I build these sorts of things and while it's not trivial it's also really not that hard. It's just insane the amount of money the government will spend on crap.
The field I work in is pretty small and I know a decent amount of the developers that use it. One project I worked on for the government, I showed up on day one and ran into a few people that had either no desire or no ability to do development work. And they were in team lead/senior roles.
Then, come to find out that you can't do anything for the project until you have a background check. And, by anything, I mean anything. No meetings, e-mails, or anything with an armed guard enforcing it. So there was an office full of people billing out at $200+ an hour for months doing literally nothing.
Then, come to find out that the way they wanted the software couldn't do. Like within an hour of hearing the requirements and what they were building I knew that it (1) wasn't possible and (2) the design they chose had fundamental flaws. Several years of effort and 10s of millions of dollars later they gave up on it.
The government is just a big whale too dumb, corrupt, and/or lazy to defend itself while a gigantic swarm of consultants/vendors are ripping off hunks of its flesh like the sharks they are.
We’ve built a system where we refuse to pay public servants. We shouldn’t be surprised when a system designed to attract below average people leads to projects with below average results.
There is significant job security (contract with three year period of performance is essentially guaranteed work for 3+ years), annual bonuses, etc.
The idea propagated by many here that engineers who work as government contractors are somehow less than is nauseating and untrue. Believe it or not, a whole world of talented people exists outside of the bubble you live in.
Yes, there are bad apples, as with every industry, and we are all just throwing out anecdotes, but the vast majority of people I worked with in government were A) hard workers, and B) overqualified for their positions, and C) highly educated/talented.
I think there is a disconnect here. Public employees--people who are actually employed by the government--have fixed, low salaries (relative to the tech sector). Contractors for the public sector--people employed by private companies--actually have pretty decent salaries. These two sets of people are different categories, but a lot of people hear "government" and may be failing to realize the distinction between actual government employees versus contract employees.
How can the government provide adequate technical oversight of its contractors if it doesn’t hire engineers? Answer: it can’t, and you can routinely see the results.
Again, why would a good engineer work for the government? If the government can’t and won’t hire engineers, how can they create informed requirements for contracts or provide technical oversight of their contractors? You can see this playing out in boondoggle after boondoggle. The government poorly specifies a contract, a contractor bids on the contract, the government changes requirements over and over because the lack of technical expertise implies they have no idea what they want, the contractor rakes in tons of money due to direction changes, and eventually the contractor delivers something shitty because the people at the government also had no idea how to evaluate whether the contractor was meeting milestones.
In terms of GS-15, their pay goes up to 170k, so its not like GS-15 step 1 is the end of the road. Federal employees have also been receiving above-inflation pay raises and COLA adjustments the last few years.
So why would a good engineer work for the government? Honestly, if pay is your only metric you use to choose your place of employment, then I would not expect them to. However, as I have mentioned, there are plenty of people in the world who choose their place of employment based on many factors other than compensation.
Is government work frustrating? Sure. I'm sure the same can be said of for the engineer developing a CRUD application and has a shitty senior engineer overseeing them. Government work can also be incredibly rewarding and unfortunately, the majority of the time you only hear about the government failures instead of its successes. The federal government issues in excess of 500 billion in contracts per year...I assure you, there are successes in there and I have seen some federal agencies that have implemented acquisition processes and development practices that are competitive with some SV companies.
I've not claimed that government can't do anything right, and I strongly believe in government. I do however believe that current public policy is designed to cause government to fail. Lots of contracts in that yearly $500 billion are successful, but things like the F-35 program, the Littoral Combat Ship, the Space Launch System, Healthcare.gov, the fuck ups in this article, and more are big enough that they eat pretty significantly into that $500 billion budget. The government has some serious issues procuring engineering work. Some pork politics certainly contribute, but lack of technical expertise at federal agencies is, I think, a significant factor.
I should probably clarify that there are some federal agencies that hire engineers as federal employees. For example, NSA, NASA, JPL, etc. To your point, they do have better success when it comes to engineering. However, they are also agencies that have a primary mission/function which requires it. For other agencies, it’s not all that easy for them to justify career engineering employees when the roles are tertiary functions. It’s not to say they don’t have them, but it is to say that they have far less of that expertise. That is why entities such as 18F and USDS exist though, to help fill that role.
While it seems like you are not keen on giving it a try, I highly encourage you to give government work a shot even if only on a temporary basis with somewhere like USDS or 18F. Only way to help make positive changes to the way government does business is through people with the drive and talent to do so. There is plenty of opportunity to influence those types of changes, even at lower ends of the employment hierarchy.
Appreciate the conversation and you offering your perspective!
Well, there's probably 100-200k engineers combined working at FAANG jobs, who have the option of the FAANG salary or the government salary. FAANG pays so /many/ paychecks that the expectation really is that high for people who can pass a FAANG interview. There are a lot of people who /can/ pass the interviews but choose not to, effectively taking a pay cut to go work on things they're passionate about; only a few of these end up working in 'boring' parts of government. The US Digital Service was meant to make it a broader/better path, though.
Your people description (B) is worth considering, too: I (personally) am unlikely to take a job I think I'm 'overqualified' for unless it's in a specific problem area I really, really care about. And 'overqualified' sounds near synonymous with 'few growth prospects': if the opportunities are there, why haven't they been taken? And if they aren't, why should I take a pay cut to work in a space with fewer opportunities for growth?
