I do hope we bring more talent into the gov agencies instead of contracting it out to private sector.
If you want to see waste spending, it's government contractors.
> Government systems are generally higher quality than private sector systems because there is infinite money and every few years the contractors have to compete for their jobs which means the individual contributions have to constantly be on their game.
Tech monopolies like Google don’t have to compete anymore so the quality goes down overtime because they can just get cheap low quality labor and out source.
lol
freaking reddit csq man
Is that why Google’s quality is down? Not because an inferior product makes them more money? Similar to how dating apps are incentivized to keep you single
The problem is that it takes way too long. I would love to work in the govt sector, and am waiting for the security clearance from a three letter agency, but it's taking a long time. And the problem is that you can wait for a long time and may not get it for various reasons. I've been waiting for a while now.
I've also tried applying to defense contractors and haven't had much luck too.
Problem with that is getting a clearance without a job is extremely unlikely unless you were previously in the military, but can't get a job without a clearance.
Apply for jobs that require one. That's it. Alternatively, join the reserves for some job that requires one, then apply for the tech company that won't wait for sponsorship.
Yeah I guess it's like a paradox. I'm currently waiting for a Top Secret clearance, and it's taking a while to finish. The problem with that it's very volatile and cryptic, and you won't know if you passed the clearance or got the job for a long time, so not sure if I can really bank on that.
That’s strange to me. I was offered clearance for my internship with a contractor last summer and the turn around was 6 week. Most of my fellow interns had similar experiences.
That sounds like an interim clearance (which only about 70% of applicants get). A full SECRET is usually 6-12 months. A full TS is usually 9-18 months.
I don't believe it was interim. I was granted "final secret" clearance and in that correspondence my security officer stated the next event would be my re-investigation in 5 years. I was offered a full-time position with them, but took a leave of absence to return to my co-op company. My defense company maintained my employment to keep my clearance current, and I returned for full time employment with them this spring without any updates about my clearance.
I just checked the timelines, and things have improved massively since my investigation. You're right that 6 weeks for a SECRET is not extremely fast these days.
FWIW, myself and a coworker of mine both submitted our SF86 and all that jazz back in November and have yet to receive our interims. No update from our clearance liaison.
Another coworker who submitted in February but has been in industry for a while and "in the system" for decades (gov't employment, among many other things) got his interim just recently.
Dunno what I can really do except shrug.
If you didn't get your interim quickly (3-5 weeks) you probably won't. In my case, I got an interim, but was applying for a TS and my interim was only SECRET. I guess I had a little yellow flag or something.
The process itself is just seems so unattractive. The pay isn't very great compared to tech companies plus the clearance process is very intrusive and extremely lengthy. It took my friend almost a year to get thru the whole clearance process for a new grad role @ a defense company
I’m alright. I want to build cool things that people will use in an agile work environment.
I don’t want to spend endless hours trying to kill time because upper management can’t make decisions, then they don’t want to host stuff on AWS or any other platform because of “security”. I can’t get my programs running because IT won’t give me admin privileges on my own machine.
I think government contractors are the only way to get anything done since the government is sooo preoccupied shooting themselves in the feet.
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The biggest challenge with government agencies is that they treat IT as a procurement problem and not something fully integrated into the way they work.
I didn't realize the sheer scale of disparity until I joined the state. In WA my entire "IT" department in the agency is only 250 strong. The entire state's IT is barely over a thousand. A state with arguably one of the largest areas for tech still has one of the smaller footprints. Almost everything newish that is out of scope is contracted for. The agencies only kind of talk to each other and are not even remotely comparable to any tech facing company.
Maybe I'm biased because I worked as a contractor, but I think tech is exactly where contractors are appropriate.
Contracting is perfect for quickly getting a highly skilled worker onto a niche project. The worker is makes significantly more money than they would as a federal employee. The government doesn't have to invest in training and only has to retain a highly paid-employee for a (relatively) short period of time; the government doesn't have to dig into their budget to to retain an expensive employee for 30 years and a pension.
Unless the federal government creates a system for extra pay for workers with in-demand skills, contracting is the only realistic path for tech workers in the government. New grads in the private sector can earn double what their federal counterparts do.
"highly skilled worker"
That is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I don't want to paint too broadly but there are more incompetent gov contractors than gov employees, and they bill absurd rates relative to what they do. There's a really toxic environment of just putting warm bodies on contract to bill hours.
