There’s Nowhere Cooler Than Here

With the day-to-day challenges feds face in government IT, it is easy to overlook an important fact:  They have one of the best jobs in the world. Not necessarily the easiest or the best paid. Rather, one of the most satisfying and consequential. They have an opportunity to work with a variety of technologies to address issues of critical importance. This was the point that CompTIA CEO Todd Thibodeaux recently made and it is something I observed first-hand over a nearly 40-year career with the federal government. 

Having started in government at the age of 18, I was fortunate to have worked with thousands of talented and dedicated civil servants. Over time, many of them became the technology leaders of various agencies.  We came to the federal government as a call to duty to serve our nation and make a difference. 

Having worked across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I can attest that these earlier mainframes, PCs, distributed computing and 3GL programming languages were just as challenging as today’s data analytics, cloud computing, open source software and mobile devices.  And while many note that the private sector is often an earlier adopter, these technologies -- then and now -- were not perfected until they overcame the unique challenges of government. The hurdles include scale, performance, security, complexity and an uncompromising need for reliability.