not OP but I've seen preference given to candidates familiar with a particular technology only used by a single government office built exclusively for them.
Must be certified in (X) where certification courses are only available to government employees of a single government office.
Must hold clearances is by far the most common though and the only reason/way to get clearance is to already be working for the government.
I'd say by far the number one thing that keeps the cycle of nepotism going in government though is access to information.
Sure, an agency might be required to publicly post an RFP, but there are like 50 undisclosed qualifications considered and timing and whether you have a personal relationship with a particular individual within the agency plays a huge role. Often the only way around this is to bid so ridiculously low on your proposal that the agency head would be called out for not going with your proposal. This leads to a race to the bottom where people are climbing over each other to provide the lowest quality service to the government often overpromising and under delivering just to get a foot in the door.
As an aside, I think the clearance and seniority requirements are the most detrimental. If you aren't of a specific mindset at a specific time you will probably never enter into a form of service that permits you to advance in government work, and this, I think, leads to a massive disconnect in the type of person who works in the public sector (especially DC) and the average person.
Very insightful, thanks. I was familiar with the problems you covered regarding RFPs and vendor contracts, but had not considered the issues regarding access to information for an individual seeking a programmer role.
I’ve worked for campaigns, as a contractor for a small firm exclusively catering to a single agency, for a larger firm that did incidental government work, and I’ve got several friends who are high up in tech working directly for agencies.
My impression is that government tech = All the problems of Enterprise + Academia, all the recognition and support of a non profit, the culture of Uber, and the ethics of Facebook.
It’s just a maelstrom of most developers idea of hell.
And if you were born in hell and they hand you a pitchfork, hey, why not have a go?
But don’t go down there thinking you’re gonna install air conditioning and escalators.
When my brain was younger and I was going through my first real programming gig/hazing ritual I felt largely the same. I was lucky to have a boss that let me go at my own pace and build up from small self contained procedural scripts, to several related classes, to practicing design patterns by writing my own datase abstraction layer and dB access objects, then controllers, then templating scheme, and by the time I was done “practicing” I was only halfway lost and broken when I jumped into a sprawling framework that handled all this for me :-)
It is just exercising your short term memory that hurts your brain and causes all that stress and you’ll get better. Soon all those layers of abstraction and the way they relate will be more muscle memory. Like driving. You’ll “glance at your mirrors” when merging and it won’t seem so stressful. It just takes time and practice
You’ll learn the libraries you’re stitching together and/or the important details of the framework you’re working with when/as things break or as you get requirements for things you’ve never done before.
Production programming as opposed to academic programming is about writing as little of your own code as possible. Because we all suck at writing code :-)
Certifications are another matter. I’ve found the ones worth having take a career to prep for and the ones your boss tells you to get can be passed by studying a cheat sheet online for a couple hours.
The Azure Administrator Associate exam drills hard on their Powershell CLI stuff. I threw up and had to take a nap after doing the practice exam earlier today.
Based on the labs I've done, and other materials, I'd say it's NOT a "cheat sheet" exam.
It's really sorting out syntax and structures that fries my brain. Code never "sticks" with me, and I'm in a constant state of bootstrapping, for lack of a better term.
Are you taking the cert to get a job or is your job making you get the cert?
Getting your employer to pay for training and the actual cert is definitely the way to go. I have always discouraged anyone looking to get the cert first
I can't share too much detail. Long story short, I have to get that cert asap. (as in, within the next week or so).
Work is covering it, and last week I did a 4 day training.
There's a lot to the exam I get, simply from experience. I'm getting slaughtered on the Azure CLI stuff since I simply cannot get the syntax to stick, no matter how many times I re-run through the labs.
Mostly hardlocking on code, and issues committing syntax to memory. Which of course, given the extremely short timeframe (need to be certified in the next week or so) probably does amplify inherent exam anxiety.
Chinese forecasts always seem to assume a slow march in a particular direction.
What happens if cooling becomes a rapid heat up in tensions?
The US is unpredictable and has always flourished when the world is in chaos. Good luck predicting when and how and who decides it is time to go over the waterfall
There should be a gig-economy job board for all those fearless souls who volunteered for a one way trip to mars to put that reckless abandon in service to the work of doing thankless life threatening tasks like ghost writing articles for leakers and whistleblowers.
I’m thoroughly disillusioned with the modern medical phenomenon of the spectrum of illness.
Coping with mental illness takes at least 3 dimensions to chart. This research suggests there is money and interest in exploring 2 1/2D. Great. I guess?
PTSD, phantom limb syndrome, and alcoholism also exist. No one would think it’s cute to conflate them or suggest they’re “related”
God bless the grass that grows through cement.
It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead
God bless the grass that's gentle and low,
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow.
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor,
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door.
Must be certified in (X) where certification courses are only available to government employees of a single government office.
Must hold clearances is by far the most common though and the only reason/way to get clearance is to already be working for the government.
I'd say by far the number one thing that keeps the cycle of nepotism going in government though is access to information.
Sure, an agency might be required to publicly post an RFP, but there are like 50 undisclosed qualifications considered and timing and whether you have a personal relationship with a particular individual within the agency plays a huge role. Often the only way around this is to bid so ridiculously low on your proposal that the agency head would be called out for not going with your proposal. This leads to a race to the bottom where people are climbing over each other to provide the lowest quality service to the government often overpromising and under delivering just to get a foot in the door.