3 ms·

I feel it still says something about government employees because one can pretty much take it as a given that the standard employee pool is basically incapable

I feel it still says something about government employees because one can pretty much take it as a given that the standard employee pool is basically incapable of building relatively basic e-commerce websites.

medellin 4y ago
Being someone who just happened into a government job for my first one out of college that holds true in my experience. No good employee stayed in the job more than two years and most only one before they got so sick of the politics and bike shedding. The government gets good employees it just loses them all very quickly when it fails to compensate them as well as provide them with meaningful work.
mjhay 4y ago
Well yeah, what do you expect when Congress and the GSA sets pay for pay for developers at levels far below the private sector? I've worked for two different federal agencies in the past, and both were more efficient and lower BS than most private-sector jobs I've worked at. This wasn't IT or development, of course. It's just taken as a truism that government is always inefficient and bureaucratic, but the average ossified corporation such as Google is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic just the same. They also aren't necessarily that bad to interact with. I'd much rather go to the DMV than interact with Comcast.
giaour 4y ago
The standard government employee is a project manager whose main job is overseeing contractor work. Funding cycles make it nearly impossible to hire in house staff to actually do work, and there is firm political opposition to the federal government doing anything on its own.
- mjhay 4y ago
  I've known some people who did contract work for the DoD like how you describe. They reported to DoD employees and were otherwise indistinguishable from actual DoD employes. However, there was some company that did their W2s, and took a cut almost as large as their salaries.

medellin 4y ago

Being someone who just happened into a government job for my first one out of college that holds true in my experience. No good employee stayed in the job more than two years and most only one before they got so sick of the politics and bike shedding. The government gets good employees it just loses them all very quickly when it fails to compensate them as well as provide them with meaningful work.

mjhay 4y ago

Well yeah, what do you expect when Congress and the GSA sets pay for pay for developers at levels far below the private sector? I've worked for two different federal agencies in the past, and both were more efficient and lower BS than most private-sector jobs I've worked at. This wasn't IT or development, of course. It's just taken as a truism that government is always inefficient and bureaucratic, but the average ossified corporation such as Google is wildly inefficient and bureaucratic just the same. They also aren't necessarily that bad to interact with. I'd much rather go to the DMV than interact with Comcast.

giaour 4y ago

The standard government employee is a project manager whose main job is overseeing contractor work. Funding cycles make it nearly impossible to hire in house staff to actually do work, and there is firm political opposition to the federal government doing anything on its own.

mjhay 4y ago
I've known some people who did contract work for the DoD like how you describe. They reported to DoD employees and were otherwise indistinguishable from actual DoD employes. However, there was some company that did their W2s, and took a cut almost as large as their salaries.