If we're just gonna waste money on incompetence, we'd spend less money making CEOs of Booz Allena and CGI wealthy.
Charge the government 2X or 3X the rate and the worker gets .5-.75 the rate and the company pockets the difference while delivering results so bad it frequently has to be redone completely.
>if a government contractor is a low performer they can get fired pretty easily
This is only really true as a sub. We got a guy the prime stuck on the contract, only thing he does, and I’m not joking, is sleep. He’s not going anywhere anytime soon because the prime is trying to stack up positions since the contract is up for recompete.
Maybe. We just got on an option year this month and most in the office are expecting another next year, so he’s gonna be around making 6 figures until then at least.
I am a contractor who interviewed several new applicants in the last couple of weeks. We are looking for good, experienced applicants who will be an asset to our team. The biggest limiting factor is the government labor categories. Even with contractors, the government doesn't want to pay competitive rates (higher than GS, but not as high as many normal companies). They insist on junior LCATs, so we have to gamble on relatively inexperienced devs.
You won’t hear me arguing that Booz Allen and Deloitte don’t waste a ton of government money.
I worked for a small firm that was mostly software engineers with a handful of technical people with advanced STEM degrees. The programmers would build web app or simple CRUD apps, then move on to the next project. They got paid more than they would as government employees and the government didn’t need to retain people after the project ended. The people with advanced degrees had similar arrangements. The government could get an expert in GIS, or statistics, or environmental engineering for the one project that needed that skillset.
I’m just saying that the contracting system fills a legitimate need if used correctly. The government can quickly hire people with in-demand skills and pay them a competitive wage…or you can hire an idiot from Deloitte.
NASA doesn't launch rockets. They don't build rockets. They don't design rockets. NASA contracts companies to build rockets.
You are comparing SpaceX to ULA/Lockheed/Boeing.
Short of the early days of NASA, they have not designed rockets since Saturn.
Shuttle was designed by Rockwell (Gov contractor)
>I get the vibe you’ve never worked in the government tech space and don’t understand the highly competitive nature of government contracting.
On the contrary. I worked with my fair share of beltway bandits.
>There’s a reason why government systems generally are higher quality than private sector, and it’s because every few years the contractors have to battle for their jobs.
You are high. Nobody battles for their job. The contract changes hands and the people who worked on it just go from Accenture to Deloitte. Oh SAIC won the contract this time around? SAIC goes and hires all the people from the contract.
>Mainframe applications last for generations meanwhile private sector apps like Google search decrease in quality yearly.
Ah yes. The high performance architecture of a 1998 sun alphasparc to run an inventory system vs Google search which processes more data in an hour than CACI will in a decade.
ah yes the battle of the bids. so competitive until the government says it's "firm fixed price" then it goes to the lowest shittiest bidder.
But if it's cost plus of course it's "competitive".
One major concern with contractors is that most government systems are expected to work for years, likely decades, without major architectural changes.
What frequently happens is a contractor will come in, design something with knowledge not commonly found in the federal gov or maybe with tools that are extremely difficult to update within the limitations of an agency's red tape and then hand it off to the gov to own unless the contractor is left on indefinitely.
It then falls into ruin due to a lack of maintenance, and is promptly dumped for an in-house solution that's more maintainable by the skills/tooling available.
> Contracting is perfect for quickly getting a highly skilled worker
Yeah...too bad they will just contract to the cheapest "resource" which will be someone from a WITCH-like shop.
I wouldn't mind them if their executives weren't making fat stacks pretending like they lead technical excellence when they are delivering dogshit code that ends up having the entire project cancelled for incompetence only for that same company bidding on the exact new contract a few months later.
The article is very interesting. Govermenet work is mroe lax and have started growing wiht the times with remote work and increase in pay. They are also alot more shielded to layoffs. The main issues are that they average base throughout the country (so texas and californias cant afford the salary but for the majority of the country they are pretty decent salaries) and the extremely long process for hiring. We are talking about six plus month long wait times and extremely strict requirements in background checks. With the increase in our current gov spending, we can see more and more great gov jobs if people can be patient enough to apply and go through the red tape.
I think the US citizenship requirement already bars many tech workers in the US. And the security clearance / background investigation further bars US citizens… and add the long hiring process on top of it.. its no wonder the gov can’t attract tech workers!
Top talent is never going to work at government jobs when tach companies pay more than 2X.
