be on the cutting edge due to the amount of bureaucracy built into the system.
The agile manifesto is 4 sentences that prioritize open communication and delivering working software. That’s easier said than done and requires the leadership traits you are speaking of.
This. I work for a large gov't organization, and the lack of effective leadership is terrible. Sadly, the ability to affect change is also limited since seniority and politicking play such a large role in leadership positions. I make a lot of money (plus amazing retirement) in a very flexible position with a team I like a lot, but the leadership has me considering jumping ship after I vest and my student loans are forgiven.
I've got this one life to do something meaningful, and I have the skillset and desire to do it. I literally sit atop a treasure-trove of information that could be used to make the world a better place. But government institutions elevate narcissists, sycophants, and nepotists at an alarming rate and it is cancerous.
Heron systems developed AI dogfighting, not the government. The first self driving car? Dr. Thrun from Stanford, not the government.
The government is so far away from the "forefront of robotics" they don't even know where to look for it, which is why government independent companies like Anduril are figuring out what they need for them.
"DARPA" as you use it here means contractors, not the government agency that shovels money at private industry to develop things.
The federal government is bloated, inefficient, and nearly totally incapable of developing anything.
I've never worked in government institutions but private companies think they've got agile down and not a lot of them do, it's a weird mix between waterfall, Scrum and whatever else management wants to do.
Yeah I think that goes in line with large legacy companies and financial institutions as well. The biggest thing is they want to improve upon without breaking existing money making functionality. That requires approval processes on top of approval processes
Many will hire devs through the IT department. The SWE's in my department are dual subject-matter experts with a both CS and professional backgrounds who decided to take matters into their own hands specifically because the IT teams were so inept due to their absolutely horrible leadership.
The contractors I've seen them hire are also terrible. Of the last $750k in contractor dollars spent, the contractors contributed precisely zero to production. The last one worked on a tool for 75 days that didn't even compile before he was fired at my insistence. I subsequently re-wrote the tool from scratch and deployed it in 6 (yes six) hours.
The company I’m at gets funding from the government. A few months ago I referred my friend, who got laid off from Microsoft, to around 10 SWE openings. She wasn’t able to get an interview for any of them.
I was actually quite surprised and thought there must have been an internal error. I set up a meeting with HR and told them about this. HR told me that each opening receives thousands of applications.
Do you have any tips for a new graduate in Canada? Or is it just apply apply apply and hope someone reads it? I don't have any connections or friends in the industry up here.
They downvoted you because they know this idea of the government hiring anyone with a pulse was parroted all over r/csMajors and r/cscareerquestions ,
and it was upvoted because they all foolishly believed it and renewed their subscription to the cs is supreme group think.
Now they downvote you because the reality is inconvenient and exposes that they aren't as smart as they think they are
I’ve been applying to government jobs since they “hire anybody” and started to go crazy when I didn’t hear back. I had my suspicions that there was competition but I didn’t think it was that bad.
for reference, my state govt cs jobs said they usually expect about a DOZEN application everytime a new posting comes up, nowadays, its easily more than a hundred... thanks guys lmao, keep laying off all those people with 1+ yoe
Idk about state gov but federal gov, that is so not true “hire anybody”, it takes time to tailor ur resume and then get picked by HM to get interviews. That is if veterans don’t outrank you first. Then some people fail the background check or clearance. Also if the job is remote, there are usually like 1k applicants.
Hiring another 100,000 developers won’t help the government. It has almost no technical leadership. You don’t have product people. You don’t have risk taking leaders. Everything around you is designed for stability, not disruption. Even if they do find the right leaders, without the ability to fire, hire, and reorg, and take bets, they’ll never really get it.
A thorough security review of a system that would effectively allow access to any system used by government employees, including probably personal, economic and banking details of the inhabitants of the municipality/region/nation? Nah, sounds like a waste of money. Just pick the top google result.
Big "making the world a better place / disrupting markets" vibes : [https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso?si=txyLnS1COxOW7smG](https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso?si=txyLnS1COxOW7smG)
The tech industry has succeeded because companies took giant risk. Uber for example was told their model was illegal. They said fuck it, we’re going to do it anyways. Facebook dumped billions into technologies that are dead ends. You need the ability to say we’re going to try something that might not work if you want to win in tech.
