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by Extended0088
1019 days ago
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This is great answer, thanks. I'm also in the UK and I'll take a look. I agree that the services that can be built for the government can be apolitical. I know that during the pandemic there was a lot of interesting work going on in the NHS. I think they created teams that were outside of the normal archaic structure of the service and allowed them a lot more freedom. Edit: Looks like the government is pretty focused on the Java stack :'( |
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Java is still popular around UK Departments but is by no means universal.
The UK Government Digital Service runs services in Ruby, Python, JavaScript / TypeScript and Java [1].
Other departments with strong programming teams would include:
- Department for Education (DfE) - Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) - Ministry of Justice (MoJ) - Home Office
Amongst others. They'll each have a tendency towards their own tech stack.
This is a useful resource [2] (unofficial but run by folks who love this stuff) for finding out what services are out there, and where possible who runs them and links to open source code.
Have a look around, see what you like the look of, then set some alerts or reach out to a department to ask if anyone there could tell you more about what it's like to work there... would be my advice.
There are even some local authorities with pretty respectable tech operations. Hackney used to get kudos for building good things, as did Surrey.
Outside of Gov, Citizens advice run off ruby last I heard, there are wonderful places like MySociety, the ODI as well as the privacy folks like EFF and Open Rights group.
I agree with your core point, finding work that is meaningful to you can be hard. Even harder if you want to get paid commercial rates for it.
But take heart, there's an ecosystem of folks working their socks off to make things better out there. Hopefully this links you into their networks.
Good luck.
[1]: https://github.com/alphagov/ [2]: https://govuk-digital-services.herokuapp.com/