“I worked at the United States Digital Service for 2.5 years after spending the first part of my career in startups. As someone new to the federal government, there were a lot of surprises both initially and after several years… ”
“…4. So much work is done by vendors…”
“There’s some variation, but many agencies employ only a handful of software developers. Instead, the IT org outsources most of the product development and implementation lifecycle to vendors. That means lots of PMs and middle management that can quickly balloon a contract. I’ve been told that the agency average ratio of federal employees to contractor employees on a IT project at CMS is 17:1. So if there are 1,000 people working on healthcare.gov (for instance), then there are only 58 feds working on the project. In my experience, many projects have a ratio closer to 40:1 (as best as I can remember, healthcare.gov seems to have closer to 25 feds involved in the IT build).”
“This means that there’s little oversight, little transparency, and vendors have a lot of leeway (this can be bad—see #9). A project often grows a large program team, whereas a few developers could do the same work. And it’s pretty common for a pure software project to have fewer than 50% of the team be developers…”
“Sidenote to entreprenuers: If you want to make a lot of money building a company, there’s probably no better way than to win a few government contracts. The numbers are huge (often as big as a Series A round) and you don’t dilute ownership. I’m fairly confident that a team of five experienced tech industry developers could be more productive than a team of 30 from most federal IT vendors — just think about those margins. I’m happy to introduce you to some folks that could provide advice — our country could use more good product teams in government software.” Read the full post here.
Source: The 10 Most Surprising Things I Learned Working in the Government – By Joe Crobak, April 25, 2018. Medium.
