The pay seems to be better in lower cost of living area's (Washington DC metro vs. SF); job security better in BigCo like Mitre, SAIC and Booze and less competition from H1B visa holders that cannot obtain security clearance easily.
Get to work on cool technology with big scaling and parallel processing over web CRUD frameworks. Anyone has experience making the switch?
I've bounced back and forth between startups in and out of the Fed space and for Fed contractor mega corps in the lean times.
Short answer: if I had the opportunity to pick up my family and move to NYC or the Bay Area and have a similar standard of living I'd probably do it tomorrow.
Long answer: job security in Fed contractor mega corps generally sucks. You can expect to have a job with the mega corp for up-to-a-year, 2 if you're lucky. Resumes in the DC area frequently go to 3 or 4 pages just listing past jobs and a couple of bullet points each let alone education or any of the other interesting things.
When the contract ends or goes elsewhere, you either get let go or are given a couple of weeks to hunt around internally for another job then are let go. Longevity in any of those companies relies heavily on cronyism and brown nosing so you might stay on the good side of management and get "offered" your next contract job in the same company. With the end of the Iraq and Afghan wars funding is getting massively cut and the sequester has had a very large impact. The same people, working in the same position, but on a new contract, from last year to this year can expect a 30-40% pay cut. I know of dozens of personal contacts who've gotten pink-slipped from the Mitres, Lockheeds, SAICs and Boozes in the last few months. There's also hundreds of smaller 10-300 person companies that sub-contract to those mega corps that might treat you a bit better.
Also, the defense contractor career progression is a mirror of military service. If you left the military as an enlisted, you probably won't ever make a senior management position. If you left in the officer ranks, you can expect to find yourself similarly positioned in senior management beneath and above people who left as officers in almost the same respective positions - it's almost farcical how bad this is.
Most contractors I know are desperate to take a pay cut and get a very stable government job at this point.
Competitive is a generous description for the work market in the DC area. It's more Machiavellian combined with Italian mobster backstabbery and unbelievably political.
The technology is also a bit behind the times (to be generous). Imagine making the kind of tech that's in the leaks, but with the state of software and hardware 5-10 years ago. It's an interesting challenge, but really takes you out of the reverse market, moving from the Fed space to the West Coast startup world is very hard.
A good compromise might be to work for a West Coast defense contractor like Palantir or Thetus...the technology is much cooler to work on in general and you get the benefits of recognition in two major employer markets. Here's a nice list of similar companies http://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ict.html
I also have met many people that work at or formerly worked at places like SAIC, Booz etc. that hated every minute of it and described it exactly as you did, so YMMV. Also, the line of work I and my company are in is slightly "unique", so we may be somewhat insulated from the problems facing contracting at the moment. Regardless, it isn't all horrible out there, and I would much sooner switch to another contracting position or move somewhere completely different than ever take a government position again.
The mega-contractors are a different kind of hell, you have to stay engaged and you have to have lots of drive, only it doesn't get spent in the actual work you're doing, it's all jammed up in office politicking and contract cycles. It's remarkably the same experience at the different mega corps also. I think being so close to the culture of the government, it bleeds down and creates this weird kind of secondary effect that seems the same no matter where you go...even if their public image and mission seem quite different.
The places I've enjoyed the most have been the smaller sub-contractors or product companies that vend into the government. I think it's because they're allowed to define their own culture and do things their way, with the primes as a shield to soak up all that badness. That all being said, shit rolls downhill, and being a sub or sub to a sub or a vendor like that does end up with your company in some bad positions from time to time...this includes getting acquired by one of the big guys.
It seems to be that contracting comes with a lot of job security risk due to funding variability and getting a full-time role in one of these MegaCorps or with the Feds directly comes with lots of politicking and competition since everybody wants to live off the largess of the US taxpayers.
I wish you the best in your endeavor whether that may be living off the US tax-payers or otherwise.
I've tried to make the jump out West a handful of times, but getting good jobs for me and my family at the same time out that way, at this point in our careers, and with resumes that read like random acronym spaghetti, has been near to impossible.
