Been there, done that. Worked at a government/university job for about 2 years. Very few people there cared about programming or software whatsoever. It's hard to stay motivated about anything when no one around you is fired up or cares about being there.
Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.
While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.
My experience working for a gigantic government contractor was just like you describe.
I cannot emphasize enough how soul crushing it is to work in this kind of environment. You cannot just put in your hours, go home, and work on something interesting. The apathetic monotony is instilled into your being. It grows inside of you during the day, and you take it home with you. You can't just context switch from 8 hours of mental atrophy to a motivated and productive state. Sometimes I would come home and be useless for anything but lying down and staring at the ceiling. I only worked there for a year but I was turning into a zombie.
If you go in thinking you can help rock the boat and make some changes, be careful. You may find that the changes happen to you instead. The dark side is powerful.
Yeah, I worked as well for goverment, or more specifically for military. Even most people that worked in the same department were civilans as well, they still weren't that qualified for the job(or cared).
I took like 5 years of meetings or committees to actually launch a website, and you were tied to vendors that were selected for the job like 10years before, and even it was clear that they didn't do a very good job, no-one cared or wanted to change. I only lasted a year there, I was too horrified to actually becoming one of them.
So I would guess that you can't say that goverment job is always better than private, or other way around. In both cases you might want to check out the environment beforehand. There actually are some interesting jobs that only exist in public sector and some of them are quite highly competative.
"Let me be clear, this is a catastrophic development for our country. When the private sector can no longer compete with the public sector, you know that society is on its way out."
What? Of course the government outcompetes in terms of job security. I would too if I get a dollar for every three you made. But that's where the outcompetition ends. Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work. You can stay in your cage where Farmer feeds you on the clock; those of us who have a passion for what we do will continue to live in the wild.
Related is PG's essay on the nature of the employee in a startup as opposed to in a corporation, although in this case the contrast is between the private and public sectors.
What? ... Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Wake up and look around: the government built first computers, your beloved Lisp, freaking Internet, not to mention sending man to space. Most universities are public. Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.
Government, believe it or not, will be the one who solves the energy problem, will eventually cure cancer and AIDS and hopefully build a true AI, while entrepreneurial types will continue "throwing sheep" on facebooks.
Inefficient? Yes. Non-innovative? No. And WTF is general business competitiveness?
It's not some amazing feat of innovation that somebody thought to hook up computers to talk to each other. Give somebody enough power to confiscate money from the people, and monopolize tech research, and they might eventually come up with something useful.
Of course, who's to say private industry research wouldn't have been able to come up with something that's even more useful, had the government not monopolized these functions? They might have been able to come up with networking protocols without such serious security holes as in today.
Government "monopolized" these functions? Does it mean there is an established mechanism that discourages innovation in private sector, i.e. punishes innovators with higher taxes or imprisonment or what?
Hey, Microsoft and Apple have tons of cash and do nothing interesting with it. The reason behind 'sudden' GM's death isn't shitty cars, they've been shitty for a long time. GM is dying because instead of trying to build a decent car business it essentially transformed itself into a bank (GM Financial) which found nothing better to do with their cash than "invest" them in guess what.
Now look at startups: have you ever seen a TechCrunch announcement that was in any way memorable? I see nothing but a never-ending conversion of MySQL tables into HTML pages, or wrapping OSS projects into HTML/JS UIs hoping to get rich quick: the distance of their "R&D trajectories" are measured in months and working prototypes are expected within weeks from the first napkin drawing.
Now look at Google, a poster child for "SV magic". Google is a creation of two Stanford students, i.e. an academia project turned into business (just like Symbolics and DEC had grown out of MIT). Entrepreneurship or corporate R&D had nothing to do with Google's success what-so-ever.
Businesses don't give a shit about innovation, technology and science. Their goal has always been quick profits, for which there always seems be some kind of a scheme to take a ride on. Look what IBM, HP, AT&T and Xerox, former think tanks, transformed themselves into. IBM especially grosses me out with their "we're a services company" bullshit. So is my pet sitter.
It is corporate never-ending search for increased efficiency that essentially kills innovation because the process of inventing is terribly inefficient by its nature: it's unpredictable, cannot be put on schedule, you can't budget for it and the outcome isn't guaranteed: find me one MBA who'll like any of the above.
