

Advice to programmers: Get a government job - bokonist
http://commentlog.org/bid/4431/Advice-to-programmers-Get-a-government-job

======
larrykubin
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.

~~~
sofal
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.

------
thomasmallen
_"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.

~~~
old-gregg
_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_?

~~~
darjen
Ever hear of the broken window fallacy? You should seriously look into it. It
applies to everything you say the government accomplished.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy>

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.

~~~
old-gregg
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>

~~~
darjen
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.

~~~
old-gregg
_Private companies like AT &T/Bell Labs and IBM used to do LOTS of research._

Most tech companies used to do more research during the Cold War, because The
Customer was paying well. Should I add more?

~~~
darjen
no, that's quite alright, you've added enough nonsense to the thread
already...

------
matthavener
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

~~~
old-gregg
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.

~~~
Prrometheus
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.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I hear stories like this over and over again. It's disgusting what 3 months of
my labor per year goes to.

------
nolanbrown23
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.

~~~
mrtron
Absolutely disagree with the generalization.

A friend is an auditor for the gov. He routinely gets offers for 5x salary
from clients he is auditing (illegally).

Why does he do it? Because he loves what he does. He feels he is doing
something necessary and honourable for his country.

~~~
nolanbrown23
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.

~~~
pmorici
You don't think there are technical problems unique to government that might
interest some people?

------
bwd
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?

~~~
jaredg
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.

~~~
bwd
"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>

------
raffi
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>

------
neilk
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.

------
ghshephard
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.

------
patio11
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.

------
jcromartie
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.

~~~
mattmcknight
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.

~~~
jcromartie
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!

------
keefe
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.

------
Anon84
This might be the answer to a previous post...
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394609>

------
jmtame
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.

~~~
gaius
Read the article to the end. He concludes by stating that if all this is
possible, the economy is fucked.

~~~
jmtame
Right, it's such a bad thing, yet he encourages everyone to do it. That makes
sense.

~~~
gaius
That's a situation created by perverse incentives.

------
pmorici
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.

~~~
pg
_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?

~~~
pmorici
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?

------
Dilpil
Unless of course you actually want to produce quality software.

~~~
aswanson
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.

~~~
sofal
_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.

~~~
dgabriel
Did you work for NUWC? I think they use BBN for most of their contract needs,
and BBN is pretty quality conscious.

------
sachinag
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.

Here's the wonderful history of Carl Malamud doing this with the SEC EDGAR
database and his current work on PACER:
[http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/carl-malamud-
ta.ht...](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/carl-malamud-ta.html)

~~~
byrneseyeview
From the article:

 _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.

------
mattmaroon
What is this 'pension' thing he speaks of? It sounds much like my IRA, except
it can somehow be lost.

------
noodle
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).

------
viggity
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.

------
kingkongrevenge
> I shall be 63, my birthday, and retire with Social Security and a very
> secure pension

This guy is remarkably naive about the long term solvency of the government.

~~~
mgornick
Either that or his few hundred a month pension might buy him a gum ball at the
rate the US is printing money.

~~~
eru
Aren't government pensions inflation indexed?

~~~
kingkongrevenge
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?

------
kiplinger
f government jobs. This guy is a loser.

------
kiplinger
This guy is part of the problem, a loser who wants to bloat the system. What
will this idiot do when the taxpayers revolt and he loses his cush job?

Bitch and moan about "budget cuts" like all the other hacks.

