Advice to programmers: Get a government job
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Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.
While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.
I cannot emphasize enough how soul crushing it is to work in this kind of environment. You cannot just put in your hours, go home, and work on something interesting. The apathetic monotony is instilled into your being. It grows inside of you during the day, and you take it home with you. You can't just context switch from 8 hours of mental atrophy to a motivated and productive state. Sometimes I would come home and be useless for anything but lying down and staring at the ceiling. I only worked there for a year but I was turning into a zombie.
If you go in thinking you can help rock the boat and make some changes, be careful. You may find that the changes happen to you instead. The dark side is powerful.
I took like 5 years of meetings or committees to actually launch a website, and you were tied to vendors that were selected for the job like 10years before, and even it was clear that they didn't do a very good job, no-one cared or wanted to change. I only lasted a year there, I was too horrified to actually becoming one of them.
So I would guess that you can't say that goverment job is always better than private, or other way around. In both cases you might want to check out the environment beforehand. There actually are some interesting jobs that only exist in public sector and some of them are quite highly competative.
What? Of course the government outcompetes in terms of job security. I would too if I get a dollar for every three you made. But that's where the outcompetition ends. Private sector wins for efficiency, innovation, and general business competitiveness.
Get a government job if you want to be financially fed from a tube til death, probably doing tedious, monotonous work. You can stay in your cage where Farmer feeds you on the clock; those of us who have a passion for what we do will continue to live in the wild.
Related is PG's essay on the nature of the employee in a startup as opposed to in a corporation, although in this case the contrast is between the private and public sectors.
Wake up and look around: the government built first computers, your beloved Lisp, freaking Internet, not to mention sending man to space. Most universities are public. Innovation is so expensive that the private sector can't even dream of achieving anything of those magnitudes.
Government, believe it or not, will be the one who solves the energy problem, will eventually cure cancer and AIDS and hopefully build a true AI, while entrepreneurial types will continue "throwing sheep" on facebooks.
Inefficient? Yes. Non-innovative? No. And WTF is general business competitiveness?
* Of course the government will do all of this: It's placed itself at the center of motion. Monopolization doesn't indicate superiority.
* General business competitiveness: A business typically has to take other things that I didn't mention into account to be viable. I wasn't prepared to enumerate all of the differences between how a government institution and a for-profit business are run. It's no mystery that being beholden to paying customers or even a community that votes with its feet is more challenging than appealing to the many forces that drive government. And obviously, we're well past the point where American citizens throwing off the bridle is a possibility.
It's not some amazing feat of innovation that somebody thought to hook up computers to talk to each other. Give somebody enough power to confiscate money from the people, and monopolize tech research, and they might eventually come up with something useful.
Of course, who's to say private industry research wouldn't have been able to come up with something that's even more useful, had the government not monopolized these functions? They might have been able to come up with networking protocols without such serious security holes as in today.
Hey, Microsoft and Apple have tons of cash and do nothing interesting with it. The reason behind 'sudden' GM's death isn't shitty cars, they've been shitty for a long time. GM is dying because instead of trying to build a decent car business it essentially transformed itself into a bank (GM Financial) which found nothing better to do with their cash than "invest" them in guess what.
Now look at startups: have you ever seen a TechCrunch announcement that was in any way memorable? I see nothing but a never-ending conversion of MySQL tables into HTML pages, or wrapping OSS projects into HTML/JS UIs hoping to get rich quick: the distance of their "R&D trajectories" are measured in months and working prototypes are expected within weeks from the first napkin drawing.
Now look at Google, a poster child for "SV magic". Google is a creation of two Stanford students, i.e. an academia project turned into business (just like Symbolics and DEC had grown out of MIT). Entrepreneurship or corporate R&D had nothing to do with Google's success what-so-ever.
Businesses don't give a shit about innovation, technology and science. Their goal has always been quick profits, for which there always seems be some kind of a scheme to take a ride on. Look what IBM, HP, AT&T and Xerox, former think tanks, transformed themselves into. IBM especially grosses me out with their "we're a services company" bullshit. So is my pet sitter.
It is corporate never-ending search for increased efficiency that essentially kills innovation because the process of inventing is terribly inefficient by its nature: it's unpredictable, cannot be put on schedule, you can't budget for it and the outcome isn't guaranteed: find me one MBA who'll like any of the above.
I've never been especially smooth with my writing, given that English isn't my first tongue, but Phillip Greenspun has: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg
Business innovates because there are huge profits to be made in making people's lives easier and better off. Government doesn't innovate. It merely saps innovation that would have occurred in the private sector.
Most tech companies used to do more research during the Cold War, because The Customer was paying well. Should I add more?
