<p>Background: I'm a computer science and math double major and a rising junior.</p>
<p>So I'm currently interning for the federal government and I am pretty much not doing anything all day. The pays alright (~$14 and technically its overkill for the work I'm putting in ... ) They were hiring math majors and they ask us to learn R (used for statistics a lot, think matlab). And for the past 8 weeks I've been programming little things in R that take only the most basic programming knowledge like things involving loops and stuff (and there really is no consequence if I don't do this) and exploring my own interests (aka googling things somewhat academic related). There have been light-hearted jokes that this is tax payer money, but I'm kind of upset that this ACTUALLY IS tax payer money ... </p>
<p>I've never had a full time job before this one and I was pretty desperate just to be hired by someone, so I grabbed onto the first person who looked interested in me. </p>
<p>Luckily its just an internship, but I'm cooping for another federal company (this time they wanted computer science majors) in the fall and I'm worried its going to be more of this -.-</p>
<p>Basically, I'm wondering if most technical, federal gov jobs are like this. Slightly below average pay where you do menial things/nothing all day. Anyone with more experience want to way in?</p>
<p>Oooooh boy…how do I explain this? Well, might as well give it to you raw…</p>
<p>Often times the federal agencies have the contractors do the “heavy lifting”. That is why contractors are paid much higher. I have been doing government contracting for almost 8 years and did 13 in the private sector before then.</p>
<p>I WILL STILL ADMIT THAT THE FEDERAL AGENCIES WASTE A TON OF TAXPAYER MONEY!!</p>
<p>Some projects are ran better than others but if I had to add my $0.05, it seems to me that the federal government project leaders who run better projects were those with prior private sector experience compared to the “lifetime” federal worker who is leading the project.</p>
<p>I know I benefit from it and federal contracting has me living quite well (Top 5% income when combined with my wife) but I DO shake my head to the wasteful acts.</p>
<p>I was in the military but worked for a big three letter agency with many more federal employees and contractors than military personnel. My Mom also works for a big federal agency not related to defense. </p>
<p>My experience was mind-numbingly boring. My training was massive overkill for the trivial job I ended up doing. If I wanted, I could have come into work and colored in a coloring book all day. My bosses wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care if they did. The only times I was ever actually busy were when some sort of bureaucratic inefficiency caused a lot of busy work to appear to need to be done in a short period of time. Usually it would be something like this: someone noticed that some regulation said X annual training needed to be completed Y days ago and somehow we were not notified and have to do it immediately. Another example might be Bill needs to do a task, which is required for team A to do their daily work, but regulation says he cannot do that task until Steve, Tom, and Tim each sign off on a form. Steve, Tom, and Tim all work on different sides of the base, and a whole team of some sort is waiting to start on the task until this form is signed. Finally (at 2:00pm) a day’s worth of work needs to be done by team A and they’re all staying at work until 8:00pm to get it done. </p>
<p>As for my Mom, she gets busy once in a blue moon. I can call her at any time during the work day and talk to her for an hour, she’ll never say “I can’t talk right now, I’m busy.” She prefers me to call her at work so it goes by faster.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most interesting part of my experience was that my job was “critically undermanned.” I basically did nothing meaningful, ever.</p>
<p>I could probably write a novel, but I was just reminded of another thing I found interesting. I worked with many contractors who were paid an obnoxious amount of money because of some rare skills they possessed which were supposedly extremely critical. One did all of his sleeping at work, and appeared to have developed a twitch that caused him to occasionally wiggle his mouse so the screensaver wouldn’t come up. Another guy doing the same job would regularly just sprawl out in his chair obviously sleeping while people walked by. Usually they’d wake him up, but he never got fired. I worked with him for two years and he slept literally every day. I’m sure he’s still there.</p>
<p>I’d recommend it if you want to get paid to do nothing, but I’d say stay away if you would rather find your work stimulating. I’m sure there are some people in the government who do meaningful work, but I’ve never met them.</p>
<p>You shouldn’t be using loops in R or matlab. Learn to vectorize your code or you’ll pay for it later (when you need to write some compute intensive code in either language).</p>
<p>I work at an armed service university and can tell you that my supervisor and his peers all do extremely advanced technical work. My supervisor never has a free minute and work almost non-stop from 8-6. I am not sure what his pay is, but mine in pretty high for someone without a degree.</p>
<p>At some agencies interns just get assigned “make work”. That’s often the case where someone in human resources or a politico decides that having interns is a good idea. They may not have asked anyone who is actually doing work whether they could productively utilize interns. So, the employees just hand over mundane stuff so that you don’t keep them from doing their jobs.</p>
<p>With a CS and Math double major I’d suggest you look for an internship in a high tech area of government, e.g., NSA, NASA, NAVSEA etc. If you are already in one of those agencies then prospects may be poor if you get stuck in the same program year after year.</p>
<p>On advantage to working with the Fed government to start is that you would obtain a secret clearance which would help if you later want to work for a govt contractor.</p>
<p>I’m starting to think that my situation is closer to what ChrisTKD described, so I think I’ll wait until my next position until I start stereotyping all Fed jobs.</p>