In terms of qualifications, people have different things that motivate them to work in certain fields/jobs. People value things other than money as well, such as power and influence, ability to impact change at scale few organizations can match, feelings they are contributing to a meaningful mission/cause, etc. It's not just about money and overqualification is many times because of the way career ladders work in government and the educational, training, internship opportunities the government pays/provides for that you are unlikely to experience in the private sector. Government will sponsor employees to work an internship in the U.S. Senate for 2+ years, or attend a postsecondary education at Georgetown/Harvard/GWU, etc. Not just for senior level employees, for mid-career ones.
I’m talking about actual government employees, not contractors. The actual government employees who manage those contracts are not paid well. You can see the results of this too in things like the F35 program where the government had no idea what it wanted and repeatedly redirected and added crazy requirements (to be fair, Lockheed is also incompetent).
You’re right though, painting even a majority of public employees as incompetent isn’t fair.
Aside from that, a contract manager/Contract Officer is typically not an engineer and if you're lucky, may be someone that can fill more of a product owner role. It's not really comparable in those terms.
F35 really isn't a great example of poor engineering talent, that is an example of a crap acquisition strategy in general and was pretty much destined to be problematic from the start due to politics, conflicting/competing requirements, etc. You could have hired the best engineers in the world and they would have likely ended with the same results, because the majority of the issues with the F35 had little to do with engineering.
He took a big paycut to start working for the state government but he has good benefits, good retirement, and normal hours that you can actually raise a family with. And while all of his peers have scattered the nation looking for jobs when natural gas prices crashed, he's still sitting pretty with his same steady job.
So there is a lot more than just salary to working for the government.
Yes. It was OK pay, but not better than market. Annual bonuses weren't a thing. There was no path for career advancement beyond senior engineer. The supposed stability was not nearly as good as you describe.
There's a bunch of reasons I stopped doing defense contracting.
The consultants have even worse incentives. The better they do the less they get paid. Meaning, it's better for them if the project drags on than delivering something on time.
Bonuses in most situations lead to a decrease in productivity.
https://hbr.org/1993/09/why-incentive-plans-cannot-work https://smallbusiness.chron.com/bonuses-affect-employees-wor... https://hbr.org/2017/03/research-how-incentive-pay-affects-e...
There's a ton of research out there on this. To simplify it basically if someone is doing mindless work like putting a cap on a bottle on an assembly line, then bonuses increase performance in the long term. But if they are doing complex work like writing software they decrease performance in the long term.
A GS-9, which is roughly a freshly-minted graduate with a Master's degree, starts at $45k/year, growing to about $60k/year (although this is also adjusted by locality). This is well below prevailing tech sector rates.
Relatedly, I think the government could probably save a ton of money with some in house technical talent to execute basic projects like the systems in this article rather than going through the crazy procurement process. It isn't clear to me that contractors are providing any added value to justify the added cost for their profit.
Step 2: Parent post
Step 3: Government is inefficient, inept, if not outright corrupt, we must gut it further! Goto Step 1.
The other day I was getting data from the USGS, and it was remarkable how well structured, sorted, searchable the data was, how it came in high quality, with a custom-built downloader applet that worked very nicely actoss multiple machines. I went from zero to complete solution in QGIS in one day. It's not all that bad.
Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.” -Milton Friedman
That was the last government work I ever did. I lasted about 3 months.
We have computer scientists who can make robust pure software systems with theoretical guarantees, and work well at scale. And we have political and administrative professionals who can converge on decisions and policies with actors with different motivations and rationality. But it's hard to do both really well at the same time, especially on the first try.
The government does not have much incentive to work efficiently because of use it or lose it budgeting. You ever notice how you only ever see stories of efficiency coming from cash strapped departments and poor cities? This is why
We don't want the government to have all the databases interlinked. There's too much potential for abuse and when you're talking about state or nation scale programs your "rare" edge cases result in tens of thousands or millions of people being shafted.
Which isn't to say that automated systems couldn't catch more of it, I just wonder what the scale is.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/15/florida-unem...
State and Federal employment records already exist with your social security number, address, employer address, employer ID number, and amount of taxes that have been withheld. I can retrieve my own copy of this record online from the IRS and my own state relatively easily.
Someone should not be able to [automatically] claim unemployment benefits for past income on which taxes have not been withheld, or estimated taxes have not been paid. That seems trivially fair. Even people making minimum wage will have payroll taxes withheld. Calculating an upper limit on the amount that can be processed automatically should therefore be trivial.
Next is the question of where to send the payment. DMVs cover a large percentage of the population. Beyond the DMV, there's voter registration, credit reports, address of record for where the last tax refund was sent, utility bills, phone records.
When I had a larger than typical refund last year, my state sent me a letter asking for copies of my and my wife's social security cards, passports, and utility bills before they would issue the refund. I felt that was pretty burdensome considering I was requesting the refund to the same exact bank account number which I had been paying them from for the last 5 years.
It's obvious the state is just totally incapable of running even the simplest of validation rules. It's just helicopter money dropping from the sky, and they don't really care who gets it, because it's not their money. It's not like anyone is going to lose their job or not get re-elected because of it.
The fact that's it's so easy to funnel all this money out of the country is a pretty wild indictment of FinCEN and the like.