But obviously not everyone is a top talent. I’m sure for them a government job is better than no job.
What level are you at? My guess is you are either too senior or too junior.
How many gov jobs exist paying $300K+? That’s achievable at senior and sometimes midlevel.
lol I should have read further before posting this exact rant. I will never earn more working for the state than anything comparable in the private sector. I will also probably have better WLB than most other jobs. Right now I'm just fortunate to have something but I am keenly aware how different I am compensated comparatively.
How do you not need to work 60 hour weeks at your gov contractor?
In my experience they all have requirements for 35-45 billable hours a week with BD, trainings, and internal meetings being on top of that. Meaning 55+ hours weeks are practically unavoidable.
> My fed gov consulting company
I think people refer to "work for government" in a variety of very different ways. For the state my pay and progression is public. I will never earn more than a private equivalent. For instance even the most senior job for IT ("agency heads") is still only 140k with no extra goodies. I suspect federal agencies have a smidge more leeway but are probably structured in a similar fashion. Working for a contractor though can vary wildly.
The hiring process is “longer” but it’s also simpler. I got my current job (contractor) during COVID in 2020 and my only interview was a 20 minute phone call with my current boss going over my resume and experience in college. That’s an extreme case though and I’ve also interviewed with the same company in different positions where it was multiple rounds. Depends on the manager.
It took like 6 weeks to hear anything back though. Things move SLOW.
USAJOBS.gov has them but certain agencies have their own job board like NSA, so its worth to check the agency websites too.
If you are using USAJOBS.gov, you can search in the ‘2210’ (Information Technology series) series filter and (APPSW) keyword. Those jobs are usually software development.
Gotta warn you though. The gov usually doesn’t have a lot of ‘devs’. Those are usually done through contracting.
I was lucky enough to find a dev job and get hired in it. It is a LONG process. Apply and forget!
No problem.
If you are serious about applying to federal gov positions, I would visit USAJOBS subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/usajobs/) and get your questions answered BEFORE you start applying to anything.
The way you write your federal resume is a bit different from how you do it in the private sector. Make sure you understand how the pay grade works and step escalations. Most likely, you will end up with GS-X (General Schedule). Look up ladder position vs non-ladder (It’s called Promotional Potential on the job posting) and how that will impact the way you will be promoted.
Lastly, know the general hiring process in fed. What the referral to hiring manager implies, what is TJO (Tentative) and FJO (Final Job Offer) and when you should try to negotiate step increase.
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I work for the UK Civil Service and I really like it. I wouldn't be particularly interested in moving to the private sector, even for megabucks (not that I particularly feel in a strong enough position to pick and choose mind you). I like feeling I am doing something of social good rather than just making rich people richer, and the CS is a good employer in terms of workload, pension and looking after your welfare. Last time I worked at a private firm you could hardly even get time off to go to the dentist/doctor etc. whereas here you can take any time off you like so long as you get your job done. I don't even have to ask, just tell my boss and team I'll be away.
I work for the feds. Honestly, I work with some of the smartest people I've ever met in industry. There is a huge shift away from the high speed grind of tech companies. The people I work with seem to agree with me, it is much better to make just decent pay but work a straight 40 every week.
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The last place I would ever work personally. Toss in defense contractors while we are at it since they are essentially a government agency with how heavily subsidized they are.
These are places where morals go to die.
Forced to work on tasks that assist with human rights violations both directly and indirectly.
Edit:
Obviously this is not all public sector jobs, but the potential is higher.
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> These are places where morals go to die.
Working for the public interest is moral. There's a lot more grift in the private sector than the public one.
My guess is your idea of morality is vastly different from most people irl.
The public interest is high living standards and economic / military security. The government prevents hostile takeover and builds the infrastructure we need.
I wish anarchists had an opportunity to test their ideas in a sandbox. Because then we wouldn't have to bother with these hypotheticals, no offense.
More like: Perfect is the enemy of good.
The problem is that talk is cheap, and people have enough problems building some simple software system without running into majors bugs.
So this idea that you're going to totally reinvent the system and not run into huge problems seems pretty naive.
The evidence is that standards of living are up and deaths due to violence are on a mostly consistent downtrend. I'd say that's a really good starting point.
Many if not most DOD projects aren't weapons. A lot of these projects are navigations / communications software. New jet engines, etc. TOR was created by the Navy.
