I work in the public sector, in Denmark, but I think a lot of the myths around public IT are just that, myths.
We have some of the best talent in our country. We pay them less, but a lot of people prefer working in the public sector for a variety of reasons. Some are idealists who want to build a better society, others like the flexible hours and the paid sick leave for their children, others again like the relative stability or safety or the fact that they get to work on big projects.
I think the bad image comes from the fact that our scandals are public. When the banking sector does a big project that fails you typically won't hear about it. When the government fails, you'll be reading news articles, blogposts and the likes as well as having researchers from prominent universities trying to pour their take on what the government needs (typically to ask said researchers).
The public sector does fail more though. I think there was a study in the 00's that showed around 75% failures on major IT systems in the private sector and around 85-90% in the public sector. But then we have to digitize an un-digitizable law, so I think this is only natural.
In my municipality we don't do complete failures often, but we don't always succeed in implementing as successful as we wanted, leading to a lack of benefit realization.
That being said, we operate around 370 different systems 50-70 of which we've build ourselves, and most of these are working fine.
I think I'm a nice example. I get headhunter a lot, and I could be making a lot more money in the private sector, but I prefer the public sector because I have Children and since my job comes with paid lunch breaks I work two and a half hours less per week. On top of that, I'm not expected to work 40-50 hours a week despite being in management. I sometimes still do, but then it's typically for interesting projects such as heading the digital voter registration process during elections.
This may be very different in America, but I suspect that the NSA would be able to attract the best of the best on image alone.
We have some of the best talent in our country. We pay them less, but a lot of people prefer working in the public sector for a variety of reasons. Some are idealists who want to build a better society, others like the flexible hours and the paid sick leave for their children, others again like the relative stability or safety or the fact that they get to work on big projects.
I think the bad image comes from the fact that our scandals are public. When the banking sector does a big project that fails you typically won't hear about it. When the government fails, you'll be reading news articles, blogposts and the likes as well as having researchers from prominent universities trying to pour their take on what the government needs (typically to ask said researchers).
The public sector does fail more though. I think there was a study in the 00's that showed around 75% failures on major IT systems in the private sector and around 85-90% in the public sector. But then we have to digitize an un-digitizable law, so I think this is only natural.
In my municipality we don't do complete failures often, but we don't always succeed in implementing as successful as we wanted, leading to a lack of benefit realization.
That being said, we operate around 370 different systems 50-70 of which we've build ourselves, and most of these are working fine.
I think I'm a nice example. I get headhunter a lot, and I could be making a lot more money in the private sector, but I prefer the public sector because I have Children and since my job comes with paid lunch breaks I work two and a half hours less per week. On top of that, I'm not expected to work 40-50 hours a week despite being in management. I sometimes still do, but then it's typically for interesting projects such as heading the digital voter registration process during elections.
This may be very different in America, but I suspect that the NSA would be able to attract the best of the best on image alone.