I've never been especially smooth with my writing, given that English isn't my first tongue, but Phillip Greenspun has:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg
It monopolizes these functions by crowding out any private investment there might have been. Private companies like AT&T/Bell Labs and IBM used to do LOTS of research. Now it's all in the realm of the government, thanks to their massive expenditures in the area.
Business innovates because there are huge profits to be made in making people's lives easier and better off. Government doesn't innovate. It merely saps innovation that would have occurred in the private sector.
thank you for bringing some sanity to this discussion. I read hacker news as an escape from the looters and moochers of the world. I hope this remains a place for people who produce and love doing it.
Please, please, someone just tell me, why are so many people convinced that taxes are outright theft? I can understand anger over how it's all spent, but I don't understand the concept that every year some guy with a badge mugs us and takes one third of our income.
* I love Lisp? While I don't "love" any one language, most of my favorite projects were developed by open source communities.
* Of course the government will do all of this: It's placed itself at the center of motion. Monopolization doesn't indicate superiority.
* General business competitiveness: A business typically has to take other things that I didn't mention into account to be viable. I wasn't prepared to enumerate all of the differences between how a government institution and a for-profit business are run. It's no mystery that being beholden to paying customers or even a community that votes with its feet is more challenging than appealing to the many forces that drive government. And obviously, we're well past the point where American citizens throwing off the bridle is a possibility.
> Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.
Keep in mind that all the money of the public sector comes from the private sector... and ultimately ends up in some pockets in the private sector as well.
depends on what you really want out of a job. if you want security and less stress gov't is the way to go. but you're also going to find people that don't care about quality, "doing it right", the latest technologies, learning, working hard, or sometimes working at all. you deal with the biggest bureaucracy in america... working for the gov't seems to be the opposite of the values purported by hn posts
What you just said applies to almost any business with more than 1K employees. I'd say any programmer considering a career at General Electric (random pick) is insane. It's a government job without government benefits.
I have friends in software development at military contractors in the area. Apparently, after you work for three years you get "tenure" and you receive France-style job security. Since its more trouble after that to fire you than to just pay you, the worst that can happen for incompetence is that you get left alone with nothing to do. Also, if you leave, you are always guaranteed a spot if you choose to return.
Nothing is good for job security like being removed from the discipline of the market. Hook up to the public teat and you can feed for life.
I understand you're being general, but as a specific example, my office is the opposite of that. (I work for federal gov't). A lot of extremely intelligent, diligent and competent people whose interests would belong right at home here.
a) government job as described in the post
b) corporate job as described in the post
c) start-up job
Unless you are getting equity there is probably no reason whatsoever to work in the private sector.
the beauty of government jobs is that you work for 20 years, and then you can retire, where you get 50% of your paycheck as your pension.
I know for many wokraholics the mentality is that money solves everything, but most people will elect to get a slightly lower salary in exchange for a higher quality of life.
Except for that its exceedingly difficult to accomplish anything of worth without some political influence outside of your sections control. Doesn't matter how much buy in you can get from your management, you're still in the end at the mercy of someone else's political whims.
I was a civil servant for awhile. Politics frequently got in the way of our department's work. Political initiatives would interrupt the ones we were working on and would frequently change based on whatever they felt like legislating that session or whomever was newly appointed. Not every department would be like that, but in a lot of cases there's too much outside influence by politicians to get any real work done.
I'm curious - why use the word "politics", why not say "democracy"? i.e. "Democracy frequently got in the way of our department's work. Democratic initiatives would interrupt ones we were working on ..."
I point this out because our society often denounces politics but enshrines democracy. Yet no one can logically explain the difference between the two. It's a fascinating cognitive dissonance. Perhaps you can explain?
The problem is one of scope. Democracy directly manifests the "will of the people" only at the ballot.
While there are second-order effects, politicians are largely free to ignore aforementioned "will" during their day-to-day routine. Thus they generally spend time manuvering and manipulating for an increase in personal power - which is what we call "politics".
"Politics" exits even without "democracy". It exists in dictatorships, in offices, even within families.
It is therefore completely correct to enshrine democracy while denouncing politics. Does this make sense? :-)
EDIT: When I say families - I am referring to "joint families" (large family groups consisting of a matriach/patriach and multiple sons/daughters/uncles/aunts and sundry). While this is not un-common in India - I felt I'd better explain it to everyone else.
What is this mysterious "will of the people"? How is it measured except through the politicians the people elect? If the politician relies on polling to make every decision, is that "democracy"? Or should we have direct democracy with each decision being subject to a popular referendum? Although, even a referendum is not the "will of the people" - it's just the will of the majority. Perhaps then we should demand complete 100% consensus for every decision enacted?