Keep in mind that all the money of the public sector comes from the private sector... and ultimately ends up in some pockets in the private sector as well.
As opposed to a corporate job, where you get all the monotony but don't get the feeding tube?
I personally wouldn't want either -- but not everyone in the world is very smart or very motivated. In that case, they might as well get a pension.
I point this out because our society often denounces politics but enshrines democracy. Yet no one can logically explain the difference between the two. It's a fascinating cognitive dissonance. Perhaps you can explain?
As a reader of hacker news, I assume you like to think of yourself as a person of science and reason. But when you summon phrases such as "will of the people" you have left that world. The phrase is empty - it provides no information, and contributes nothing to the discussion. Would you mind more precisely defining what you mean by "will of the people"?
"A majority of British voters cast votes for Gordon Brown under the expectation that he would manage the economy, and that's all. Instead he used his role to grab power, at the expense of the people"
Is this a fair paraphrasing?
I can then rephrase your original sentence:
"Democracy is when elected officials act in a way that voters approve of. Politics is when elected officials act in their own self interest, in a way contrary to what voters want"
Is that it? Or let me try a second, different, way of paraphrasing:
"Democracy is when elected officials act in a way that benefits the public good ( whether the public realizes it or not). Politics is when an elected official acts in a way the benefits himself, regardless of the public good"
Is one of these summaries fair? I'm not trying to be difficult, I'm just trying to nail down precisely what you are trying to say.
He's trying to say he doesn't like Gordon Brown.
re: your original point, I think in this context, by 'Democracy' people mean "honest politicians working towards ends they think their constituents would approve" and by 'Politics' people mean "politicians doing (probably dirty) work, driven by all kinds of pressures, often self-interested ones".
It's a difference in intent. To some extent it's the difference between murder and manslaughter. Or perhaps between murder and execution.
Large chunks of the UK media have had it in for him following some initial mis-steps (the will he/won't he election-call thing comes to mind).
As far as I can tell, their story then became the self-fulfilling "he's a lame duck who can't manage the media".
I don't like a lot of things the Labour govt (Blair and Brown) have done/are doing, but I don't think Brown stands out an as example of political self-interest.
Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Tony Blair resigned - he hasn't called a General Election yet.
While there are second-order effects, politicians are largely free to ignore aforementioned "will" during their day-to-day routine. Thus they generally spend time manuvering and manipulating for an increase in personal power - which is what we call "politics".
"Politics" exits even without "democracy". It exists in dictatorships, in offices, even within families.
It is therefore completely correct to enshrine democracy while denouncing politics. Does this make sense? :-)
EDIT: When I say families - I am referring to "joint families" (large family groups consisting of a matriach/patriach and multiple sons/daughters/uncles/aunts and sundry). While this is not un-common in India - I felt I'd better explain it to everyone else.
Nothing is good for job security like being removed from the discipline of the market. Hook up to the public teat and you can feed for life.
No, really, I'm not joking.
Though it is sad to see what happens when people take advantage of job security and get paid to do hardly anything.
a) government job as described in the post b) corporate job as described in the post c) start-up job
Unless you are getting equity there is probably no reason whatsoever to work in the private sector.
the beauty of government jobs is that you work for 20 years, and then you can retire, where you get 50% of your paycheck as your pension.
I know for many wokraholics the mentality is that money solves everything, but most people will elect to get a slightly lower salary in exchange for a higher quality of life.
A friend is an auditor for the gov. He routinely gets offers for 5x salary from clients he is auditing (illegally).
Why does he do it? Because he loves what he does. He feels he is doing something necessary and honourable for his country.
There just can't be much joy in being a tax collector and if there is some anomaly and he does truly enjoy it, it's exactly that, an anomaly.
What would making more money provide him? He has his dream job and job security.
While I don't dispute the auditor is performing a vital function for the government and loves his job, the role of a technical person and auditor cannot be compared. In his case the government supplies the auditor with more than just a salary and security, they provide him power that can't be had elsewhere.
For a technical person, the government is the hole you go into to die because you no longer love what you do.
Raising taxes.
Besides, the feds will most likely bail the states likely to default (CA, MI, NJ) at least until 2013.
As with any other pension system, if a lot of the trust's holdings are in bonds, and those bonds end up in default, that would be a problem.
The government pensions schemes are facing the same problem as Social Security -- people living and collecting benefits longer, health care costs going up (for those that include long term health benefits), and so on.