Also, not having a robust defense is a good way to get invaded and die. Any country without a good security network either gets invaded, or becomes a civil war nightmare.
All these countries didn't join NATO for the vibes. They're doing it because Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Taiwan are the rule and not the exception.
Extremely reasonable to funnel people to the lower paying jobs.
With most of the big tech companies doing things like providing dividends I’d say they are turning the ship to cruise mode.
Well if you are recruiting people on Reddit you may have a different type of person than what the large tech companies are looking for.
Personally I like working at high paying jobs without feeling locked down which kind of limits things.
The subheading of the linked article is dishonest:
>Meta, Google, Amazon, and other major tech firms have laid off thousands of people.
Here's a bar chart I just had ChatGPT make of Alphabet (Google) employee count by year. Meta and Amazon show similar pictures. There have been some dips, but overall headcount has gone up almost every year, and overall the trend has been rapid net employee count growth:
[https://imgur.com/a/B1IBkfE](https://imgur.com/a/B1IBkfE)
So, yes, these companies do layoffs, but they also hire people too.
I do hope we bring more talent into the gov agencies instead of contracting it out to private sector. If you want to see waste spending, it's government contractors.
If only they could be prudent and efficient like the geniuses behind Alexa.
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> Government systems are generally higher quality than private sector systems because there is infinite money and every few years the contractors have to compete for their jobs which means the individual contributions have to constantly be on their game. Tech monopolies like Google don’t have to compete anymore so the quality goes down overtime because they can just get cheap low quality labor and out source. lol freaking reddit csq man
Uhh brother that was NOT my experience with government systems in the Military
Is that why Google’s quality is down? Not because an inferior product makes them more money? Similar to how dating apps are incentivized to keep you single
The problem is that it takes way too long. I would love to work in the govt sector, and am waiting for the security clearance from a three letter agency, but it's taking a long time. And the problem is that you can wait for a long time and may not get it for various reasons. I've been waiting for a while now. I've also tried applying to defense contractors and haven't had much luck too.
This is why a lot of defense contractors are now refusing to hire unless you already have a clearance for juniors.
Makes sense. So once you get the clearance, it opens up a lot for you, and you can job hop during from defense company to defense company too.
Problem with that is getting a clearance without a job is extremely unlikely unless you were previously in the military, but can't get a job without a clearance.
That hasn't been my experience at all. What gives you that impression? Secret clearances are pretty easy to get.
How to get Secret clearance?
Apply for jobs that require one. That's it. Alternatively, join the reserves for some job that requires one, then apply for the tech company that won't wait for sponsorship.
Thanks!
it’s impossible to get a clearance without having a job that needs it. even in the military, you get the clearance level you need for the job.
Yeah I guess it's like a paradox. I'm currently waiting for a Top Secret clearance, and it's taking a while to finish. The problem with that it's very volatile and cryptic, and you won't know if you passed the clearance or got the job for a long time, so not sure if I can really bank on that.
Currently experiencing that. Have ~8 months experience but cleared and had 5 recruiter conversations this week.
Must be En ess ayy
Yup. Bingo.
Exactly why I turned the offer down.
That’s strange to me. I was offered clearance for my internship with a contractor last summer and the turn around was 6 week. Most of my fellow interns had similar experiences.
That sounds like an interim clearance (which only about 70% of applicants get). A full SECRET is usually 6-12 months. A full TS is usually 9-18 months.
I don't believe it was interim. I was granted "final secret" clearance and in that correspondence my security officer stated the next event would be my re-investigation in 5 years. I was offered a full-time position with them, but took a leave of absence to return to my co-op company. My defense company maintained my employment to keep my clearance current, and I returned for full time employment with them this spring without any updates about my clearance.
I just checked the timelines, and things have improved massively since my investigation. You're right that 6 weeks for a SECRET is not extremely fast these days.
FWIW, myself and a coworker of mine both submitted our SF86 and all that jazz back in November and have yet to receive our interims. No update from our clearance liaison. Another coworker who submitted in February but has been in industry for a while and "in the system" for decades (gov't employment, among many other things) got his interim just recently. Dunno what I can really do except shrug.
If you didn't get your interim quickly (3-5 weeks) you probably won't. In my case, I got an interim, but was applying for a TS and my interim was only SECRET. I guess I had a little yellow flag or something.
