There are plenty of people who are willing to work for the government and the pay is pretty decent. But their stack is often Microsoft based and their IT is located in Apeldoorn.
Who in their right mind would want to travel all the way to Apeldoorn.
A good example of internal development in the government is the police. They have internal development teams.
Every person that I've met who worked in government IT in NL said they run on a Microsoft stack.
This puts a huge filters out who's willing to work for them.
Most people managing stuff running in a datacenter don't live near that datacenter, it really doesn't matter where it's located. Also, the Netherlands is so tiny that crossing half of the country would still fall under "reasonable commute" in many places
Maybe that’s a reasonable commute to the US mind who isn’t used to work/life balance and likes spending unpaid hours in their car losing precious time with their family.
For me, a reasonable commute is a 10 minute bike ride to the office.
It's about 3 hours to cross the country (Groningen to Rotterdam) on a train and that's assuming you live by the train station and your work is also near the station too, which is mostly not true. I know some people who commute for 1 hour and a half, but they aren't in the office really often.
Apeldoorn? I don't know any government offices there. Most of it seems to concentrate in The Hague, with some agencies spread through the country.
The whole Belasting is in Apeldoorn....
I used to work in Burbank and lived approximately 34 miles away, across Los Angeles. It could take almost three hours for me to drive home on a Friday afternoon on the freeway. This was before Covid, and traffic has only gotten worse.
Their (Logius) vacancy site says Den Haag, not Apeldoorn on the vacancy for Java developer (another reason to not work there -- java).
Apeldoorn is actually a very nice place, surrounded by nature.