My experience was that 80% of the folks are lifers, for better or worse. Work-life balance was great because everyone’s got kids and soccer games and traffic to beat home, but it was still very much a “butt in chair” system, not a “get work done” one. People regularly do “10-40” (10-hour days M-Th) or “9-80” (9-hour days M-Th, every other Friday off) schedules.
Compared with startup life and even FAANG, everything moves slowly. It’s a combination of real security, security theater, and the red tape that comes with being funded by taxpayer money. That plus the extra rules from just being near the nuclear stuff (can’t drink at lunch, guests need a background check, relationships with foreign nationals must be disclosed) made it a slog.
The most hilarious example, heard only through stories: there are two internal networks, the normal one everyone uses and the high-security one that has no internet access. They are physically separate—no cables crossed, no SSH tunnels, no bridges, nothing. But you have to transfer data between them sometimes, so you would remotely load your data onto a tape drive, and there was a tech you would ping who would eject the tape, run it over to the other network, and insert it in.
As with anything rote, the process was soon automated with a shell script. The script would take a couple of minutes to execute, and your data would be transferred. Entire workflows were built on this script. And around noon every day the latency would skyrocket, because the tape runner was on lunch.