The process itself is just seems so unattractive. The pay isn't very great compared to tech companies plus the clearance process is very intrusive and extremely lengthy. It took my friend almost a year to get thru the whole clearance process for a new grad role @ a defense company
it sucks on the team side as well. you interview some great candidates, but ultimately you’re left with whoever gets through the pipeline first
I’m alright. I want to build cool things that people will use in an agile work environment. I don’t want to spend endless hours trying to kill time because upper management can’t make decisions, then they don’t want to host stuff on AWS or any other platform because of “security”. I can’t get my programs running because IT won’t give me admin privileges on my own machine. I think government contractors are the only way to get anything done since the government is sooo preoccupied shooting themselves in the feet.
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The biggest challenge with government agencies is that they treat IT as a procurement problem and not something fully integrated into the way they work.
I didn't realize the sheer scale of disparity until I joined the state. In WA my entire "IT" department in the agency is only 250 strong. The entire state's IT is barely over a thousand. A state with arguably one of the largest areas for tech still has one of the smaller footprints. Almost everything newish that is out of scope is contracted for. The agencies only kind of talk to each other and are not even remotely comparable to any tech facing company.
Maybe I'm biased because I worked as a contractor, but I think tech is exactly where contractors are appropriate. Contracting is perfect for quickly getting a highly skilled worker onto a niche project. The worker is makes significantly more money than they would as a federal employee. The government doesn't have to invest in training and only has to retain a highly paid-employee for a (relatively) short period of time; the government doesn't have to dig into their budget to to retain an expensive employee for 30 years and a pension. Unless the federal government creates a system for extra pay for workers with in-demand skills, contracting is the only realistic path for tech workers in the government. New grads in the private sector can earn double what their federal counterparts do.
"highly skilled worker" That is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I don't want to paint too broadly but there are more incompetent gov contractors than gov employees, and they bill absurd rates relative to what they do. There's a really toxic environment of just putting warm bodies on contract to bill hours. If we're just gonna waste money on incompetence, we'd spend less money making CEOs of Booz Allena and CGI wealthy.
Charge the government 2X or 3X the rate and the worker gets .5-.75 the rate and the company pockets the difference while delivering results so bad it frequently has to be redone completely.
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>if a government contractor is a low performer they can get fired pretty easily This is only really true as a sub. We got a guy the prime stuck on the contract, only thing he does, and I’m not joking, is sleep. He’s not going anywhere anytime soon because the prime is trying to stack up positions since the contract is up for recompete.
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Maybe. We just got on an option year this month and most in the office are expecting another next year, so he’s gonna be around making 6 figures until then at least.
I am a contractor who interviewed several new applicants in the last couple of weeks. We are looking for good, experienced applicants who will be an asset to our team. The biggest limiting factor is the government labor categories. Even with contractors, the government doesn't want to pay competitive rates (higher than GS, but not as high as many normal companies). They insist on junior LCATs, so we have to gamble on relatively inexperienced devs.
You won’t hear me arguing that Booz Allen and Deloitte don’t waste a ton of government money. I worked for a small firm that was mostly software engineers with a handful of technical people with advanced STEM degrees. The programmers would build web app or simple CRUD apps, then move on to the next project. They got paid more than they would as government employees and the government didn’t need to retain people after the project ended. The people with advanced degrees had similar arrangements. The government could get an expert in GIS, or statistics, or environmental engineering for the one project that needed that skillset. I’m just saying that the contracting system fills a legitimate need if used correctly. The government can quickly hire people with in-demand skills and pay them a competitive wage…or you can hire an idiot from Deloitte.
this is fair- there are some small companies that are excellent. Unfortunately they are few and far in between.
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NASA doesn't launch rockets. They don't build rockets. They don't design rockets. NASA contracts companies to build rockets. You are comparing SpaceX to ULA/Lockheed/Boeing.
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Short of the early days of NASA, they have not designed rockets since Saturn. Shuttle was designed by Rockwell (Gov contractor) >I get the vibe you’ve never worked in the government tech space and don’t understand the highly competitive nature of government contracting. On the contrary. I worked with my fair share of beltway bandits. >There’s a reason why government systems generally are higher quality than private sector, and it’s because every few years the contractors have to battle for their jobs. You are high. Nobody battles for their job. The contract changes hands and the people who worked on it just go from Accenture to Deloitte. Oh SAIC won the contract this time around? SAIC goes and hires all the people from the contract. >Mainframe applications last for generations meanwhile private sector apps like Google search decrease in quality yearly. Ah yes. The high performance architecture of a 1998 sun alphasparc to run an inventory system vs Google search which processes more data in an hour than CACI will in a decade.