Considering the fact that many defined benefit programs look about as safe as ticking time bombs, this doesn't particularly reassure me. In addition, there is the problem of actuarial assumptions. I remember a New York state actuary getting in trouble because he was being paid by the state labor unions earlier this year and came across this article while I was trying refresh my memory of the details: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/21/business/pension.php
Depending where you are at, there is an opportunity to make an impact and do very interesting work. There are also entrepreneurial opportunities in the government: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395714
But I've also seen exactly how meaningless the private sector can be. While it may satisfy my desire for fast-paced, stimulating work, ultimately a lot of it is, well, stupid. The fact that you can get to work with some exciting new tech obscures the fact that 50% of projects will fail, and of those, even fewer will ever matter to anyone or even bring a smile to anyone's face. And many of the ones that do succeed are often patently immoral, or at best amoral.
Meanwhile, capitalism today is run for the benefit of managers. Even if you're lucky enough to work for a successful company, expect the CEO and VPs to reap the lion's share of the rewards, and fire you (or your friends) at Wall Street's whim.
I guess I'm saying that I can see this guy's point of view. Gee-whiz tech is one thing, but stability does matter, and some parts of the government are doing good work. I know a woman who makes a good, stable living generating stats out of the census, and also creating web tools for people to do the same. Consequently she's doing something good for Americans of all kinds, the scale creates interesting challenges, and there's even something to look forward to after it's all over. Can you imagine it?
Right now I have a great job, but even we can't completely escape the relentless stupidity that is the software business today.
Yes, during a death march, you do tend to stay working after 5:00 PM, and possibly even work on weekends.
But, once you get into year three or four, a properly managed software shop should see those pushes for just three or four weeks a year, and it's not uncommon to see engineers putting in 30 hour work weeks the rest of the year.
Of course the whole roller coaster of layoffs is still pretty valid - but if you are a good developer, jobs are pretty easy to come by once you've built up your network, and you can treat the off time as vacation. There is a reason why recruiters make $20K-25K (minimum) for tracking down high performance developers - they are hard to find.
If you are an average developer, having to deal with 6 month to 2 year sabbaticals might suck, and I can see why the government job approach might make sense.
My conclusion: Rock stars should look to being principal developers for private concerns, others should consider all their options based on their needs.
Then if you quit 2-3 years down the road, everyone will be better off: you'll have a job you'll enjoy, and the government will have gotten 2-3 years of labor out of you for a song and won't have to pay your absurdly generous pension benefits.
But seriously, I hope that the Obama administration ratchets up the level of accountability when it comes to federal use of technology. There is so much redundancy that could be eliminated and, at the same time, so much more work that could be accomplished.
What I do have a problem with is the government's current obsession with buying COTS software and making me "integrate it" and claiming it's easier than doing it ourselves. Millions and millions down the drain on licenses for Sharepoint, Oracle, and other crap for which I can download better alternatives for free. Source code we can own as a country and share across agencies. It's criminal that it's so hard to make that work.
I'm sorry but not everyone on this forum shares your ideologies. Not everyone is in it for money, comfort, or security. It requires sacrifice to do something meaningful with your life sometimes. If you can't pull an 80 hour week, then startups are definitely not for you.
No offense or anything meant by this response. I'm just saying, I felt like the writer was trying to impose his beliefs on me. In an annoying sort of way.
The government needs employees who are selfless and would readily set their bosses chair on fire if it meant doing the right thing by the American people.
Might it not be better if these people worked in the private sector, where their efforts could have more effect?
That isn't to say that that person wouldn't be making some sort of personal sacrifice in terms of either salary or work environment. I mean, doesn't it worry anyone else that if all the countries best and brightest minds are out there building the next Twitter we might have the B team working on things that have a far greater chance of effecting us all in the long term?
It sounds glorious, doesn't it?
I wrote software for submarines. The innovation is outsourced and is done long before these systems start development. It's all about integration and stifling quality control. More effort is spent on generating paperwork than on developing the system. A corporate government contractor will bend over to get a contract, letting the customer dictate the details of the design (for example: specifying that CORBA must be used for all inter-process communication). The "quality" of the software comes from taking horrible code and beating it into submission with QA over the course of months. The user interfaces that come out of this process make me pity the poor sailors.
Coming up with these impressive technologies and then integrating them into real systems are two completely different activities, separated temporally by about a decade. The glory rests with the former only.
Here's the wonderful history of Carl Malamud doing this with the SEC EDGAR database and his current work on PACER: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/carl-malamud-ta.ht...
You have already received rich rewards for the initial publication of these documents, and releasing this data back into the public domain would significantly grow your market and thus be an investment in your future.
This seems really unlikely. It looks to me like Westlaw makes money by restricting access to information; I don't think they'd make more money if they had open access, though it would of course be very nice of them.
Avoid the government like the plague. If you private sector gig asks you to work in a manner you don't want to, find another company, but don't think about the gov.
This guy is remarkably naive about the long term solvency of the government.
Bitch and moan about "budget cuts" like all the other hacks.