> Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.

There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top.

If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.

Being a contractor is where it's at, it's just hard to win the contracts sometimes because you gotta know people. Once you do, it's not unusual to see a $3 million budget to build a basic website.

The government might also have a lot of trouble finding programmers that have never done any illegal drugs, which probably doesn't help. Although that might only really be something the three letter agencies care about, I'm not sure.

Your assumption that this is happening because those engineers are less skilled is completely wrong. I've worked at both private and govt. the problem in Govt is that resources just go towards the wrong projects. and things that could be fixed never do get fixed due to bureaucracy and regulations. engineers working for gov sometimes are forced to use the worst tools imaginable: often due to regulations (the tools/software used needs to be licensed or some other bs regulations).

Believe me when I say there is a lot of money to be made making it easier for people to package information to give to the government. Yes, the government should spend more money on IT.

I agree with you. This is just a huge side conversation.

Also, there is a TON of great educational content on youtube produced by governments. Google won't show me those videos on web pages at the government website, but they'll show me the youtube video with ads on it.

Is this in the US? As I said, I was talking about the UK.

Government offices don't just lose on salary, but also on working conditions.

Secondhand anecdotes recount fistfights in the office and the unfireable-until-the-election official viewing porn during working hours and continually infecting their desktop and the intranet with malware.

This sounds outrageous. Would be awesome if that video is going to end up on yt.

Unfortunately, that was from before smartphone ubiquity. Possibly the story is also from before YouTube, but the recounting of it was not.

You should have a look at the work that the USDS is doing.

You should also look at volunteering with Code for America.

I've also seen a number of .gov sites that require googleapis or use google and other trackers. .gov is very much involved with monetization and tracking

It’s due to the government not being able to compete on salary due to federal salary schedule limitations.

The joke is they can easily pay a contractor 150$/hour though. But can’t pay an employee hourly wage of 100$/hour

I believe employee wage ceiling is something more like $75/hr, and that would be for a job description like "you run the department of commerce"