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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

In the 90s, I taught retraining courses to government computer programmers (e.g former COBOL programmers) Let’s just say “they’re not sending us their best people” roughly describes my experience. That is, people who had previously held jobs writing code by the government didn’t even know what “parenthesis key” meant or where it was located which largely led me to believe that many of the people in my class were collecting paychecks but didn’t really know how to use computers.

Unless the government radically raises salaries and benefits for these positions to attract top talent, I’d be concerned with it being stacked with a bunch of people who don’t have much developer or engineering experience.

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The issue is perhaps not salaries and benefits. Often a lot of effort is taken to try to fill a position internally. This would explain your anecdote -- after some staff churn people were promoted to a position they had no business occupying.

I say this as various friends at times worked for government agencies and sought promotion. They could have filled extant positions due to their experience, but they were denied before becoming a public servant due to lack of public service and then denied after for lack of seniority (even when asking to be considered as an external hire).

Coming from them, jobs often seemed to open up after a person had retired and were catered towards an individual.

In addition, the restrictions on government agencies for who qualifies can be restrictive in ways that exclude the top talent.

That's very interesting, haven't heard this complaint before. Do you have an example of such a restriction?

not OP but I've seen preference given to candidates familiar with a particular technology only used by a single government office built exclusively for them.

Must be certified in (X) where certification courses are only available to government employees of a single government office.

Must hold clearances is by far the most common though and the only reason/way to get clearance is to already be working for the government.

I'd say by far the number one thing that keeps the cycle of nepotism going in government though is access to information.

Sure, an agency might be required to publicly post an RFP, but there are like 50 undisclosed qualifications considered and timing and whether you have a personal relationship with a particular individual within the agency plays a huge role. Often the only way around this is to bid so ridiculously low on your proposal that the agency head would be called out for not going with your proposal. This leads to a race to the bottom where people are climbing over each other to provide the lowest quality service to the government often overpromising and under delivering just to get a foot in the door.

As an aside, I think the clearance and seniority requirements are the most detrimental. If you aren't of a specific mindset at a specific time you will probably never enter into a form of service that permits you to advance in government work, and this, I think, leads to a massive disconnect in the type of person who works in the public sector (especially DC) and the average person.

Very insightful, thanks. I was familiar with the problems you covered regarding RFPs and vendor contracts, but had not considered the issues regarding access to information for an individual seeking a programmer role.

I’ve worked for campaigns, as a contractor for a small firm exclusively catering to a single agency, for a larger firm that did incidental government work, and I’ve got several friends who are high up in tech working directly for agencies.

My impression is that government tech = All the problems of Enterprise + Academia, all the recognition and support of a non profit, the culture of Uber, and the ethics of Facebook.

It’s just a maelstrom of most developers idea of hell.

And if you were born in hell and they hand you a pitchfork, hey, why not have a go?

But don’t go down there thinking you’re gonna install air conditioning and escalators.

Citizenship requirements, criminal background checks, and drug tests, for example.

USDS & 18F seem to have been huge steps in the right direction. A future administration that cares about getting this right should look to them as a model.

I do wonder if "sent to retraining" selects for a bad audience?

Anyone competent enough to retrain and retool could've done so, obviating their need for your training.

I mean, that was also the 90s - I’ll bet there are quite a few good programmers within government. Your point stands that salaries and the gov value proposition isn’t competitive - to me it’s almost like a charity job.

As a dev coming from private sector and now in government, your comment rings true to my experience so far.

It's true that there are many programmers in government who were promoted from within, learned on the job, and are limited on technical knowledge we would expect from a CS grad or a seasoned "software engineer" from industry. In many cases the code is written by contractors under the watch of a government employee who is responsible for delivering the system.

But I have found some aspects very rewarding: guiding new programmers who are eager to learn modern languages and techniques; introducing industry tools and practices to leadership who are excited to modernize/replace legacy systems.

Of course, for every ColdFusion developer who is humble and motivated update their toolbelt, there is one who resents all new technology and technologists. Not talking about the groans about going "agile", I mean people who say "react is silly, I can do all this with jquery! New devs don't know how to do it the 'real' way".

Overall, there is a powerful current within these organizations that is pushing toward new tech and better talent. But I don't know how leadership will manage to bring in new grads and private sector talent while still honoring its promise to promote those in non-technical jobs after years of service.

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