Interestingly, I went west from DC to the Valley within the past year - I have found that DC (industry) is surprisingly savvy, and much better at process management & leadership overall than the Valley. DC also seems to have a wealth of talented designers compared to the Valley that I have seen.
However, government is indeed a different world. One of my friends complains how he has to file a request in order to get permission to do anything (he is a contractor for the Department of Energy) - this is normal based on all I have heard from my ~4 years in the area. I heard in another organization, they are forced into short product cycles by the requests of representatives and senators for investigations. One forward thinking VP of Engineering came into a different organization and shored up a lot of the tech & brought a modern stack to the organization, making all of the developers very happy, but was ultimately sacked (I forget the exact reason told to me, but I remember it not reflecting well on the federal government).
Also, when a consumer of software created by government contractors finds a critical bug that causes a non-functional app and reports exactly what is failing (important scripts not loading), good luck getting the contractor to fix it - I've seen it take 10 months to get an acknowledgement of the problem, which affected the entire Marine Corps in not being able to satisfy a required class for that duration since it was required to complete it online.
The federal government needs to change how it runs things - I'm hoping that the USDS can make waves, but having been in the federal government world myself, I don't want to touch that beast without much better compensation & work environment.
However, government is indeed a different world. One of my friends complains how he has to file a request in order to get permission to do anything (he is a contractor for the Department of Energy) - this is normal based on all I have heard from my ~4 years in the area. I heard in another organization, they are forced into short product cycles by the requests of representatives and senators for investigations. One forward thinking VP of Engineering came into a different organization and shored up a lot of the tech & brought a modern stack to the organization, making all of the developers very happy, but was ultimately sacked (I forget the exact reason told to me, but I remember it not reflecting well on the federal government).
Also, when a consumer of software created by government contractors finds a critical bug that causes a non-functional app and reports exactly what is failing (important scripts not loading), good luck getting the contractor to fix it - I've seen it take 10 months to get an acknowledgement of the problem, which affected the entire Marine Corps in not being able to satisfy a required class for that duration since it was required to complete it online.
The federal government needs to change how it runs things - I'm hoping that the USDS can make waves, but having been in the federal government world myself, I don't want to touch that beast without much better compensation & work environment.