1. I'm working with an amazing team. Experience has taught me that there's no amount of money worth working with a bad one. 2. I have a disabled spouse and t

1. I'm working with an amazing team. Experience has taught me that there's no amount of money worth working with a bad one. 2. I have a disabled spouse and the public sector has offered quite a bit of flexibility around this (e.g. work from home pre-COVID). 3. Everything is customer focused. No dark patterns or data collection. Everything is open source. 4. Work I can believe in. I've worked on everything from drug delivery to environmentally safe fire exstinguishers to solar tech. Comparatively, the last private sector job I interviewed with would have mostly served was building b2b middleware for crypto firms. 5. Variety. I get to touch a huge range of tech, so the job never gets boring. Among the tasks on my annual review for next year, I'm touching 3D rendering, parsers, GPU computing (not CUDA - can't guarantee the users have an NVIDIA card), computational chemistry, and transitioning our GUI code to a declarative framework. I declared myself a C++ developer, but I once had a single day where I had to edit code in eight different languages (C++, Python, Racket, Tcl, Labview, IDL Wave, Mathematica, Labtalk) and I've worked with at least as many more in production. 6. The pay isn't that big of a difference. My last job offer in the private sector was £50k, but there were enough caveats that it would have worked out about the same in the end.