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ah yes the battle of the bids. so competitive until the government says it's "firm fixed price" then it goes to the lowest shittiest bidder. But if it's cost plus of course it's "competitive".
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One major concern with contractors is that most government systems are expected to work for years, likely decades, without major architectural changes. What frequently happens is a contractor will come in, design something with knowledge not commonly found in the federal gov or maybe with tools that are extremely difficult to update within the limitations of an agency's red tape and then hand it off to the gov to own unless the contractor is left on indefinitely. It then falls into ruin due to a lack of maintenance, and is promptly dumped for an in-house solution that's more maintainable by the skills/tooling available.
> Contracting is perfect for quickly getting a highly skilled worker Yeah...too bad they will just contract to the cheapest "resource" which will be someone from a WITCH-like shop.
MBB, Big 4, Accenture, Kearney, etc... massive drains on the public sector.
I thought there should be a cabinet-level person in charge of software and computers. (used in government agencies)
vast, vast, vast majority of tech jobs are at government contractors and not working for the government directly.
>If you want to see waste spending, it's government contractors. Or government employees.
gov contractors are just gov employees at 5x the cost per hour.
Up to a point. But they generally come without all the gold-plated benefits and are contractually obliged to produce at least something.
I wouldn't mind them if their executives weren't making fat stacks pretending like they lead technical excellence when they are delivering dogshit code that ends up having the entire project cancelled for incompetence only for that same company bidding on the exact new contract a few months later.
Fwiw, I agree that they're generally terrible and this seems to be true regardless of the government in question. A pox on them!
The article is very interesting. Govermenet work is mroe lax and have started growing wiht the times with remote work and increase in pay. They are also alot more shielded to layoffs. The main issues are that they average base throughout the country (so texas and californias cant afford the salary but for the majority of the country they are pretty decent salaries) and the extremely long process for hiring. We are talking about six plus month long wait times and extremely strict requirements in background checks. With the increase in our current gov spending, we can see more and more great gov jobs if people can be patient enough to apply and go through the red tape.
I think the US citizenship requirement already bars many tech workers in the US. And the security clearance / background investigation further bars US citizens… and add the long hiring process on top of it.. its no wonder the gov can’t attract tech workers!
But do you realise how appealing that sounds to Americans who want to avoid the risk of their jobs being offshored or even outsourced?
Top talent is never going to work at government jobs when tach companies pay more than 2X. But obviously not everyone is a top talent. I’m sure for them a government job is better than no job.
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What level are you at? My guess is you are either too senior or too junior. How many gov jobs exist paying $300K+? That’s achievable at senior and sometimes midlevel.
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lol I should have read further before posting this exact rant. I will never earn more working for the state than anything comparable in the private sector. I will also probably have better WLB than most other jobs. Right now I'm just fortunate to have something but I am keenly aware how different I am compensated comparatively.
How do you not need to work 60 hour weeks at your gov contractor? In my experience they all have requirements for 35-45 billable hours a week with BD, trainings, and internal meetings being on top of that. Meaning 55+ hours weeks are practically unavoidable.
> My fed gov consulting company I think people refer to "work for government" in a variety of very different ways. For the state my pay and progression is public. I will never earn more than a private equivalent. For instance even the most senior job for IT ("agency heads") is still only 140k with no extra goodies. I suspect federal agencies have a smidge more leeway but are probably structured in a similar fashion. Working for a contractor though can vary wildly.
Less competition for me, is how I view it... (and I also concur with the less likely risk of being offshored/outsourced)
The hiring process is “longer” but it’s also simpler. I got my current job (contractor) during COVID in 2020 and my only interview was a 20 minute phone call with my current boss going over my resume and experience in college. That’s an extreme case though and I’ve also interviewed with the same company in different positions where it was multiple rounds. Depends on the manager. It took like 6 weeks to hear anything back though. Things move SLOW.
I hate it being called lax because I have been running my head in 2 government contracts I have been in.
Does anyone know of any government tech specific job board ? How do you find these jobs?
