Can They Make Government Jobs as Cool as Google and Goldman?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Cool is working on something that you, personally, find important -- and making progress.
The biggest barrier to that in government is being allowed to make progress, partially because the existing processes have a large inertia, and partially because the cost of failure is so high.
That's a cool job!!!
On the other hand, I don’t have children but like having the rest of the day available, and it’s great to not necessarily be working when most businesses are open. I’d call that freedom pretty cool, especially if you’re in an area where that saves you commute time in rush hour.
I respect individuals who value time with their kids in addition to having a serious career. My father was too busy chasing C-suite positions and running Iron Man races to spend time with his six kids.
Of course someone who has only worked salary without concern for billable time may never have experienced this. But even for salaried employees if your employment agreement says 40 hours, that does not include lunch breaks. Few employers in tech care because bean counting hours doesn't increase performance for creative types or knowledge workers.
I get your point about an article redefining "cool" in a way you don't like but if we entertain what the article is talking about, they mean jobs that have "prestige" and are "desirable" to graduates.
There's no denying that top-of-the-class college graduates dream more about landing an analyst job at Goldman or McKinsey rather than getting hired at a government job such as "parks & rec manager". (A job as a park ranger to track bears may be "cool" but a parks & rec manager to shuffle paperwork around is probably not. A job as a park manager may be respected but it's not prestigious.)
Some government jobs that would be considered "cool" would be NASA scientists working on Mars rovers or NSA code crackers. However, those are not the type of government jobs (because NASA/NSA can attract talent) the article is talking about.
Those jobs are desirable to graduates because they pay lots of money. End of story.
There's more to it than that. I can't speak for the mindset of consulting jobs like McKinsey but for jobs like Goldman Sachs, there truly is a set of people that enjoy finance and therefore, working there or at one of the other prestigious bulge bracket firms (Citi, JP Morgan, etc) would be more interesting to them than working as an "Assistant to the Comptroller of the local city government".
Are there graduates that hate finance and only want a Goldman job only for the money? Yes. But those people are also not best suited for a low-paying job such as "Assistant to the Comptroller of the local city government".
Ditto in tech. It’s been a long time since Google had a reputation for cool. They have a reputation for paying well & being good on the resume.
Ethical and political views of an organization that spies on citizens aside, I think a government organization that open sources it's code is pretty darn cool.
Seeing as how taxpayers paid for it in the first place, open-sourcing the code should be a requirement, not a cool extra.
- Racking up 8 industry certifications, fully paid, only to have all my ideas shot down because they didnt come from a manager with a degree in philosophy.
- Buying an expensive flush computer system for a type of truck that we already outsourced transmission flushes for, and that was being phased out in favour of something cheaper from International Harvester.
- Refusing...and i mean absolutely refusing...to fix any salt spreader hardware because meyer (the manufacturer) insisted everything would last 40k miles. - trying to explain we dont measure in miles, we measure in engine hours. all reports still list miles.
- watching the city basically sell off 5 salt spreading trucks because a lawsuit after one failed made them all 'a liability'
- replacing a fleet of Kodiak 4x4 HD salt spreaders with used Ford F250's from a construction fleet. - watching these all fail miserably after the first major snow storm.
- Borrowing...then buying and poorly repainting...trucks for salt spreading from the National Guard.
- Getting dinged on my performance review EVERY YEAR because management wouldnt buy parts I needed to make the sheriffs new mine resistant armored vehicle work.
Well I kind of understand the management here: why do the sheriff needs a mine resistant armored vehicle in Ohio?
That said of course this should not have an impact on your performance review..
The government equivalent of Google would be working for an interesting branch (CIA, NSA, NRL, etc) of the federal government. Not working on trucks for the town.
And, as a DC local, I can tell you that there are plenty of applicants for federal jobs. People want the jobs - they pay reasonably well (not Google level, but comfortably upper-middle-class, with stable benefits).
A huge number of my peers from high school and college work for Uncle Sam. Almost all of them have post-graduate degrees, love their jobs, and are definitely smart enough and ambitious enough to pick and choose their employer.
China builds apartments to prop up their GDP, the US builds mine-resistant armoured vehicles (among other military hardware). Nobody needs these vehicles except the people building them.
Everyone should try to work in government at some point to understand why things so relevant to your life happen the way they do, and to be better citizens.
State and local has huge challenges in terms of funding and potentially old infrastructure, but also incredible opportunities to change lives with simple improvements in processes that haven’t gotten the love they deserve.
Wage increases would help, but two year “tours” with other benefits might at least help folks understand why the mission is so important and maybe bust up some staid organization with some new energy.
Good luck to these folks - they’ll need it.
I disagree: Working in something government related makes you deeply hate the government.
To give some background: When I get involved into political discussions (which I rather avoid for good reasons), people very often tell me privately afterwards that I gave really good arguments for my points of discussion, but my arguments and political direction are so different from anything they have heard so far and could hardly be more different from any party program of any party they heard of (needless to say that I do not feel in any sense represented by any party in Germany). So they privately do agree with many points that I introduce, but openly state to me that they are not be able to defend these arguments in public because they are so different from the current political agenda.