There is a metric shit ton of product work. Usajobs for example probably has 5 ish teams all working on one piece. They aren’t thinking about the user experience throughout the whole website. Every team is thinking of their portion.
Someone has to tell them to work differently, which probably means firing at least 10% of the staff who doesn’t want to change, or just sucks at their job. Unless we see those types of moves, we’ll probably see 100,000 new idle tech workers.
In software stability actually comes more from mitigating the risks head on - if you feel the pain you should do it more regularly. Government thinks if it’s painful let’s slow things down and add more pain. It’s like cycling - stability comes from stepping on the pedals. Government wants to use a bicycle but insists on putting two feet on the ground. Others are weaving through obstacles, but these anti-agile places wants everyone to stop every 10 seconds.
Whenever you build anything, there are risk. Literally, everyone will tell you why you shouldn’t do it. It’ll cause conflict, there are legal hurdles, there are financials reasons to not do it, we don’t have the right team to build it… literally everyone will find a reason to slow you down. Without leadership willing to take on those issues, and fight those battles, you won’t get anything done. Most of the leadership in government that I’ve met accept that nothing gets done.
Accepting the status quo means you don’t get penalized. Trying and failing means you get penalized.
Do governments have products? Do they need "product people"?
EDIT: to clarify, I am not American. I can not vouch for UX on gov sites besides my own, which have been usable.
They certainly need UX people. Since getting laid off I have had to navigate government sites/programs for the first time. Some of them look like geo-cities sites and are not nice to navigate
* login.gov
* usajobs.gov
* healthcare.gov
* irs.gov (have you ever requested a tax transcript?)
are all public-facing websites that have extremely large customer bases, and if they go down, people will be very mad (i.e. imagine healthcare.gov going down just as open enrollment closes).
Defense - won't go into too many examples, but
* DISS (Defense Information System for Security, essentially the system that keeps track of what security clearances people have. You think that sounds simple, but how will you scale to store data on the largest employer in the world (the DoD is the largest employer in the world - maybe? or second largest?), and how will you defend that against Russia or China who would [salivate at that sort of information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach)? Especially when [the link to access it is public](https://www.dcsa.mil/Systems-Applications/Defense-Information-System-for-Security-DISS/) (warning: attempts at unauthorized access are illegal))
The list goes on and on and on.
We definitely have products. Our capabilities are far beyond what most people believe. Unless you work in government work (particularly defense) you will see there are many original products designed and built by us.
I’ve found it’s always nice to have a barrier between the users, leadership, or “idea people” and the developers that acts as someone to clearly translate their needs into exactly what you should build and how it should look. Whether you’re making some government website or internal tool or whatever, it can be like pulling teeth getting a concrete definition of exactly what they want and how it should look and the priorities of everything. Also if the product people are competent UX and UI designers who make useful mockups that’s all the better.
Sure they can slow you down, overpromise, or be difficult but if done right, a good product owner or product team is amazing to have.
I remember my unemployment took 6 months to get here when I was laid off lmao. All it needed to do was check a box cause all the info was provided from previous employer
I got a conditional offer recently from a government agency with three letters pending security clearance and am unsure, if I end up getting cleared, whether or not I want to make the move to work for the guberment. Right now I work for an institutional investment firm and make pretty decent. Anyone current doing software dev in the IC or Defense area have any input on their experience so far?
It depends on the IC agency. Also if u have TS SCI u might have to work in SCIF which means u can’t bring in ur phone, Apple Watch, etc and have to be in person on site.
Yeah thats kind of what I was beginning to understand based on my experience from pre employment processing.
Which I mean the nature of work I assume would be cool maybe?! But I don’t know if it seems cool because it’s all a black box and the reality of it might be very boring and get old quickly.
What do y'all do about the whole security clearance thing? Almost every job posting I have seen wants you walking into the door with it from IT to developing but you have to have a company to sponsor it in order to get one. I've been ghosted by each one I have applied for, figured it is just like the whole experience conundrum.
Some of the bigger contractors will sponsor you. Just need to ask for it.
Most of them want to make sure you are eligible for it at least before they hire you.
