Speaking as a technical person who worked for government, one of the most frustrating things was not pay, I am a simple man. What was frustrating was the GARBAGE tech we had to deal with. I'm talking 5+ year old windows versions, crap peripherals and desktops, shitty offices in ugly buildings, super intermittent connections to the data that always go down, throttled data-centers by incompetent SQL pulls (I was guilty of this starting out, too)...the list goes on and on. Compare this to other places, where you can actually code in comfort, can actually solve more problems because you're not constantly derailed or demoralized by government's rusty and slow systems...