Just like any large organization, some jobs will suck. Some will not.
For this job announcement the pay is $99,172 to $166,500 per year, depending on experience.
I was a GS-14 with just a B.S.
The best thing about government service is finding a position where you think the mission is important.
Also, the benefits are really good.
Yes, there are poeple that are retired in place in some organizations, but often good people do well. They tend to get recognition, but there are bad bosses there, too. You need to work with HR to move ASAP to a good team if you find yourself in a toxic place.
I have always thought the way to go was to mimic their practices. If you have a requirement to partner with a local company majority owner, so do we. If you require IP transfer, so do we. I think this would be more strategic than a broad tariff.
I came across this sentence today on a page for a public swimming pool. "Recent ADA changes have required the installation of entry steps and a power lift." [0]
It reminded me of this thread.
Most of the value in government is setting standards so that society is more fair to those that have been ignored in the past. It struck me as odd in how they phrased this sentence. Now, I have to admit that the person that wrote the copy for this page has some kind of fetish for sharing building footprint measurements, but not height. So, I don't think copy editing is high on their list of skills.
The federal government was actually designed to be pretty inefficient in order to keep it small and out of people's hair. Government wasn't supposed to be good at making roads. It was supposed to be good at saying how wide those interstate highway lanes should be.
Don't even get me started on federal contract law and the FAR. I think it says somewhere around page 1312 in the FAR that government contracting should be as efficient as possible.
The reason the message "All taxes are bad" resonates so well is because there has been a near constant cadence accompanying it that "All government is bad". Many people think there is no inherent value in government because that has been sold to them for the past 50+ years.
It is similar to the message that "Adam Smith's capitalism" = "no regulations" when in fact Adam Smith was not against regulations. Regulations are the structure that markets are built upon. Otherwise, everything is caveat emptor (translation: let the buyer beware) all the time.
It is hard to know where the correct line between total freedom and total government control lies, but I have to assume it is somewhere closer to the middle than either extreme, but the middle never makes the evening news.
For sites that just convey text, they should work without JS. This would mostly solve accessibility (a11y) issues if sites looked to use simplicity wherever possible instead of adding complexity to solve issues caused by complexity.
I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand until their next mortgage payment is due."
I found this to be so true at a job I had in international development. Being on a small but respected team in the org and having input on how projects all over the world would be implemented was very fulfilling.