As a reader of hacker news, I assume you like to think of yourself as a person of science and reason. But when you summon phrases such as "will of the people" you have left that world. The phrase is empty - it provides no information, and contributes nothing to the discussion. Would you mind more precisely defining what you mean by "will of the people"?
Let me give you an example. In the UK Gordon Brown was the Chancellor. The will of the people was that he managed the economy and that's all. The will of Gordon Brown however was to be Prime Minister, so he used his role as Chancellor to take power over unrelated departments by manipulating their budgets. That strategy worked pretty well for him. It's not working so well for we the people right now.
I'm still not sure what "will of the people" means or how one determines it. Again, it helps to speak in terms of observable phenomena rather than ambiguous concepts. Let me attempt to phrase your sentence a bit more precisely:
"A majority of British voters cast votes for Gordon Brown under the expectation that he would manage the economy, and that's all. Instead he used his role to grab power, at the expense of the people"
Is this a fair paraphrasing?
I can then rephrase your original sentence:
"Democracy is when elected officials act in a way that voters approve of. Politics is when elected officials act in their own self interest, in a way contrary to what voters want"
Is that it? Or let me try a second, different, way of paraphrasing:
"Democracy is when elected officials act in a way that benefits the public good ( whether the public realizes it or not). Politics is when an elected official acts in a way the benefits himself, regardless of the public good"
Is one of these summaries fair? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just trying to nail down precisely what you are trying to say.
"I'm just trying to nail down precisely what you are trying to say."
He's trying to say he doesn't like Gordon Brown.
re: your original point, I think in this context, by 'Democracy' people mean "honest politicians working towards ends they think their constituents would approve" and by 'Politics' people mean "politicians doing (probably dirty) work, driven by all kinds of pressures, often self-interested ones".
It's a difference in intent. To some extent it's the difference between murder and manslaughter. Or perhaps between murder and execution.
It's true that I don't, but he does make an excellent example of a politician that put his own career/personal glory ahead of his duties to the electorate.
He seems less legacy obsessed to me than Tony Blair.
Large chunks of the UK media have had it in for him following some initial mis-steps (the will he/won't he election-call thing comes to mind).
As far as I can tell, their story then became the self-fulfilling "he's a lame duck who can't manage the media".
I don't like a lot of things the Labour govt (Blair and Brown) have done/are doing, but I don't think Brown stands out an as example of political self-interest.
When you don't love what you do, you work for the government. I care about my retirement too but if that is your end goal, then you clearly don't care about the work you do. All you want to do is just go to work, come home, retire and die.
Sorry, my generalization was meant to be specific to technical jobs in the government (with the exception of NASA and DARPA).
While I don't dispute the auditor is performing a vital function for the government and loves his job, the role of a technical person and auditor cannot be compared. In his case the government supplies the auditor with more than just a salary and security, they provide him power that can't be had elsewhere.
For a technical person, the government is the hole you go into to die because you no longer love what you do.
Oh, I don't think that's true. My dad worked as an EE for the Navy for 35 years, and he got to do cutting edge stuff with sonar, oversee computer installations on submarines, etc. And then he retired at 61.5.
No...he isn't a 'tax collector' - he is a head auditor for a region of the country. He has caught some Superman 3 style schemes at major institutions. He really is doing a great service because he is incredibly smart and hard working and chooses to use those skills in the public sector.
What would making more money provide him? He has his dream job and job security.
Given how deeply some of the state and local governments are in the hole in this financial crisis, has anyone given any serious thought as to how safe government pensions really are? The two possible scenarios that worry me the most about our current situation are commercial real estate problems being as bad as residential and the failure of a large state or municipality (e.g. Michigan or Detroit) to be able to meet its debt and pension obligations, which might set off a chain reaction in the municipal bond market of the magnitude that we saw in the commercial paper market after the failure of Lehman. Is there a backstop similar to PBGC available for public sector plans (couldn't find one with a few minutes of research) or is the Federal government the only possible source of help?
The state and local government pensions I'm familiar with should actually be safer than most pension systems -- in theory, the government agency makes its required contributions to the trust fund at the time the employee is paid. The bigger state and local pension systems are some of the largest institutional investors, so their fates are more tied to the market than their member governments.
As with any other pension system, if a lot of the trust's holdings are in bonds, and those bonds end up in default, that would be a problem.
