18F Reviews

If you are an RPCV or non-term-limited person, your career options are limited. Also the org cares about certain initiatives and concerns while others aren't as important. For instance, it has pursued cost-recoverability (a good goal) to the detriment of other important goals such as diversity, education, knowledge management, and its mission. It seems more focused on building software than reaching its mission which it can't do by building software alone. Your experience varies wildly depending on where you are located and who manages you such that culture is inconsistent. And there are a lot of people concerned with their position and title in a hierarchy instead of just doing good work. Too many people require that they be involved in decision-making and there are examples of many anti-patterns such as seagull management, loose cannon development, micro-management, and intellectual violence. So it has a stronger allure from the outside than the inside and people easily become disenchanted. Also performance reviews are carried out in an inconsistent matter so your review depends on whom your manager is rather than on your work.

Few, if anyone, in management has experience running a large organization and most seem unaware of the day-to-day realities their staff faces. This has improved recently, but in a rapidly changing environment, management seems to need to focus all of their attention onto putting out external fires. The parent agency’s leadership doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the work required, and constant pressures from above seem to be slowly eroding the ability of the organization to do truly top of the line work. 18F is run like a consultancy (in that it sells services to other agencies and is required to be cost recoverable) but from within the government. The problem is that 18F lacks the flexibility of a private sector firm to control costs and seek diverse clients (aka, private sector clients when government work dries up at the end of the budget cycle).