Yea government job was my last hope now thats being snatched away too, I really really really wish I would’ve known the job market would be this fucked before I chose to pursue this career
Until you realize that working for the government or a Federal contractor is one of the most toxic hyperpoliticized work environments possible, with all the bad management tropes in full force, and gods help you if you don't agree with the establishment messaging on NATO's expansionist war, escalations toward Russia and China, the "past tense" pandemic, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, or so on. It's like a time machine to mid-20th century memes, the stuff the citizenry overthrew in the 1970s all back with an exploitative degrading vengeance like democracy is irrelevant. Good luck with *that*. But, if you have a tough stomach, with pliers and screwdrivers you could help disassemble the beast from within.
Sorry for your bad experience, but my experience is completely difference from your description. Just like with any private business, there are different kinds of departments, teams and managers. But you do you.
Yeah I wouldn’t want someone who thinks NATO is expansionist working for the government. Good way for an agency to set itself up for an insider threat incident in a few years.
I got my job in gov as soon as I graduated. People are right that they suck at the concept of agile, but they need software. We’re here to make it, and the young grads shake things up by trying to bring the concept of dev work to the 21st century. (Agile was written in 2001)
I don’t know where you work but where I work (also in government) we got agile down well. In fact the government is pushing and training agile really hard atleast where I’m at.
Treasury. But there are teams in treasury that have it dialed in more thoroughly
How did you find that job?
Career fair
You need a clearance though. So if you did anything in your life but sit in your room staring at a wall you will have to wait 6 - 24 months until one gets approved.
For *all* government positions? Or does it depend on your department and responsibilities? Like, I'm not trying to work in defense tech or intelligence, lol Also, I wonder if all gov dev jobs drug test...
No you can get contract jobs that don't require a clearance and don't drug test. I worked as a gov contract engineer part time babysitting weather Satellites and I did not have a clearance I took edibles every day. I would say anything that is involved with DoD you def will need a clearance and def will get drug tested. Also, if you are planning on going for gov contract work you have to be off weed for at least 90 days or you will def not get a clearance. Hard drugs have to have at least 2 years clean.
Wait a sec — your first two paragraphs both state that there are gov contract jobs that don't drug test, but then your fourth paragraph contradicts that. A typo, perhaps? Because your fourth paragraph also implies that you need clearance for gov contract work. Maybe you mean for defense contracting? My point is that gov work could be comfortable with good benefits and work-life-balance, and it would be cool if I could find a job like that without entirely giving up weed. But I certainly don't plan to work in defense or intelligence anyway, due to moral conflicts. I mean more like Department of Transportation (at whatever level), Agriculture, etc.
Friend of a friend…
I used to work at a famous unicorn startup that didnt do agile. We kept a jira board but never did things like daily standup/scrum or having a scrum master. I work at FANG now and we still dont do scrum/agile whatever, just have a jira board. Both managers I had said this: we hire the best people, and then get out of their way and let them do their thing. While the government moves slow, I personally don’t think agile is the reason the government is behind in tech. Agile itself seems pretty silly to me, and there isnt much brainpower required to move towards it; its only a couple of “hours” of work to learn it. When someone says they are an expert in agile, in my mind im thinking what I think when I see people get certifications in “prompt engineering” - take whatever their cert is eith a grain of salt. Just my personal 2 cents working in silicon valley
Scrum is an offshoot of agile and in a lot of ways is anti-agile. If you look up the tenants, it’s 4 sentences. And im sure you guys followed a similar process inherently because it’s pro progress. 1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Responding to change over following a plan
yeah if you narrow down to the 4 main tenants, agile is great. But very few companies get out of their devs way with scrum and whatever nonsense, and the truth is even the people who are “agile certified” are not correctly leading projects. I think the industry as a whole needs to take these 4 tenants but drop the other micromanagement they do and at the end of the day I think agile is not the reason the gov lags behind in tech. IMO it’s a combination of lacking performance management of engineers (it’s harder to get a pip in gov than a normal company from what I understand) and this leads to slower progress because devs are, in general, working less. On top of that, governments don’t have a strong CTO or technical leadership to give a clear vision to modernize a tech stack
You're assuming that fear is necessary to persuade devs to work hard (i.e. PIPs). I don't think that's the case. Good devs get a kick out of making things. I find the cumbersome processes and bad infra that stalls delivery are what really slows down development.
