Do you think it is possible to turn a public sector development team into a team that is highly regarded in the development community?

Question

Do you think it is possible to turn a public sector development team into a team that is highly regarded in the development community? Are there examples of it? I'm think of the highest level such as FogCreek, Google, ect., where you can attract the best quality and you output the best quality. One of the main problems that I see with this is that companies like that can and do pay for the best. But we are often told, and I agree, that if you have interesting problems you can attract the talent regardless. The public sector certainly has world changing problems but are they the type of "interesting" that technical people will sign up for?

I am encouraged that some of the brightest bulbs of the past few decades are now getting more interested in public problems. Maybe that will be a start.

Edit: An outstanding development team could really help problems in Social Services and Criminal Justice systems. I fear that a lot of the budget for both those systems is used perfoming tasks that we could make obsolete. So potentially, we could help the "budget crisis". Is that problem interesting?

Answer 1

I think it's possible. One turnoff for me and the people that I see is that the public sector's most "interesting" problems are typically finding more efficient ways to kill large amounts of (or specific) people. NASA, space exploration, and the like have wonderful problems that I can see exciting many people (NASA would be your best bet at creating a dev team that could be touted as a "dream team"), but it takes a certain kind of person to work on a project where you understand and are OK with knowing your talents are being used to kill potentially thousands or millions of people over the course of its lifespan. Not all public sector projects are like this, of course, and there are certainly "world changing" projects that work for good, but it's that perception and the horror stories that keep people out.

The second turnoff is that developers have an ego. Seriously. When we write something awesome, we want to tell people about it. Top Secret clearances prevent us from doing so. That makes us cry inside.

Answer 2

I suspect the NSA is a very attractive environment for some people, although you're not going to get known for what you do.

Answer 3

It's probably harder in the U.S. than anywhere. There has been a relentless and orchestrated effort to denigrate governments and to devalue anything done by them and to elevate private enterprise above all else. It takes its most extreme, absolutist and fundamentalist form in the Libertarian Party, which is probably more strongly represented in ranks of software developers than any other industry.