To me this is deeply frustrating.
> State and local has huge challenges in terms of funding and potentially old infrastructure, but also incredible opportunities to change lives with simple improvements in processes that haven’t gotten the love they deserve.
This is exactly what government is not about. It is obeying some strange set of laws perfectly instead of doing what really makes sense.
When these work well at the local level they are awesome. When they don’t I often hear people complain but they rarely understand why the site is subpar, challenges to make it better, or want to pay for improvements.
There do exist some exceptions, but then you need a decision by the respective political commitee to allow such an exception. Here things get very ... political.
This holds for many other points, too: The existing laws do not allow one to work efficiently and effectively. This is only possible if you are good at playing the political game.
To be more specific, "office politics" is not the same thing as "Politics" (as in GOP vs Democrat, liberal vs conservative, etc). Your initial post mentioned the decline of political discourse. In my view, that's a different thing than office politics.
When did that happen?
Government simply can't afford to pay or select that much, and those government roles which guarantee strong future employment prospects are often because those employed in it are perceived to have connections as much as skills (probably not something the civil service wants to emphasis whilst recruiting...)
Well, not really, not for maybe 10 years now. If you joined Goldman as a fresh graduate you would be an Analyst, which means 2-3 years of 80-100hr weeks for good but not amazing pay. At any big tech offering RSUs your overall compensation will be much, much better, as will your general quality of life. But Goldman still gets 4000 applicants for every opening because people figure it's worth it for the doors it opens down the line.
Government simply can't afford to pay or select that much
If the government could put together a programme that opened doors - not through corruption but by a reputation for producing capable, hard-working people - people would go there too. It's not dissimilar to why some (many?) people do a 4-year stint in the military - GI Bill and the prestige of being a veteran after.
I dunno about “prestige”, but the in-law hiring preferences for veterans don't hurt.
Every industry has companies like this. Apple and Google in software, PWC in accounting, BoozAllen in consulting, etc.
He had some great stories to tell but his experience there was anything but "cool".
It's in comparison to the current perception of government employment.
Goldman and Google are phenomenally cool by that standard.
“Can X be made as cool as Y?” is a valid question when Y isn't very cool if X is even more uncool.
Long answer: no, with comments! This is because government is inherently risk-averse and attracts many working types who are more attracted by stability, consistency and a ‘safe’ job. Obviously governments are varied beasts and there are some ‘funky’, innovative, exciting departments, although in my experience they are very much exceptions.
Making and enforcing rules is safe territory - in terms of being somewhat of a known state, working at exciting companies can be very much the opposite. But as some commentators have stated, cool is very much an individual angle.
It's funny how true this is while some government jobs immediately spit in the face of these practices. More specifically, a lot of O-1 and O-2 officers are so far up their own ass that they don't realize that the stability exists because the technical side of some jobs have such a well established routine.
Yes sir. We understand that you have a college degree in chemistry. We know that according to your analysis, we should do A, B, and C. But have you considered that the software we have for mapping out RF propagation has (quite literally) never failed us? Have you considered that the people who wrote this software both have a degree in the field and refined it based on real-world analysis? Also, have you considered that having us set up a re-transmission site in the middle of a firing range is bad for the equipment and bad for my chances of living to see 21?
You would think that last one would be common sense, but waking up to friendly fire (explosions) at 6AM is terrifying.
And Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies here.
It helps that tech salaries are generally lower in the UK, but it's mainly about attitude. GDS enjoy a very high level of autonomy and are free to use modern tools and methodologies. Working at GDS is legitimately cool.
If your cool jobs couldn't attract the clever people I assume the OP was alluding to, then it isn't worth the hassle?
Governments also have to work with many outside agencies, suppliers and consumers, I guess many more than people like Goldman do. Unless the whole network is run well, frustration is crouching at the door.
But it doesn't need to be as cool as Google/Goldman, it just needs to be well run.
Clearing snow or getting rid of garbage has no obvious financial value even though it is necessary. So answering the question, should Sanitation be run by a clever person on $200K per year or a normal person on $40K is harder.
Should the manager of a city's sanitation department draw a Goldman/Google-level salary? Perhaps not. But, the person is probably managing tens or hundreds of employees, a fleet of vehicles, and depending on how the city is organized, they're also managing some complex "industrial" facilities(water treatment, etc).
I don't think a six-figure salary is unreasonable for that. Heck, given the impact on my life if sanitation goes to shit, I'll happily pay my share of taxes to support a salary that draws somebody who will get the job done.
Ditto for the leaders of many of the other city/county services.
The point of the article is questioning if its possible to have government jobs that are attainable by the everyman.
1) that they endured the training, unimaginably impressive
2) special forces military, always cool
The only special thing about a Google engineer is that they get paid well and have a probably nice work environment. Which actually is nothing special.
Most people would admire a Navy SEAL, be glad that they do their job but never ever want to be one, except for 5 minutes in their imagination. Almost no-one admires a Google engineer but most people would probably want to be one or at least have their working compensation/environment.