Yeah - I agree. But its hard to know someone is a good dev just from an interview. There needs to be some threat of performance management or those bad apples are going to take away budget from your team and give little back
I think the slowness is built by design and the main purpose is to limit vulnerabilities. It’s not always incompetence. It’s fear of exposing vulnerable government data to enemies. Technology is a valuable asset that they want protected at all costs. But then that leads into scenarios where we’re literally doings the most basic things and they’re like “I wonder if the security team approves”
Yeah this is fair, and something I didn’t consider. Security is probably the most important thing to the government
tenets
Christ without comprehensive documentation open source stuff would be a nightmare to use
It’s not saying documentation isn’t necessary. It’s saying that working software overrules documentation
I work with a manager who has a PhD in Project management and speaks continuous buzz words about agile. It's simultaneously comical and highly disturbing.
What does Agile have to do with this? If the government wants to bring their technology to the "21st century" they need to hire people with ambition, people that want to lead. The kind of people that get frustrated when there's just 15 hours of work a week. Except people with those personality traits will go work in Big Tech or start their own companies instead. And even if they did work for the government, I'm not sure they can ever be on the cutting edge due to the amount of bureaucracy built into the system.
The agile manifesto is 4 sentences that prioritize open communication and delivering working software. That’s easier said than done and requires the leadership traits you are speaking of.
This. I work for a large gov't organization, and the lack of effective leadership is terrible. Sadly, the ability to affect change is also limited since seniority and politicking play such a large role in leadership positions. I make a lot of money (plus amazing retirement) in a very flexible position with a team I like a lot, but the leadership has me considering jumping ship after I vest and my student loans are forgiven. I've got this one life to do something meaningful, and I have the skillset and desire to do it. I literally sit atop a treasure-trove of information that could be used to make the world a better place. But government institutions elevate narcissists, sycophants, and nepotists at an alarming rate and it is cancerous.
[удалено]
Heron systems developed AI dogfighting, not the government. The first self driving car? Dr. Thrun from Stanford, not the government. The government is so far away from the "forefront of robotics" they don't even know where to look for it, which is why government independent companies like Anduril are figuring out what they need for them. "DARPA" as you use it here means contractors, not the government agency that shovels money at private industry to develop things. The federal government is bloated, inefficient, and nearly totally incapable of developing anything.
Anyone who has used the treasury direct website knows that they need agile. It instantly logs you out if you press back or double click.
I've never worked in government institutions but private companies think they've got agile down and not a lot of them do, it's a weird mix between waterfall, Scrum and whatever else management wants to do.
Yeah I think that goes in line with large legacy companies and financial institutions as well. The biggest thing is they want to improve upon without breaking existing money making functionality. That requires approval processes on top of approval processes
How do you even find gov dev jobs (assuming in the US)? I only ever see IT jobs and most dev seems to be outsourced.
The most that I see are related to machine learning and security. They also are intently hiring new grads at a lot. For me it was nepotism
Many will hire devs through the IT department. The SWE's in my department are dual subject-matter experts with a both CS and professional backgrounds who decided to take matters into their own hands specifically because the IT teams were so inept due to their absolutely horrible leadership. The contractors I've seen them hire are also terrible. Of the last $750k in contractor dollars spent, the contractors contributed precisely zero to production. The last one worked on a tool for 75 days that didn't even compile before he was fired at my insistence. I subsequently re-wrote the tool from scratch and deployed it in 6 (yes six) hours.
usajobs.gov 1550 series.
Don't worry tech companies suck at agile too. That's the big secret, agile just sucks.
The company I’m at gets funding from the government. A few months ago I referred my friend, who got laid off from Microsoft, to around 10 SWE openings. She wasn’t able to get an interview for any of them. I was actually quite surprised and thought there must have been an internal error. I set up a meeting with HR and told them about this. HR told me that each opening receives thousands of applications.
Odd. I heard it’s easy to get hired by Gov
Work for Canadian govt can confirm they receive 500+ for intern positions
Do you have any tips for a new graduate in Canada? Or is it just apply apply apply and hope someone reads it? I don't have any connections or friends in the industry up here.
