[BareNakedCoder]

Not just governments. I worked at a F100 company that had a special type of internal funding called SQP for spending on (mostly) IT people-hours on projects. Year after year, the biz would penny-pinch on their SQP to the point that we struggled to keep core contractors on staff. Then around Oct/Nov, biz would come to us begging to spend their SQP on anything (else they could lose it next year) as long as that project stop billing at fiscal year end (not a day afterwards; as that would be charged to next year's SQP). That meant we now struggled because we didn't have enough people on staff to burn up all the SQP. Famine then feast! I would suggest (half jokingly) that we should head over to the nearest retirement home and get a bus load of old folks to join us at $150/hr for two months to just sit there doing nothing but burn SQP.

[Answerawake]

We are always seeing threads with junior people/new grads talking about how they are having so much trouble breaking into the industry. Just hire them and give them interesting tiny projects. Would be super helpful to so many people to get going and still allow you to spend all your money.

[joejerryronnie]

You can't ramp up hiring that quickly. By the time you've onboarded several new devs, the year (and budget period) will be over.