Has anyone here worked on government websites or APIs?
I'm curious what the experience was like.
I'm curious what the experience was like.
I could probably spend a week telling war stories, but the main takeaway is that you can't look at government as just another sector waiting to be brought up to speed. Government is an entire industry unto itself, with incentives that seem fully alien to anyone from the private sector. Money doesn't flow according to the laws of capitalist physics, but by byzantine congressional allocation. Understanding how things actually get done requires a ton of time, networking, study, and empathy.
Career government techies are extremely risk adverse (for a lot of very good reasons). If you want to make an impact, it helps to be able to take on a lot of the risk that nobody else wants to. For me, that meant promoting open-source alternatives to various entrenched products (cough, MS Access, cough) and accepting all the blame if the higher-ups don't like it. For this reason, it helps not to look at this as a career.
Going up against the entrenched interests can be frustratingly hard. It feels like everything is subtly working against you. Or, not so subtly- On more than one occasion I had teammates get singled out by the federal IT press. Somehow I managed to stay anonymous, but the threat was there. Fortunately, I felt a strong sense of support from my bosses, as well as a lot of righteous fury from seeing so many failed, hundred million dollar projects that could have just been a simple web app.
Granted, it's been about five years since I was in government. I would be curious to know if things are different nowadays :)
The "FedRamp" contract overhaul pretty much locks in the requirements and specifications to these above implementations.
I have designed an API that revolves around and side-steps this that currently serves 60 million US civilians...but in the end, the security assessment pretty much comes down to the Privacy Acts interpretations and the common sense security landscape.
If you are a leader in the bureaucracy, your incentive is to not personally fail, which is not the same as to succeed.
There is an army of auditors waiting to question every decision, so the obvious way to avoid that is to not make any. Balancing the need to do something without deciding anything is an art of sorts.
That creates an incentive never to label anything a failure and just keep pumping good money after bad - that's how to avoid the negative article.