The government pensions schemes are facing the same problem as Social Security -- people living and collecting benefits longer, health care costs going up (for those that include long term health benefits), and so on.
"The state and local government pensions I'm familiar with should actually be safer than most pension systems"
Considering the fact that many defined benefit programs look about as safe as ticking time bombs, this doesn't particularly reassure me. In addition, there is the problem of actuarial assumptions. I remember a New York state actuary getting in trouble because he was being paid by the state labor unions earlier this year and came across this article while I was trying refresh my memory of the details: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/21/business/pension.php
Government job isn't all bad. For folks like us there are many opportunities. Do you want graduate school paid for? Scholarship for service is a great program. I know the lab I was at would give civilians the options to spend 2 years in residence working towards their PhD with their civilian pay. Granted 2 years isn't enough time to do the whole thing, but you can get courses paid for (and the time to take them) while working. Sometimes taking the courses is considered part of your job. Most of my MSc was paid for this way. Government benefits are great--the BS the gov employees have to deal with is what makes it painful.
Depending where you are at, there is an opportunity to make an impact and do very interesting work. There are also entrepreneurial opportunities in the government: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395714
I've worked at a government job and it was one of the worst experiences of my professional career. As a summer student, I outperformed the guy who had that job the other 10.5 months of the year. And still I have never been paid so much for doing so little.
But I've also seen exactly how meaningless the private sector can be. While it may satisfy my desire for fast-paced, stimulating work, ultimately a lot of it is, well, stupid. The fact that you can get to work with some exciting new tech obscures the fact that 50% of projects will fail, and of those, even fewer will ever matter to anyone or even bring a smile to anyone's face. And many of the ones that do succeed are often patently immoral, or at best amoral.
Meanwhile, capitalism today is run for the benefit of managers. Even if you're lucky enough to work for a successful company, expect the CEO and VPs to reap the lion's share of the rewards, and fire you (or your friends) at Wall Street's whim.
I guess I'm saying that I can see this guy's point of view. Gee-whiz tech is one thing, but stability does matter, and some parts of the government are doing good work. I know a woman who makes a good, stable living generating stats out of the census, and also creating web tools for people to do the same. Consequently she's doing something good for Americans of all kinds, the scale creates interesting challenges, and there's even something to look forward to after it's all over. Can you imagine it?
Right now I have a great job, but even we can't completely escape the relentless stupidity that is the software business today.
75th Percentile for Sr. Developers with a strong framework experience in the valley is $150K right now. Plus the options upside (Which should hopefully come through every third or fourth company you work for).
Yes, during a death march, you do tend to stay working after 5:00 PM, and possibly even work on weekends.
But, once you get into year three or four, a properly managed software shop should see those pushes for just three or four weeks a year, and it's not uncommon to see engineers putting in 30 hour work weeks the rest of the year.
Of course the whole roller coaster of layoffs is still pretty valid - but if you are a good developer, jobs are pretty easy to come by once you've built up your network, and you can treat the off time as vacation. There is a reason why recruiters make $20K-25K (minimum) for tracking down high performance developers - they are hard to find.
If you are an average developer, having to deal with 6 month to 2 year sabbaticals might suck, and I can see why the government job approach might make sense.
My conclusion: Rock stars should look to being principal developers for private concerns, others should consider all their options based on their needs.
A government job is a wonderful thing for folks who want to start their own business. The hours are short and the work won't mentally exhaust you, and the pay will put a roof over your head and food on the table. After you get home at 5:30 you can spend a few hours working on your side project.
Then if you quit 2-3 years down the road, everyone will be better off: you'll have a job you'll enjoy, and the government will have gotten 2-3 years of labor out of you for a song and won't have to pay your absurdly generous pension benefits.
I've been a full-time government contractor, and let me tell you: it gives you plenty of time to work on interesting side projects.
But seriously, I hope that the Obama administration ratchets up the level of accountability when it comes to federal use of technology. There is so much redundancy that could be eliminated and, at the same time, so much more work that could be accomplished.
I don't have a problem with redundancy- it's like saying we don't need Microsoft and Apple. A little diversity goes a long way- it's the natural selection based approach. The real problem is it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the most connected. So many competing systems survive because of the government attitude of never admitting a mistake- ever.