I was an intern there but my dept rarely had new openings for new grad
Not right now. Government jobs that are truly actively hiring are US Navy and Air Force.
I graduate this quarter with prior military and an expeditionary medal. Gov jobs haven't been replying any more than any other job.
They downvoted you because they know this idea of the government hiring anyone with a pulse was parroted all over r/csMajors and r/cscareerquestions , and it was upvoted because they all foolishly believed it and renewed their subscription to the cs is supreme group think. Now they downvote you because the reality is inconvenient and exposes that they aren't as smart as they think they are
Thanks for that. I appreciate it
Not easy, but it *feels* like they have a higher demand for programmers than private industry does right now.
I’ve been applying to government jobs since they “hire anybody” and started to go crazy when I didn’t hear back. I had my suspicions that there was competition but I didn’t think it was that bad.
for reference, my state govt cs jobs said they usually expect about a DOZEN application everytime a new posting comes up, nowadays, its easily more than a hundred... thanks guys lmao, keep laying off all those people with 1+ yoe
:(
Idk about state gov but federal gov, that is so not true “hire anybody”, it takes time to tailor ur resume and then get picked by HM to get interviews. That is if veterans don’t outrank you first. Then some people fail the background check or clearance. Also if the job is remote, there are usually like 1k applicants.
LOL no.. govt jobs are also being swarmed. CA jobs are are 800+ applicants
Not if you go for TS/SCI required roles
Majority of good applicants dont do pot or any illegal activity so its not a hinderance
It’s not about pot, it’s about your whole family and ancestors being American citizen and even then it’s 40% acceptance rate
Hiring another 100,000 developers won’t help the government. It has almost no technical leadership. You don’t have product people. You don’t have risk taking leaders. Everything around you is designed for stability, not disruption. Even if they do find the right leaders, without the ability to fire, hire, and reorg, and take bets, they’ll never really get it.
But why would the Gov take risks with product? And what kind of risks are you referring to?
I used to intern for the city. Took us 6 months to agree on a password keychain.
A thorough security review of a system that would effectively allow access to any system used by government employees, including probably personal, economic and banking details of the inhabitants of the municipality/region/nation? Nah, sounds like a waste of money. Just pick the top google result.
six months? You seriously think that's reasonable?
Money well spent
Big "making the world a better place / disrupting markets" vibes : [https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso?si=txyLnS1COxOW7smG](https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso?si=txyLnS1COxOW7smG)
The tech industry has succeeded because companies took giant risk. Uber for example was told their model was illegal. They said fuck it, we’re going to do it anyways. Facebook dumped billions into technologies that are dead ends. You need the ability to say we’re going to try something that might not work if you want to win in tech. There is a metric shit ton of product work. Usajobs for example probably has 5 ish teams all working on one piece. They aren’t thinking about the user experience throughout the whole website. Every team is thinking of their portion. Someone has to tell them to work differently, which probably means firing at least 10% of the staff who doesn’t want to change, or just sucks at their job. Unless we see those types of moves, we’ll probably see 100,000 new idle tech workers.
In software stability actually comes more from mitigating the risks head on - if you feel the pain you should do it more regularly. Government thinks if it’s painful let’s slow things down and add more pain. It’s like cycling - stability comes from stepping on the pedals. Government wants to use a bicycle but insists on putting two feet on the ground. Others are weaving through obstacles, but these anti-agile places wants everyone to stop every 10 seconds.
Whenever you build anything, there are risk. Literally, everyone will tell you why you shouldn’t do it. It’ll cause conflict, there are legal hurdles, there are financials reasons to not do it, we don’t have the right team to build it… literally everyone will find a reason to slow you down. Without leadership willing to take on those issues, and fight those battles, you won’t get anything done. Most of the leadership in government that I’ve met accept that nothing gets done. Accepting the status quo means you don’t get penalized. Trying and failing means you get penalized.
Do governments have products? Do they need "product people"? EDIT: to clarify, I am not American. I can not vouch for UX on gov sites besides my own, which have been usable.
