Pros
Good Pay and Benefits. Exposure to large government IT operations
Cons
The IT Directorate is not very progressive in their thinking and is following IT trends that are at least 5 years old. The office of information security seams to not have a solid understanding of modern software architecture/design or security practices, rendering their policy positions as deprecated and uninformed. ATO assignment and enforcement seem arbitrary. The development environments that are imposed on programmers are archaic at best and severely encumber the entire development workflow. If you are developer that needs a *nix based environment you will be fighting lots of battles to get simple tools you need to do your job. Since the infrastructure support team and the office of security roadblock productivity. No solution exists for developing on *nix platforms remotely. There are pockets of great teams that are working very hard to innovate and push back against the nonsequitar IT normatives, however, working on these teams are very tiring since you are constantly combating the aforementioned issues. Once the Bureau gets a new CIO which hopefully reforms a lot of the anti-productivity process which are currently in place, there is great potential to have this agency be a wonderful environment to innovate and usher in new eras of Government software development.