About My Job: The Shadow Civil Servant

by Conor Friedersdorf

A male reader writes:

I am not a government employee - I might as well be, but not for the reasons they think. I work in the federal division of one of the many IT companies in northern Virginia, and people assume that I lead a quiet life because we're just like the government. This is sort of true: I don't work mad hours like our teams on commercial contracts. However, we are the focal point of all of our customer's frustrations of the structural impediments (and peer...