I was hired into 18F last year. I work out of San Francisco, where we have a team of about 15 working in the center of the city (UN Plaza). It's the second-larg

I was hired into 18F last year. I work out of San Francisco, where we have a team of about 15 working in the center of the city (UN Plaza). It's the second-largest office; the largest is DC, but we have smaller offices in Chicago and NYC, as well as many people working remotely in other parts of the country. I have 20 years of software engineering experience, and the salary I get is competitive with similar salaries in SF. The benefits are decent, plus you get loads of discounts of things just for being a Federal employee. There were several reasons I joined, but patriotism isn't one of them: I'm actually a British citizen who relocated to the USA almost a decade ago. Having kept in touch with friends back in London, I'm amazed and inspired by what GDS has achieved: they are, quite literally, setting the high water mark for user-centered design and research. Then I looked around the state of US government websites, and I felt what is one of the most common motivations for an engineer: seeing something broken that you know how to fix. Not only are the people here fantastic, but we're getting to use better tools and services than I have previously. We started deploying using AWS and all its associated services, but have recently set up Cloud Foundry, and that's made fast development and deployment so much easier. (Yay, that wonderful feeling of deleting huge swathes of configuration you just don't need any more.) The project I'm on uses Mandrill and Twilio, plus Snap CI for testing & deployment. (Other projects may use different tools. Not much is mandated.) We all work on MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt Displays. (Some of us run Linux on those MacBooks.) Part of what makes this work so well is that, while 18F does bill clients for our time, our primary motivator is quality rather than profit. We get to do the right thing because it's the right thing. If we find a better way to build, we switch to that. I've worked with plenty of startups but I've rarely worked with any team that was able to improve its working methods so quickly. Everything we build is open source by default, available on Github. Plus, we contribute to other FOSS projects (such as the aforementioned Cloud Foundry). I've ended up making PRs back to plenty of libraries and other projects while working on this one to fix minor bugs or add useful features. No, my day job here is not totally free of strange and frustrating bureaucracy, but there's far less than you'd guess, and plenty of freedoms that make up for that. I could bang on about my beliefs about the role of government and politics and how all this should work, and that is all important to me, but it's less relevant to the day-to-day work. And so far, that work is immensely satisfying.