Civic tech. Do good work with smart people. Look at 18F, USDS, the Digital Services Coalition consultancies….Some projects are more exciting than others, but these orgs are mission-driven, mostly about improving digital services for Americans.
This sounds good in theory. I’ve tried this with a smaller consultancy. The problem is there’s too much bureaucracy for my tastes, coming from startups. Also I ran into some of the worst code I’ve seen in my life. Maybe I just wound up at the wrong place.
There’s a lot of bureaucracy dealing with the government, no doubt. Also a lot of bad code. Hopefully neither of those were coming from your own team, because yeah, you might have been at the wrong place. I’m at a DSC shop where I’ve worked with ex Apple and Google folks, and some of the USDS people are the best engineers I’ve ever worked with.
Sadly, the code/quality issues were from my team. Bureaucracy issues also, to a lesser extent.
This is the right answer. There’s also the SBIR, if you want to try building something ambitious: https://www.sbir.gov/