4 ms·

It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

by JPKab 13y ago

It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door. The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth. The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently). It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.

dfc 13y ago
There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
- dfxm12 13y ago
  the parent post seems to be referring to bidding for & working with the federal government on government contracts.
  - dfc 13y ago
    The sentence is: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful." The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
    - enoch_r 13y ago
      It's similar to the sentence "Bob got a new girlfriend, but she is awful." "It" refers to "the Federal side."
      - dfc 13y ago
        Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
- cowsandmilk 13y ago
  I read "it" as a pronoun, not as "information technology"
  - dfc 13y ago
    Me too, I just can not figure out what the pronoun refers to. I am not sure why my request for clarification was down voted. I appreciated the comment and wanted to make sure I understood everything the OP was saying.
- evilduck 13y ago
  Yes. Been there, done that. Never again. Federal government consulting firms hire warm bodies at the lowest price possible. They are the people who employ the college students from Java shops (because a degree is a must, of course) who barely learn Java and then grow up to never touch another programming language in their life. Knowing anything from MS or Oracle is double plus good for your resume. You're totally replaceable to them and treated accordingly. Anyone competent or specialized is generally hired as a subcontractor to the main contractor and not by the government itself. Government IT employees are nigh-unfireable and they know it. They're about 50% people who've transferred in from other Government positions because they know it's easy or they're former contractors who join the government so they have a stable job. The government managers who vet your deliverables and the upper managers who make contract decisions, well, they're just the previous technically incompetent people who've stuck around long enough to get promoted up. As the individual contractor, contracts are usually 1-3 years so you're constantly always up for being laid off or moved to a different contract. Your company is notoriously stingy, but that's mostly because they're not paying you for competitive skills, they're paying you because butts-in-seats means they get their lucrative contract rate that's at least 4x more than they're paying you. Since only behemoths of companies can even afford to try to land federal contracts, your employer has a large amount of corporate bureaucracy you have to deal with and that sucks... then you're sent to a government facility to work, where you get to deal with government bureaucracy on top of your internal crap too. As a contractor, between both organizations you'll get to take hours upon hours of totally useless 'computer safety, ethics and public responsibility trainings' which are mostly written so 4 year olds can understand them. The government technology you work with is generally 5-10 years behind the curve if they even pretend to maintain something. As late as 2010 I was working on a J2EE app trying to migrate it to Java 5. It was stored in Visual Source Safe 6, and their development shop was totally crippled by what was essentially "God objects" and file locking. Too many developers, too many chokepoints in code. I've spent more than 1 day of my life walking around a building asking if people really needed a certain file locked. Oh, and many government employees worked 9-40 compressed schedules and are out on Mondays or Fridays, so you'd better not need to write to a file except on Tues-Thursdays, even if it is critical to meeting a deliverable deadline.

by JPKab 13y ago

dfc 13y ago

There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?

dfxm12 13y ago
the parent post seems to be referring to bidding for & working with the federal government on government contracts.
- dfc 13y ago
  The sentence is: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful." The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
  - enoch_r 13y ago
    It's similar to the sentence "Bob got a new girlfriend, but she is awful." "It" refers to "the Federal side."
    - dfc 13y ago
      Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
cowsandmilk 13y ago
I read "it" as a pronoun, not as "information technology"
- dfc 13y ago
  Me too, I just can not figure out what the pronoun refers to. I am not sure why my request for clarification was down voted. I appreciated the comment and wanted to make sure I understood everything the OP was saying.
evilduck 13y ago
Yes. Been there, done that. Never again. Federal government consulting firms hire warm bodies at the lowest price possible. They are the people who employ the college students from Java shops (because a degree is a must, of course) who barely learn Java and then grow up to never touch another programming language in their life. Knowing anything from MS or Oracle is double plus good for your resume. You're totally replaceable to them and treated accordingly. Anyone competent or specialized is generally hired as a subcontractor to the main contractor and not by the government itself. Government IT employees are nigh-unfireable and they know it. They're about 50% people who've transferred in from other Government positions because they know it's easy or they're former contractors who join the government so they have a stable job. The government managers who vet your deliverables and the upper managers who make contract decisions, well, they're just the previous technically incompetent people who've stuck around long enough to get promoted up. As the individual contractor, contracts are usually 1-3 years so you're constantly always up for being laid off or moved to a different contract. Your company is notoriously stingy, but that's mostly because they're not paying you for competitive skills, they're paying you because butts-in-seats means they get their lucrative contract rate that's at least 4x more than they're paying you. Since only behemoths of companies can even afford to try to land federal contracts, your employer has a large amount of corporate bureaucracy you have to deal with and that sucks... then you're sent to a government facility to work, where you get to deal with government bureaucracy on top of your internal crap too. As a contractor, between both organizations you'll get to take hours upon hours of totally useless 'computer safety, ethics and public responsibility trainings' which are mostly written so 4 year olds can understand them. The government technology you work with is generally 5-10 years behind the curve if they even pretend to maintain something. As late as 2010 I was working on a J2EE app trying to migrate it to Java 5. It was stored in Visual Source Safe 6, and their development shop was totally crippled by what was essentially "God objects" and file locking. Too many developers, too many chokepoints in code. I've spent more than 1 day of my life walking around a building asking if people really needed a certain file locked. Oh, and many government employees worked 9-40 compressed schedules and are out on Mondays or Fridays, so you'd better not need to write to a file except on Tues-Thursdays, even if it is critical to meeting a deliverable deadline.