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>The government is desperate for people who can code.

Not desperate enough to teach people to code who want to learn though.

But I bet half the need is from mountains of shit code anyway. The contracting and procurement processes are fucked (source: friend who works in gov't IT contracts -- stay far away from any dev positions involving Dept. of VA).

Demand for good devs is going to be won by companies. We clearly can't even fill private sector roles even at these salary levels. I'm not sure how anyone can look at our really picky labor market with the government's lack of salary and perk offerings and think "yeah we can fill these if we just try a bit harder".

Government really needs a different approach to solve their staffing needs in this regard. They aren't competitive.



I agree with many parts of your reply.

That said, the context was about older and experienced devs who, for some reason, can’t find a job in the private labor market.

The federal government is a much safer bet for these people. As bad as it can be, it’s better than unemployed. Some of the jobs are actually good.


> Not desperate enough to teach people to code who want to learn though.

There's endless free material online for those who actually want to learn.


Those people end up in companies if they're any good at it, presuming they can somehow pass the filtering.




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