Even with the higher cost of living in the Bay Area, many of the places I've interviewed have balked at my salary requirements. During interviews with one big West Coast company, I made it through all of the phone screens, phone interviews, work history discussions, face-to-face interviews, lunch, meeting with the senior management, and then it all fell apart when we got to salary. "You realize Mr. Bane that not even the CEO for this organization pulls that kind of salary down?" "That's fine, I'd be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for preferred stock options" and that usually is the end of the discussion.
The interviews I've had with the Googles and the Facebooks have also left the interviewer at a loss for words as they tried to untangle my resume and ask reasonable interview questions. The environments: the technology, the politics, the hiring practices, the career progression, the titles, everything is just so different that at some point the interviewer and I inevitably end up just realizing it's not going to work.
For example, most people out West with a similar career progression as me might have done a year long stint in Hyderabad or Shanghai trying to setup a new office. In a normal interview we'd chat about the challenges doing that, how it's so hard to get approval from the local government for the kind of high speed internet business line we'd need or the difficulty in ensuring overnight delivery of important data center parts or whatever and how I'd solve that with a reasonable inventory of spare parts but not provision too many blah blah blah.
When the topic comes up with me I have to talk about my time in a couple of combat zones, dodging mortar fire or stepping over a pile of gore that used to be a man. My principal challenge wasn't recruiting local talent, it was finding cover from a late night firefight or figuring out how to get fiber in my diet after a month underground in a bunker eating MREs so I could use the toilet. After all that was accomplished, then I got to figuring out how to coax industry obsolete technology running off of a jury-rigged diesel generator to do something useful for my work.
I don't regret it out here, I've managed to be involved in some history making events, had some awesome travel, met incredible people and did far more than figure out how to get people to click ads. There's a concept I've heard from PhD students [1] where they describe that moment where, before they publish their first paper or their dissertation, they know something new that nobody else in history or on the planet knows. Working here is kind of like that. There's been moments where I've solved a problem or learned something that nobody else on the planet knows and it's pretty awesome to be there at that moment.
But at the same time, you don't really ever "build" anything in the sense of creating something that will advance the species. It's not what I would call "life affirming" work. You build siege engines that become obsolete as soon as the walls of the enemy are penetrated. You become Leonardo da Vinci looking for work. [2]
If you want to see what's being looked for check this site out: http://clearedjobs.net/
1 - http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
2 - http://gizmodo.com/5460442/leonardo-da-vincis-resume-explain...
AFAIK the US still has military presence && conflict in both of those countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%...
It's your right to work on whatever you want, but even though I work with technology, I prefer to focus on what I'm building and its implications instead of what cool implementation details go into it.
Working on mass surveilance systems because the tools are technically exciting is akin to using molecular gastronomy to produce a portion of human feces.
No longer do you have idealists willing to drive their vision of a great United States by taking a job with marginal income but great reward. You have folks like those above, who see headlines of rights abuses and think "I would like to profit off that."
Sure the quality of life is better in the locality the work is in, but only because it is built upon the lessening of quality of life for others at the expensive of said others.
Others who do not want their tax monies being driven to immunity shielded corporations who work to kill others via drones under the guise of freedom and liberty. Yes, that is SAIC[1].
[1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/14/news-saic-wins-95-mil...
Perhaps you and I have a different perspective on quality of staffing. Too often, I find a lot of people in academia/life sciences research/NGO's have a propensity to feel or appear to others that they are altruistic or making a difference. But when push comes to shove, the same "altruistic" person will resort to the same old Machiavellian tactics for personal gains that's commonly seen everywhere.
Best way IMO to establish a fair society and company is to make everyone as informed as possible how you will be exploited and lied to; and I find that honest attitude to be more prevalent in BigCo vs. startup's where management appeals more to the "startup" culture to manipulate people to do more work and take less pay.
Is this that abstract? These are the tools that will be used to usurp Americans of their privacy. If you just don't care, I can understand that. But if you do care, why sacrifice your values for salary money. I'm just saying, my personal price for driving society back into the dark ages is much higher.
Go find a flower company or something, you can easily avoid work at SAIC or Boeing.