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by rswerve 825 days ago
Civic tech. Do good work with smart people. Look at 18F, USDS, the Digital Services Coalition consultancies….Some projects are more exciting than others, but these orgs are mission-driven, mostly about improving digital services for Americans.
2 comments

This sounds good in theory. I’ve tried this with a smaller consultancy. The problem is there’s too much bureaucracy for my tastes, coming from startups. Also I ran into some of the worst code I’ve seen in my life. Maybe I just wound up at the wrong place.
There’s a lot of bureaucracy dealing with the government, no doubt. Also a lot of bad code. Hopefully neither of those were coming from your own team, because yeah, you might have been at the wrong place. I’m at a DSC shop where I’ve worked with ex Apple and Google folks, and some of the USDS people are the best engineers I’ve ever worked with.
Sadly, the code/quality issues were from my team. Bureaucracy issues also, to a lesser extent.
This is the right answer. There’s also the SBIR, if you want to try building something ambitious: https://www.sbir.gov/