I spent a couple of years with the USDS (https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/). USDS, along with 18F, are largely responsible for login.gov, as well as a lot of

I spent a couple of years with the USDS (https://usds.gov/ https://usds.gov/). USDS, along with 18F, are largely responsible for login.gov, as well as a lot of other really great projects. Overall fantastic experience if you're open to an adventure! I could probably spend a week telling war stories, but the main takeaway is that you can't look at government as just another sector waiting to be brought up to speed. Government is an entire industry unto itself, with incentives that seem fully alien to anyone from the private sector. Money doesn't flow according to the laws of capitalist physics, but by byzantine congressional allocation. Understanding how things actually get done requires a ton of time, networking, study, and empathy. Career government techies are extremely risk adverse (for a lot of very good reasons). If you want to make an impact, it helps to be able to take on a lot of the risk that nobody else wants to. For me, that meant promoting open-source alternatives to various entrenched products (cough, MS Access, cough) and accepting all the blame if the higher-ups don't like it. For this reason, it helps not to look at this as a career. Going up against the entrenched interests can be frustratingly hard. It feels like everything is subtly working against you. Or, not so subtly- On more than one occasion I had teammates get singled out by the federal IT press. Somehow I managed to stay anonymous, but the threat was there. Fortunately, I felt a strong sense of support from my bosses, as well as a lot of righteous fury from seeing so many failed, hundred million dollar projects that could have just been a simple web app. Granted, it's been about five years since I was in government. I would be curious to know if things are different nowadays :)