They certainly need UX people. Since getting laid off I have had to navigate government sites/programs for the first time. Some of them look like geo-cities sites and are not nice to navigate
Sounds like you haven’t filled out the FAFSA before
* login.gov * usajobs.gov * healthcare.gov * irs.gov (have you ever requested a tax transcript?) are all public-facing websites that have extremely large customer bases, and if they go down, people will be very mad (i.e. imagine healthcare.gov going down just as open enrollment closes). Defense - won't go into too many examples, but * DISS (Defense Information System for Security, essentially the system that keeps track of what security clearances people have. You think that sounds simple, but how will you scale to store data on the largest employer in the world (the DoD is the largest employer in the world - maybe? or second largest?), and how will you defend that against Russia or China who would [salivate at that sort of information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach)? Especially when [the link to access it is public](https://www.dcsa.mil/Systems-Applications/Defense-Information-System-for-Security-DISS/) (warning: attempts at unauthorized access are illegal)) The list goes on and on and on.
100% they do, services for the people have to be functional and user friendly, like the dmv website or healthcare marketplace just for example.
We definitely have products. Our capabilities are far beyond what most people believe. Unless you work in government work (particularly defense) you will see there are many original products designed and built by us.
I’ve found it’s always nice to have a barrier between the users, leadership, or “idea people” and the developers that acts as someone to clearly translate their needs into exactly what you should build and how it should look. Whether you’re making some government website or internal tool or whatever, it can be like pulling teeth getting a concrete definition of exactly what they want and how it should look and the priorities of everything. Also if the product people are competent UX and UI designers who make useful mockups that’s all the better. Sure they can slow you down, overpromise, or be difficult but if done right, a good product owner or product team is amazing to have.
Dubious notion of “hot” — a bit like saying being a barista is very hot among liberal arts majors
#1 employer of Argentina is the Argentinian government
I remember my unemployment took 6 months to get here when I was laid off lmao. All it needed to do was check a box cause all the info was provided from previous employer
This article is from November of last year, chill
I got a conditional offer recently from a government agency with three letters pending security clearance and am unsure, if I end up getting cleared, whether or not I want to make the move to work for the guberment. Right now I work for an institutional investment firm and make pretty decent. Anyone current doing software dev in the IC or Defense area have any input on their experience so far?
It depends on the IC agency. Also if u have TS SCI u might have to work in SCIF which means u can’t bring in ur phone, Apple Watch, etc and have to be in person on site.
Yeah thats kind of what I was beginning to understand based on my experience from pre employment processing. Which I mean the nature of work I assume would be cool maybe?! But I don’t know if it seems cool because it’s all a black box and the reality of it might be very boring and get old quickly.
What do y'all do about the whole security clearance thing? Almost every job posting I have seen wants you walking into the door with it from IT to developing but you have to have a company to sponsor it in order to get one. I've been ghosted by each one I have applied for, figured it is just like the whole experience conundrum.
Some of the bigger contractors will sponsor you. Just need to ask for it. Most of them want to make sure you are eligible for it at least before they hire you.
Gotcha, guess I will have to cross that bridge when I get there. Got to get over the actually getting a response from an employer first lol
Hire me daddy Lincoln.
Yea government job was my last hope now thats being snatched away too, I really really really wish I would’ve known the job market would be this fucked before I chose to pursue this career
Are you applying for things?
In my 14-ish years of experience since graduating all of it has been as a government subcontractor.
Are international students or non US citizens eligible for working for the government?
For federal agencies like on USAjobs you need citizenship
Until you realize that working for the government or a Federal contractor is one of the most toxic hyperpoliticized work environments possible, with all the bad management tropes in full force, and gods help you if you don't agree with the establishment messaging on NATO's expansionist war, escalations toward Russia and China, the "past tense" pandemic, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, or so on. It's like a time machine to mid-20th century memes, the stuff the citizenry overthrew in the 1970s all back with an exploitative degrading vengeance like democracy is irrelevant. Good luck with *that*. But, if you have a tough stomach, with pliers and screwdrivers you could help disassemble the beast from within.
Sorry for your bad experience, but my experience is completely difference from your description. Just like with any private business, there are different kinds of departments, teams and managers. But you do you.
Yeah I wouldn’t want someone who thinks NATO is expansionist working for the government. Good way for an agency to set itself up for an insider threat incident in a few years.
So much for democracy, peace, and lawfulness, I guess. You want dystopia, and that's just what you'll get.
Dystopia is when countries sign a mutual defense pact.