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Comment by snagglegaggle | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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