The tech industry is great. At a consumer tech company you get to work on products that people love and are important to their lives. Working for a social service agency can also be great. You get to work on projects that help people that may have a lot of disadvantages.
Here's a story: I had a small mix up in my taxes that caused the government to think I owed them over $10,000. I called the IRS over and over again and was unable to ever get to speak to anyone. It literally took 5 phone calls to figure out how to get into a queue, and then it had a two hour wait, and it's only open 9-5 so it could only be done during the work day. I'm lucky: I have enough money that I just hired an accountant to tell me what to do and the result was that the government ended up giving me back over $1000. Alternatively if I hadn't responded within 90 days I would've forfeited my right to appeal it at all. For so many people they need to take an entire day off of work just to wait in line, either on phone or in person, just to figure out what the issue is. Hopefully they can fix it on the same day and it doesn't end up costing them another day off which can put their job at risk. There is so much mind boggling inefficiency and it really ends up hurting the poorest people the most. So don't feel like you have to be some kind of NSA supporting, jingoistic jerk to work for the government. There's important, non-politically-controversial stuff to be done there that can have a big positive impact on peoples' lives.
I'm not going to get sucked into a debate about which is worse, but I'll give you my perspective on working with federal gov't IT. Yes, policy sucks, thats not going to change any time soon but it is moving towards something halfway decent. There are plenty of skilled, intelligent and motivated IT professionals who you would actually be working for. You don't do the bidding of every politician out there, but you do follow directives from offices higher up such as the white house. Btw, the respect these people proffer to devs is immense because they know you could have worked anywhere else and make more money but you decided to work for a cause they believe in as well.
So please be considerate when you make these sweeping assumptions about the govt.
At best they could be as clueless as you and believe in "the cause", at worst they see how it is in reality and they see you as a sucker working for less than you deserve.
"Be the change you want to see in the world" and all that jazz. Gives me something to do until Watsi or someone like them needs an ops/infrastructure guy.
"You can do a hell of a lot more damage in the system than out of it." - "Stevo", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi2y9-Mxq-0
But seriously, government is what we make of it. We can sit here as sheep and accept the way that we're governed or we can take the leap and try to change it by joining it.
I can't promise that it will ever get better if you sign up to help but I can promise that it won't if you don't.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html
See also: http://codev2.cc
Granted, he was talking about how the private sector can fill in where government doesn't go. Yet even on the inside there are choices to be made and influence to be exerted.
If you care about policy, you put in the time, and you know what you're talking about -- you'll make your mark.
But 18F convinced me that they have the key to change that - completely with regard to their own work, and then with a wider ripple effect. That's something I couldn't pass up; I turned down a dream job in the private sector for 18F. Six months later, I'm more convinced and excited than ever.
It's important that 18F is a brand-new organization with great autonomy. This is not an effort to make an existing Federal agency "get" open/agile. That would be noble but very difficult. Rather, 18F is built from the ground up entirely of people with real devotion to and real experience in the principles. That especially includes the people at the top (to the extent we even have a top, it's really quite flat in here). And 18F overall has the leverage to do our work our way, because many other groups within the government believe that we can and will deliver (and are delivering) effectively... there's more work lined up for us than we can possibly fulfill (even if you all DO join us). We can say "no" when we're asked to work with conditions that would change us into what we're trying to fix.
All that said, we are a bunch of idealists, too. Has our optimism run away with us? Well, we'll certainly deliver excellent product. Time will tell how far the ripple effect will go.
What industry is that? Because in the tech industry I work in, the clueless politicians you speak of are replaced by clueless business-people who are equally obsessed with playing politics. Sure, there are a few "enlightened" companies that empower their technical staff, but those are a small minority.
If you've worked for a large, bureaucratic private-sector organization (like Intel), then you'll have a pretty good sense of what you're in for.
Remember: every committee, every rule, every baffling thing that seems to make no sense is there for a reason (even a picayune, trivial, bad reason)--that's life in an organization that's had 10,000 hands in the cookie dough before you came along.
The difference is that public-sector work is something that conceivably we all have a stake in and can benefit from, while the beneficiaries of private sector work at any given company are distinctly more narrow in scope.
I mean, hopefully the program is really effective and creates a very concrete high-level goal and lets the tech creators go wild and do their thing, but I really do imagine it being bogged down by nonsense.
Also, long ago I did a contract for a state government. There was definitely some nonsense. But honestly, I was surprised how many sincere public servants there were. Sure, there were people who seemed useless, and there were definitely perverse incentives at times. But our project managed to get something useful and exciting done (on time and within budget, even) mainly because there were people at all levels of the government who really believed in doing good things for the state and its citizens. It was a very positive experience, and I can imagine something similar happening here.
Everyone is glued to their phones so much they don't have the mental bandwidth to even think about where the country is going. This would make the problem a lot more approachable if successful.