Question:
Does Gov't Exp. on Resume look "Bad" GS 05 on Federal job ?
I've recently been told by a recruiter that starting off your computer
career with a Federal job is a real bad move.
He said that once you wanted to leave, and enter the private sector,
you will not be taken seriously, since you have been involved w/
the Govt. (red tape, nothing gets done, etc...)
Is there any validity to this claim?
Answer:
-I don't think that's universally true. I know some people at NASA and LBL,
for example, who are doing real interesting work and wouldn't have any
trouble finding jobs in private research labs.
On the other hand, many government programming environment and projects
are much different from the private sector, so employers think skills
won't transfer well. This is especially true of semi-technical or
non-technical positions.
- Yes, its quite possible. The Government buys its technology. It
pays far too little (with a few exceptions) to have the capability of
doing anything truly impressive with civil service staff, there are a
few research places that do such things, but you have tolook carefully
to see if you are really going to be doing the work itself, or the paper
work. Government paperwork experiences is useless unless you leave to go
to government contractor, and if you want to be a programmer or
systems analyst, its still useless.
If you want interesting work, good experience, and to build a useful
resume, stay out of Government unless you intend to spend your life in it.
If you want to work on some of these hi-tech projects you hear about,
find the contractor that is actually doing it and apply to them.
In school, if they talked about it at all, they probably told you that
three major parts of is projects are funding (permission), staffing, and
execution (actually doing the work to design test and build). In government,
you not only have to get permission to to the job, you have to get
permission from a variety of places to contract for the work, you have
everyone and his brother protesting the contract if they lose, regardless
of how bad their proposal was, you have dozens of arcane administrative
instructions governing how you do everything. A project that takes six
months to actually do may take three years from approval to commencement of
work. I once spent six months doing the paperwork to get a contractor to
do a job that took sixty days to complete. What was the job? doing the
paperwork needed to get permission to do the next phase of the project.
The government has legions of employees whose careers are built around
moving all of this paper around. We have projects that start out as five year
projects, get delayed by funding, politics, or paperworkm or managerial
ineptness, stretch out to seven or ten years, and by the time the thing is
deployed, its well over budget, five years late, has had three or four
project managers, and each one has received outstanding performance evaluations
for his or her tour......
there are lots of reasons not to be a computer weenie in the government.
-I have met bone-headed idiots at every job who hold this opinion.
Depending on your geographic area, working for the federal government may
give you a history of low salary that can be difficult to overcome. I came
to Verdix from a federal job (not my first) where I made $6-8 K less than
I was worth (in the Washington, DC area).
Federal agencies can have miserable administrative support, since a
competent secretary can make better than GS-5 pay elsewhere. Being a GS-11
assigned to do secretarial work for my department made me somewhat
dissatisfied with my only federal job.
The federal government does some really fascinating work; where else can
you do car crash tests, or design boat propellors, or test new airplane
designs, or map some other planet, or research what sorts of steel are
best for submarine hulls? Not too many private employers do that sort of work.