What I do have a problem with is the government's current obsession with buying COTS software and making me "integrate it" and claiming it's easier than doing it ourselves. Millions and millions down the drain on licenses for Sharepoint, Oracle, and other crap for which I can download better alternatives for free. Source code we can own as a country and share across agencies. It's criminal that it's so hard to make that work.
Wow, man. Are you my past self speaking from an alternate universe? Never admitting a mistake, buying/integrating before building, worthless COTS licensing and contracts and dead-end projects everywhere. Yup. That's exactly what I remember from gov't contracting 5 years ago!
shudder... talk about being a cog in the machine. Unless you're shooting for an early one, working for retirement just makes no sense. Just becoming steadily more lazy until I die? Whatever it is you are wanting to do after you retire, find a way to do it now.
The way this is written disgusts me. I feel like a salesman is telling me to jump off a cliff because he personally values retirement, a 9-5 job, and safe/comfortable pensions.
I'm sorry but not everyone on this forum shares your ideologies. Not everyone is in it for money, comfort, or security. It requires sacrifice to do something meaningful with your life sometimes. If you can't pull an 80 hour week, then startups are definitely not for you.
No offense or anything meant by this response. I'm just saying, I felt like the writer was trying to impose his beliefs on me. In an annoying sort of way.
Ugh, that's all I have to say. This is exactly the kind of person the government doesn't need working for it; ie: someone who's only concern is their own job security.
The government needs employees who are selfless and would readily set their bosses chair on fire if it meant doing the right thing by the American people.
The government needs employees who are selfless and would readily set their bosses chair on fire if it meant doing the right thing by the American people.
Might it not be better if these people worked in the private sector, where their efforts could have more effect?
Sure, but, someone has to work for the government. When the government contractors come calling whom would you rather have sitting on the other side of the table. Some fool who's only goal is to get through the day with the least amount of hassle or someone who isn't afraid to evaluate an idea on it's merits and call BS if that's what it is.
That isn't to say that that person wouldn't be making some sort of personal sacrifice in terms of either salary or work environment. I mean, doesn't it worry anyone else that if all the countries best and brightest minds are out there building the next Twitter we might have the B team working on things that have a far greater chance of effecting us all in the long term?
Like what, another buggy facebook app or social site? The software running on the FAA flight control systems, DOD command and comms systems, and satellite navigations outclass pretty much anything I've seen from the startup space in terms of quality.
The software running on the FAA flight control systems, DOD command and comms systems, and satellite navigations outclass pretty much anything I've seen from the startup space in terms of quality.
It sounds glorious, doesn't it?
I wrote software for submarines. The innovation is outsourced and is done long before these systems start development. It's all about integration and stifling quality control. More effort is spent on generating paperwork than on developing the system. A corporate government contractor will bend over to get a contract, letting the customer dictate the details of the design (for example: specifying that CORBA must be used for all inter-process communication). The "quality" of the software comes from taking horrible code and beating it into submission with QA over the course of months. The user interfaces that come out of this process make me pity the poor sailors.
Coming up with these impressive technologies and then integrating them into real systems are two completely different activities, separated temporally by about a decade. The glory rests with the former only.
Most of that is written by contractors, not government employees. And for most startups the money they could spend training programmers and investing in methods and process is better spent getting something, anything, out there, on the street producing revenue.
What percentage - by whatever measurement you want, lines of code, man hours, whatever - do those make up of all software written by government organizations?
If you like the idea of making something people will use, but are scared of working for the government, consider making a tool that the government has to take over.
You have already received rich rewards for the initial publication of these documents, and releasing this data back into the public domain would significantly grow your market and thus be an investment in your future.
This seems really unlikely. It looks to me like Westlaw makes money by restricting access to information; I don't think they'd make more money if they had open access, though it would of course be very nice of them.
i'd just like to point out that my state government has advertised for some agile rails jobs. "good" government jobs exist (assuming those were good jobs, i didn't apply or work in them so i can't say for sure).
I had a government gig for 12 months and I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Just because the author worked 80 hour weeks and now works a precise 40 does NOT mean you should work for the government. If you thought private sector bureaucracy is bad, just wait until you work for the gov. Plus working for the government quadruples the chances that you'll be working with completely lazy, incompetent morons (not exactly the kind of people I want running my health care, but that is a whole other ball of wax)
Avoid the government like the plague. If you private sector gig asks you to work in a manner you don't want to, find another company, but don't think about the gov.
The CPI and GDP deflator already dramatically understate inflation. You think they won't do whatever the hell they want with the index when they have little choice financially?
Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.
While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.