Is it just me, or most of the people from these subreddits give a massive vibe of being pencil pushers? As if some redditors somehow managed to score an IT job within lower level position of FBI and started congregating together over their shared massive egos.
I've been ducking in and out between contract and govie work for quite some time, I can give you some insight on this from what I've seen but I have no clue where or who the fuck these reddit personalities are.
I do a lot of specialized work. Oftentimes what happens is a contract falls through the hands of a contract company. There are many ways and reasons for this to happen, from what Ive seen the company wasnt making the government happy with their SLA or Return on Investment (ROI). When this happens, if the government considers the work vital enough they will try to buy the current workers into fed service with the contract, since they know the systems better than a new employee obviously would. Now, something you should all understand about federal service right away: Federal service offers less money in technical roles especially than commercial/contract, but they offer a ton more benefits. Federal healthcare, dental, and of course, retirement in 20 or so. Therefore, if you're some low level service person, youll almost always choose to go federal, because the benefits are immaculate and being a low marketable skill level you'll want that than take your chances outside. Plus, after three years, you'll get tenured in, which just means you are VERY VERY HARD to fire. Damn near impossible. Now if you were smart, you'd use this time to work on education and experience, but there are a lot of people who will just coast on federal jobs after they get tenured in. And you know what, thats not a bad thing, you do you. Every year you get a step promotion, all the way to I think 12. Also the ranks go from GS/GG or whatever you are level 5-15, those are RANKS and each rank has p sure up to 12 STEPS, which you get annually increased a step. So if you're ok with a GS-9 salary, you can coast on that for as long as you'd like afaik. At least in my path thats the case. As for what contracts fall through, they're usually service desks of some sort from tier 0 IT to desktop infra or low level networking, we're talking repairing CAT cables and running wire.
So thats a massive tl;dr but a lot of people fall into federal work jobs that they normally wouldn't qualify for because of this. Now, you're supposed to find a way to meet qualifications before your three years or they fire you, buuuuut if you dont and you make it to tenure, theyre stuck with you. Even if the job runs out of time and goes End of Life (EOL), they will find somewhere else to put you. I have seen several cases where a federal worker was extremely useless at a role and they still did not or could not fire them, so they just get moved to a place where they are allowed to be useless. This is the dream job for lots of federal workers, as there are tons of jobs where you can come into work like once or twice a week, sometimes a month, then fuck off and still be on the payroll.
I never meet these employee types but I do often hear stories of them, how useless they were and how they were carted off to some bullshit job instead of being fired. Before Trump's EO, a LOT of jobs were listed as remote on federal search sites. Obviously, contracting jobs are not the same. They will fire you quickly if you prove to be useless.
