1. You haven't worked in government. Their code is worse than Yahoo! or virtually any startup. Bitcoin isn't.
I bet the NSA and NASA both write code that's orders of magnitude better than anything Yahoo does, just to pick two counterexamples.
I bet the NSA and NASA both write code that's orders of magnitude better than anything Yahoo does, just to pick two counterexamples.
And this wouldn't have been their A team.
The motivations are very similar to startups working outside of larger companies. You get more freedom in work choices and pay scale.
Government also discourages small side projects, especially in the classified world, and particularly discourages them from becoming production. They would far prefer to run a program of record, or pay for (well defined) innovation by third parties.