I'm a recent college grad who works for one of the top contractors of the US Department of Defense. My job is such that I'm always jumping from program to program performing a number of different tasks. They pay me well, which is nice, but I feel like it's a waste of the government's, and therefore the peoples', money. The problem is I have an issue with the way work is done around here. I feel like we are given an extraordinarily high budget for almost every single task. For example, I was given a 360 hour budget for a task that only took me 80 hours. Furthermore, I feel like we are implicitly discouraged to go under budget. A little under budget is fine, and preferable to appease program managers and the government, but a lot under budget is a huge no-no. The problem is, I finish everything wayyy early, and spend the rest of the time checking the work I've done to beyond an exhaustive level and I've also found myself milking my hours so that I don't finish my projects so early anymore. Anyway, the reason I'm fed up now is because work is slow on my team at the moment and will be for about another week and a half. It's so slow that I'm doing some work for a different team in a different department, and I was assigned a simple number-crunching task that the other team's leader said should take about two weeks--and I finished it in THREE HOURS! This was a task without much grey area. You just do the calculations, look it over to make sure it's all good, and you're done. Also, it's a task that is performed semi-frequently and it would take about 30 minutes for a good programmer to write a program that would do the task in half a second. None of this is such a problem when we've got a lot of work to go around, but even in those times, it's heavily encouraged to work overtime. I feel this overtime is encouraged not really for the sake of finishing projects and meeting deadlines, but for using up the budgeted hours so we don't get cuts in the future. I feel this culture of using up all the hours in our budget percolates down possibly from the head of our division. In any case, it is frustrating. When it comes down to it, I feel like I cannot in good faith continue working here if things continue as they've been, unless I can move into a new position with a team that doesn't have this kind of problem...at least not to this extent. So my question is, for those of you who may work for a DoD contractor, is your situation similar? If it is or has been in the past, what have you done to deal with it? If it's not, how bad does this sound? Or am I just freaking out over nothing? From the perspective of my team, department, and employer as a whole, the workload varies a LOT and you can't very well hire salaried employees only to send them home without pay for a couple weeks when work is slow. If you did that nobody would work for you.
I worked for years for BAE systems, and loved it. So my experience is much different. If you dislike it so much, leave. If you live in the DMV area, plenty of great jobs around. Just be careful what you say about your government job (clients). Especially if you hold a clearance... Sorry you feel this way. I recommend just finding something else that you like.
Apart from asking a couple questions to fellow team members about budgets, I haven't said anything about it to anyone and don't plan to (except for anonymous posting on this forum--hope I haven't provided too much info as is). I certainly feel an obligation to keep myself and my coworkers out of trouble. And I'm certainly well aware it's not my place to mention something directly to the customer, or mention it somewhere where the customer could see it, that would be damaging to my company, whether it's providing proprietary information or damaging to the reputation. I actually like the work that I do and my coworkers are great, but this whole budgeting thing is driving me crazy. I'm trying to stay honest but I've been pinging my boss constantly for more work and, although she's been good about it, I think she's getting overwhelmed with me.
I won't say what I'm a part of or not. Just that I work for a government contractor and the whole budgeting situation is different that I expected. Now that I've whined about it a little to mostly unsympathetic strangers, I think I'll just try to wade through this slow patch until we start the flood of work coming in, then I'll see how I feel about the situation and in the meantime try not to waste taxpayers' money for my purposes. I'm sure I can figure it out.
there are many stories of government workers just sitting around collecting checks, some never ever showed up. its just how it works i don't know why its tolerated its been like that for a long time from the older people sharing their experiences.
It was. As an example, I found a bug while testing some software for the military. 30 minutes later, I'd determined the fix was literally a single-digit code change, flipping a "0" to a "1". I was instructed to write up the proposal to fix it. Knowing how things work, I turned in an estimate for 60 hours. That wasn't enough. I had to up it to 180 hours. You see, there are several powerpoint presentations to make, many reviews at several levels (programmers, managers, security ...) that everyone has to attend and sign off on, many teleconferences ... and always following TheProcess. Which changed about every 6 months, in a seemingly random fashion. I retired early. It won't change. And if you rise to mid-level management, you'll be the guy telling guys like you to do such things, as you spend your life trying to get those endless spreadsheets to show the right numbers, and hoping you'll get promoted to look at even more spreadsheets. I still have spreadsheet nightmares.
Its not perfect, its abused, and it often takes on a life of its own, but there is a reason for the madness. Someone finds an error in the software, its a simple one number change, the person thinks she will just change it and that's the end of it. No big deal. Wrong. What was the effect of the error, does it impact other people, does it explain test results that - unknown to the programmer - other people are struggling to resolve, does the change have a ripple effect to other parts of the code or other systems? When the entire package is recompiled, linked and released, what other code changes were intentionally or accidentally included? How many other programmers were tinkering with the source, who did not follow proper backup procedures and messed with the formal configuration, and their changes/tinkering were included in the new release? And experience shows that when a programmer says "I only changed one line", its often BS. They get in the code, they see a section where the columns don't line up so they line them up, or add comments, or fix a loop to make it better or clearer - all the time introducing the chance of a typo. Or they see another "obvious" error and fix it, maybe a number is wrong, maybe the radius of the earth isn't exactly correct so they put the correct number in - and screw up all kinds of code that was written assuming that specific number even if its not perfect. Many programs have been bitten by "trivial" software changes and now people don't take chances. Sometimes the process is overkill and just blindly followed by bureaucrats who apply irrelevant rules because they don't want to take a chance. But there is a reason for the process.
