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Comment by LeonardoTolstoy | Hacker News Reader

I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.

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As someone from the UK, with friends who work as programmers in both the public and private sectors, I'm not sure what you're saying is true. It's definitely not highly paying to work for the government, although "relatively" may be doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.

I'm going off what I was told when I expressed surprise that such a good engineer would go for government work. Looking online it looks like they pay about median for a software engineer in London. And yeah, relatively here is basically meaning I was surprised you didn't have to take a pay cut to work for the government.

Unfortunately this is not true at all (at least for the past decade or more). There are definitely some really high quality people working for GDS, but for the life of me I have no idea how they keep them. Civil Service salaries are extremely low compared to industry rates, and the perks (such as pensions) aren't nearly as good as they used to be.

I have a friend who is a civil servant (ONS). She would be the first to concede that salaries are low but there are other benefits that compensate. Working from home 3 days a week, generous time off in lieu for the odd extra hours worked and so on.

I should add she is late 50's and the prospect of finding work elsewhere in a comparable role would be very unlikely.

I bet the pension would help as well.

That's the same in Spain, the key is that public employees generally speaking can't be fired for performance reasons. That is the ultimate workplace in a country of 20%+ unemployment.

In the US government, take a look at https://www.usds.gov/apply and https://join.tts.gsa.gov/ — and there are many more opportunities emerging as the USG gets better at all of this.

More generally for federal and state/local government opportunities to use your technology expertise to make a difference, these folks are excellent: https://techtalentproject.org/tech-talent/

The problem with working in the government/nonprofit sphere is that you will always be treated as second fiddle/grunt work to the real movers and shakers.

I mean just look at the breakdown of who runs that “tech talent project” to see what I mean. In the industry, ideally, decisions are being made and executed by other technical people. It’s part of what has made Silicon Valley so uber successful.

This is definitely not true. Developers are better off in the private sector and I've never heard of any developer regard working for the government as coveted or prestigious.

When I retire I want to go work for the GDS

> The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying

It's middle of the tree at best. I'm sure you can find people for whom it's well paying, but the recruiters from UK gov departments that regularly contact me keep trying to sell me on the benefits of jobs where the upper salary band is less than half of what I earn.

I would say that this is true for the breed of programmers that like to help other people, who I respect over anyone who goes for higher paying work. Gov.uk has some real stars associated with it

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