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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

And you get bonus days off any time congress needs to raise the debt ceiling!

That varies quite a bit. I remember feeling bad for my coworkers who worked on "critical" projects in exchange for IOUs while I got free vacation (although I was also getting paid in IOUs for a little while)

Sometimes better than random layoffs because someone needed to juice the stock price.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce... (“A major Alphabet investor said the company should cut even more jobs and address 'excessive' pay in the wake of mass layoffs”)

(Edit: retracted an unnecessarily snarky statement)

(I admit Congress needs to get its shit together)

Hey both of these suck for everyone involved, I was just trying to point out that government work is not without its own issues. You may be right about government jobs being more stable, you're certainly less likely to just lose your job. They do tend to pay significantly less though from what I've seen.

I'm from the UK so while we do have layoffs, like much of Europe we have relatively good employment protections. The government here don't tend to do layoffs, but do tend to use contractors significantly more than most businesses and do flex their contractor base up and down.

Wasn’t a personal attack by any means, more like “pick your poison” with a bit too much snark (which I apologize for). Google is great until it suddenly isn’t, and working for Uncle Sam has its own challenges. Happy to hear you’re in a jurisdiction where you’re not exposed to the US labor experience, I’m just trying to throw life preservers out because I’m not sure how long the market is going to be this dysfunctional for (and this will be my third “once in a lifetime” economic crisis).

Not everyone involved, think of those poor investors!

Spot on about the contractors. The city I live in contains some of the larger data processing hot-spots of the German government (not so much in terms of large number-crunching server farms, but in terms of ever changing complicated business logic running at high volume) and there's a crazy number of consultancies serving that market and nobody else. But ironically those are the safest jobs nonetheless, because that demand could only ever go away in total state collapse.

Working as a contractor for a public entity, I can't think of anything that I would like to do less than that...

I can certainly feel what you mean, it's where those who will take on anything to get a bigger car congregate in these parts. But it's actually not that bad I think, deployments are not "the temp guy in an in-house team" but projects with a presumably not too difficult buyer: the customer-side person you are working with doesn't have too much skin in the game. Realistic expectations and all that. One of the more graspeable downsides I think (never worked that way, but went though the hiring process once) is that those state clients seem to never outsource a complete project, but insist on keeping projects neutral by staffing them from as many different consultancies as possible, which means that you'll only ever work with people who are nominally your competitors.

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