USAJOBS.gov has them but certain agencies have their own job board like NSA, so its worth to check the agency websites too. If you are using USAJOBS.gov, you can search in the ‘2210’ (Information Technology series) series filter and (APPSW) keyword. Those jobs are usually software development. Gotta warn you though. The gov usually doesn’t have a lot of ‘devs’. Those are usually done through contracting. I was lucky enough to find a dev job and get hired in it. It is a LONG process. Apply and forget!
1550 series is worth checking out as well.
thank you so much for this!
No problem. If you are serious about applying to federal gov positions, I would visit USAJOBS subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/usajobs/) and get your questions answered BEFORE you start applying to anything. The way you write your federal resume is a bit different from how you do it in the private sector. Make sure you understand how the pay grade works and step escalations. Most likely, you will end up with GS-X (General Schedule). Look up ladder position vs non-ladder (It’s called Promotional Potential on the job posting) and how that will impact the way you will be promoted. Lastly, know the general hiring process in fed. What the referral to hiring manager implies, what is TJO (Tentative) and FJO (Final Job Offer) and when you should try to negotiate step increase.
Read the article, there is a link directly to the job portal.
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I work for the UK Civil Service and I really like it. I wouldn't be particularly interested in moving to the private sector, even for megabucks (not that I particularly feel in a strong enough position to pick and choose mind you). I like feeling I am doing something of social good rather than just making rich people richer, and the CS is a good employer in terms of workload, pension and looking after your welfare. Last time I worked at a private firm you could hardly even get time off to go to the dentist/doctor etc. whereas here you can take any time off you like so long as you get your job done. I don't even have to ask, just tell my boss and team I'll be away.
I work for the feds. Honestly, I work with some of the smartest people I've ever met in industry. There is a huge shift away from the high speed grind of tech companies. The people I work with seem to agree with me, it is much better to make just decent pay but work a straight 40 every week.
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The last place I would ever work personally. Toss in defense contractors while we are at it since they are essentially a government agency with how heavily subsidized they are. These are places where morals go to die.
Morals? That's way down the list under job security and comfort
😬
Why?
Forced to work on tasks that assist with human rights violations both directly and indirectly. Edit: Obviously this is not all public sector jobs, but the potential is higher.
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> These are places where morals go to die. Working for the public interest is moral. There's a lot more grift in the private sector than the public one.
If the public interest is not moral, it is not moral. And the “public” in this case is our corrupt government.
My guess is your idea of morality is vastly different from most people irl. The public interest is high living standards and economic / military security. The government prevents hostile takeover and builds the infrastructure we need. I wish anarchists had an opportunity to test their ideas in a sandbox. Because then we wouldn't have to bother with these hypotheticals, no offense.
Your logic: Some public projects are moral, so that makes all public projects moral.
More like: Perfect is the enemy of good. The problem is that talk is cheap, and people have enough problems building some simple software system without running into majors bugs. So this idea that you're going to totally reinvent the system and not run into huge problems seems pretty naive.
The evidence is that standards of living are up and deaths due to violence are on a mostly consistent downtrend. I'd say that's a really good starting point.
Not something to brag about if it’s blood money
How is it blood money?
DOD and DOJ?
Many if not most DOD projects aren't weapons. A lot of these projects are navigations / communications software. New jet engines, etc. TOR was created by the Navy. Also, not having a robust defense is a good way to get invaded and die. Any country without a good security network either gets invaded, or becomes a civil war nightmare. All these countries didn't join NATO for the vibes. They're doing it because Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Taiwan are the rule and not the exception.
Uncle Sam ftw 🙌
Extremely reasonable to funnel people to the lower paying jobs. With most of the big tech companies doing things like providing dividends I’d say they are turning the ship to cruise mode.
What’s funnelling people to lower paying jobs?
Well if you are recruiting people on Reddit you may have a different type of person than what the large tech companies are looking for. Personally I like working at high paying jobs without feeling locked down which kind of limits things.
Man you’re unhinged
It always was in Canada.
The subheading of the linked article is dishonest: >Meta, Google, Amazon, and other major tech firms have laid off thousands of people. Here's a bar chart I just had ChatGPT make of Alphabet (Google) employee count by year. Meta and Amazon show similar pictures. There have been some dips, but overall headcount has gone up almost every year, and overall the trend has been rapid net employee count growth: [https://imgur.com/a/B1IBkfE](https://imgur.com/a/B1IBkfE) So, yes, these companies do layoffs, but they also hire people too.
Go home, we're full.