Everyone I know working FedRAMP jobs is prior military/g-level.

So, some people don't lie, say they smoked pot in high school and none of them make it to the next step.

I had a twitter convo last year or pre-x whenever with the CTO of some org I can't remember (I don't think centcom, something much smaller) and he mentioned that they've lightened up quite a bit, or at least his program which was a softwar engineering group was more lenient. He was looking for engineers on via twitter on his official account.

So maybe that's loosening up here thankfully.

Well, there is the other way, but, as we know, never ever that would happen.

The "let's be managed and only hire developers" is a huge myth. All large organizations involve tons of "cloud engineers" or "devops" depending on how they want to call them and are just sysadmins with a different name and a bigger paycheck.

Having actual datacenters doesn't add a ton of complexity and datacenters themselves are often managed by people who don't even have an engineer paycheck. The main difference between being on prem vs cloud is you have to plan (how many servers/storage/network equipment you have to buy and replace on the following year) and pay for stuff (like space, racks) more in advance + take into accounts delays in delivery. This is where cloud makes the job much faster for companies but given the slow pace at which gov stuff happen usually I don't think this is a problem for them.

Remember it's not just about being able to find one single engineer - then they become key-person risk. You need multiple engineers to be able to handle the loss of that engineer, either temporarily (vacation) or permanently (suddenly hit by a bus). Then you end up having a team of DBAs. Then you have functional rather than feature teams. Then you need multiple managers to align to get anything done, and have internal politics.

Being able to consume databases as a product has non-trivial value.