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I recently left pricate industry to go work in the government (DoD specifically) for the second time in what is legitimately the most important job I've ever had. I've always worked in research and tech, so government is a big pay cut, but I also really like what I'm doing, and I like that work doesn’t take over my life even though I'm legitimately contributing a lot.
My issue with this whole thing is this:
First, everything I work on is classified. Sure, I could come up with some unclassified bullet points like "developed Python codes", "worked through mathematical problems", "investigated some API's, fou d other data sources", "worked through more complicated math when the first approximation wasn't good enough", but what is this proving? How does it show my job is necessary or valuable?
Second, my boss, my bosses boss, etc. up my chain of command know what I'm working on and they're all impressed. Are my five bullet points going to be used to somehow override theor judgment of me? We al we already have to do evaluations at work. We do self evaluations and our managers evaluate us. My evaluations are really high. They always have been in every job I've had. Why the fuck do I have to send 5 bullet points to Elon Musk and be subject to some randos judgment based on that?
Finally, I read a news article that said AI is going to be used to determine which jobs are necessary based on these bullet points. I'm not sure what the source is on that--maybe it's wrong. It seems likely to me, though, because there's no way they're going through each email by hand. Again, fuck that. My job is legitimately important, for reasons I can't talk about here.
For all the complaints I see here about federal beurocracy and waste and the cold, methodical nature of beurocrats, I have to wonder, what is thay based on? Federal offices are just, like, normal work places. And the people who work there are normal people, who would be very unlikely to enact some conspiracy of hiring fake employees, faking vasge swipes, faking timecards, etc--no more likely than anyone else, certainly.
One more comment: In my previous industry job, we got a new CIO at one point. He really liked my boss, who he promoted to a position directly below him, and she knew how valuable I was, and so the CIO ended up really liking me as well. He put me in charge of some stuff, and I talked to him semi-regularly.
The problem was, he had no idea what he was doing. He laid off all our middle management in tech, which a year later we still hadn't recovered from. He snatched up tons of people who were laid off from Amazon, Google, etc. bloating our AI/ML. He decided he wanted us to move off the cloud and develop tech that we could sell to other companies, even though it wasn't a tech company.
He started canceling contracts with vendors. Firing contractors. Building on prem systems. I had VP's and their assistants screaming at me that we were blowing things up and I had to change the CIO's mind. . . But of course, i couldn't do anything. High up people started quitting.
At one point (this wasn't actually his fault), I was trying to requisitions funds for a project I'd veen told to start, which involved keeping 3 contractors who did very important work on our financial syatems. I argued and fought but finance kept telling me we couldn't keep the contractors, even though they were the only thing preventing another group of external contractors from pushing changes that would routinely destroy our payroll systems.
Anyway, long story short, I quit that job and came back to the federal government. I'll be damned though if it isn't starting to feel like a repeat of the same situation.
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