And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech
I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.
Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.
I had a student job at the State of Illinois a long time ago.
From what I could tell their biggest problem hiring good people were:
1) pay rates tended to be well below industry, even when considering benefits (for programmers at the time)
2) their hiring process was really long. They had to go through this process where they had to find someone they wanted to hire and then get the req opened, which required apparently going through a lot of layers. It would take months and the candidate would find another job. Then they'd have to do it over again. I may have the details wrong, but going from finding a candidate they liked to giving an offer with a start date was multiple months.
There was also some other weirdness. Every time I logged into my computer it had this warning about everything I did being monitored. We were always lectured that anything we do could by FOIAed, and don't type anything that you don't want to be a headline the next day. They were also extremely strict about alcohol. There was a rumor in the office that on a student worker's last day his manager took him to a going-away-lunch and ordered a round of drinks. The student spilled the tea back at the office and the manager was fired the next day.
Overall in retrospect it wasn't a bad place to work. It seemed kinda oppressive to me as a student but in retrospect the environment wasn't bad.
Having worked for both FedGov and Contractors directly, plus several F500s, the Gubmnt was wayyyyy more focused on loss, waste, and long-term planning.
the levels of waste and BS and general suck at some large mining + O&G companies was astounding, on top of being absolutely brutal, miserable places to work.
Interesting! I guess government doesn't equal government and highly depends on where you work and what you work on. The same way being a product manager at Google vs. a founding engineer at a startup vs. a research scientist at OpenAI are different, though they all "work in tech".
Plus, I'm in Europe and my friend runs his own startup, so very different environment.
That's close enough to my experience in state government. The biggest problem was generally a lack of widespread competence. There was plenty of red tape, but there were also lots of people whose job was to deal with that tape.
I also thought that as well, then I worked with the privat sector as a freelancer and people where even more incompetent.