<p>I hear a lot about the difference between working for private companies as opposed to working for the state/federal government when it comes to engineering. I hear that the private sector does a lot more design work whereas the public sector mostly does just cost estimating and contracts most of the work out to private companies. </p>
<p>Can anybody explain the difference a little bit more in detail? (or confirm whether what I'm hearing is right?) And what do you see are the pros/cons of working for either?</p>
<p>I have worked in both so I can give you a summary of it:</p>
<p>Public sector: mostly planning work, maintenance management, project development and operations. </p>
<p>Private sectors: consulting, designing, cost estimations, project management, development</p>
<p>Private sector is more fast pace and more work. Some companies would make you travel alot and may even set you permanently as a contractor employee at another company to do full time support.</p>
<p>I agree with BEngineer.
another thing about public companies is that they are very bureaucratic and give you lots of mindless paperwork, weekly meetings, and on top of that, since they’re public, the bulk of the engineering resources is directed to on-time customer support and sales of legacy systems instead of focusing on researching and development. also, management makes stupid business models in which a new design takes forever to get approved.
in a private company, since you don’t have to answer to shareholders, you get to pretty much design and build anything at the pace you want as long as you have the resources to do so.
public vs private companies in a capsule: public companies → sales-driven; private companies → innovation-driven</p>
<p>
Public sector is more bureaucratic, rarely merit based promotion, enjoy more relatively more secure employment and nowadays gets paid more than private sector. </p>
<p>Depending on WHO or which agency you work for, your work can vary from doing meaningless mind numbing paperwork to designing a 10’ tunnel to channel excess water from one reservoir to a nearby spreading ground/groundwater basin recharge.</p>
<p>Never had a chance to work in private. By the time I graduated, I foresaw the US was entering the 2nd great depression and opt at public sector instead of private.</p>