Where are the Government Web Developers?
- Written by
- Clay Johnson
- Date
- 06/05/2009 12:15 p.m.
Where are the web developers in Government?
Are you a web developer who works for a non-defense related federal agency? Not a contractor, but actually employed by the Executive Branch of Government? If so, I'd like to meet you. Because I'm beginning to think you don't exist. USAJobs tends to agree with me, too. From what I'm able to gather, the entire federal government is hiring a total of 6 "IT Support Specialists," which look like cleverly disguised network administration jobs and "off the shelf software management" jobs.
To be specific, what I'm looking for is:
- A web developer (Someone who knows Python, ASP.NET, PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, alongside HTML and CSS)
- Who doesn't work for a contracting firm, but is instead employed directly as a full time employee by a federal agency who
- Builds user facing federal websites, and
- Does not work for defense related agencies.
I've met strategists, managers, new media directors, bloggers, even "architects," but not a single developer. I've met lots of government contractors who work as developers as virtual FTEs for the Government. And granted, I don't have much contact with the Department of Defense-- I'm sure deep within that organization there are developers building software for the government that keeps us safe. But outside of defense, are there any? Do they exist? I've asked around, and nobody can seem to point me in the right direction.
If you know of any, point me in the right direction, and let me know why they seem so rare in the comments.
Discussion
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i can introduce you to dozens of them. ping me offline. 6 of them working for http://globe.gov
also, i used to be one - building systems for serving OCG compliant data for NGDC
Maybe globe.gov can be Sunlight's next redesign project.
All IT positions are classed in the same 2210 series in the federal government, from level 1 helpdesk to "CIO" equivelents. There are a number of parenthetical titles for admin, network, info security, analysis and design, but they are uncoded, not required and often misspelled.
Also, since the fed hires for long term, they don't often specify languages in job postings as in industry. a web developer would simply have web development as a criteria, but occasionally they'll be specific in the technologies expected.
There are 637 federal .govs (Health and human services has 77). So there are plenty of webmasters. They even have a website for federal webmasters webcontent.gov which has plenty of good info for non federal webmasters too.
Also for the three years ending about aug of 2008, there were about 120 jobs mentioning python, and 350 mentioning asp.net.
I've talked to a few government web people, and I get the impression that one of the biggest responsibilities for government web developers -- and one of the biggest things holding back government websites -- is "Section 508" disability compliance. (Look it up on Wikipedia.) The basic idea is a good one, that people with disabilities should have equivalent access to content as people without disabilities, but ironically it tends to achieve this by limiting the content and user interface features available to the latter group.
First of all, 508-compliance is one of the main reasons government websites look like they're from the 1990's. Why? Because 1990's websites work really well with screen reader software, and if you go beyond very basic layouts, you can make things really difficult for screen reader users. If you start adding interactive content in JavaScript or Flash, then you still need to make a second version of your page without them but with exactly the same content, so someone might ask why you'd bother with them in the first place. (This is to say nothing of cross-browser issues and an unwillingness to pick winners and losers among competing technologies.)
Second, imagine you have a stack of paper documents that you'd like to make available to the public. The simplest solution is to run them through a document scanner and post the PDFs, right? Well, if you want to be 508-compliant, you also need to OCR the text. But OCR text is notoriously littered with typos and erroneous punctuation, so you need to manually proof the text to ensure that it's accurate and can be read by a speech synthesizer. Now, imagine the document has a few pictures or charts in it. In order to provide equal access, someone needs to write a description of each figure that provides a similar amount of information to what you'd get by looking at it. This is surprisingly difficult, if you've ever tried it, and often requires someone well-versed in the subject matter. So, instead of just posting a PDF, we now need an expensive OCR software package (or several), a team of OCR proofreaders, a team of technical writers and editors, and an approval process for the agency to sign off on all this new text going out. So you can see why this stuff doesn't get posted!
I bet that if you really looked at what government web developers are doing, it's this kind of stuff, and if you want to know why there aren't job postings for web developers with experience in interactive technologies, it's because those technologies make 508-compliance difficult.
There are a few folks at Federal Student Aid (US ED) that still do in-house development (Java), for smaller projects where it would be too time-consuming to do a procurement effort. Let me know if you would be interested in making a connection.
Myself, I used to develop federal websites, but that changed years ago when we started outsourcing most work. I know and still do development "on the side", but as a fed employee, I am an IT project manager and manage development and technical architecture projects.
The 508 compliance does not mean you have to make ugly sites or that you can't use JavaScript. You can build a perfectly compliant page with all that new fangled technology. It just takes a little extra work. With a bit of CSS transformation, you can make a simple HTML document that screenreaders love and make it into a beautiful beast.
This site is a pretty good example. It's pretty, but if you disable javascript and CSS styles, you still see a nice structured document and a functional Web site. If they developed like this, they could have sites that have no problems with 508 compliance but still look visually appealing.
All the developer needs is a little learning on techniques(like css img backgrounds for graphical links) and they're all set.