One of the most frustrating things about being an IT professional in the Baltimore/DC metro area is that there is an abundance of contracting jobs available if you have a security clearance.  Having a security clearance gives you the ability to work for many of the federal agencies in the area.  You can be a God amongst IT professionals in your area of discipline but unable to find work because you don’t have a security clearance.

If you do a quick search on a job board like Careerbuilder.com, you find many job listings requiring some type of security clearance.  You may say to yourself, if I am qualified to do the job, a contracting company will have no issues with helping me get a security clearance. Unfortunately, many contracting companies are reluctant to arbitrarily sponsor a perspective employee for a security clearance.  Sponsoring an individual for a security clearance is a long and expensive process. For those few companies that do sponsor individuals for security clearances, the individual usually ends up having to sign an indentured servant document stating if you decide to leave for another contractor, your current company can take legal action against you.

There are three general levels of security clearances: Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.

Confidential refers to material which, if improperly disclosed, could be reasonably expected to cause some measurable damage to the national security. The vast majority of military personnel are given this very basic level of clearance. This level needs to be re-investigated every fifteen years.

Secret pertains to the unauthorized disclosure of secret information could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security. This level is reinvestigated every ten years.

Top Secret pertains to individuals with this clearance who have access to information or material that could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security if it was released without authorization. This level needs to be reinvestigated every five years.

If you are an IT professional who has one of these clearances, especially Secret and Top Secret, you are sitting in a pretty sweet spot.  I remember a few years back, I worked at a federal agency with this recently retired Army Ranger who happened to have a Top Secret Poly clearance. He liked working at this federal agency because the job was low maintenance. During one of our breaks he mentioned that this recruiter had been bugging him to interview at another federal agency because they needed a system administrator with his clearance.  The former Army Ranger wasn’t interested in being a system administrator because of the demands of the job and knew he wasn’t qualified.  He told us that he would go to the interview just to get the recruiter to leave him alone, and to make sure he didn’t get the job he would show up to the interview wearing shorts.  You can imagine our surprise when the former Army Ranger told us that they made him a six figure job offer on the spot, and offered to send him to MCSE training at no cost.  He had a change of heart and decided to take the job because the salary was too good to pass up.

If you are one of those individuals like myself without any security clearances, you are pretty much screwed as a contractor for many government agencies.  You will have to really dig deep to find the government agencies that only require a Confidential “Public Trust” clearance to work as a contractor.  The Food and Drug Administration and Department of Treasury have a few departments in which one could find an IT job as a federal contractor.  As for myself, I decided to stop trying to look for IT  jobs as an federal contractor.  I made a lot of good friends and had a lot of fun during my time as a federal contractor.  As with most things, they must come to an end at some point.  I figure this would be a good time to switch gears and pursue other interests.

Unless you are an individual who enjoys having their life turned upside down every two to four years, working as a federal contractor sucks.  The concept behind the need for contractors to work side by side federal employees has been flawed for many years.  Needing a contractor to fill a position tells me that the process to become a federal employee is too bureaucratic heavy or why else would an agency be having a hard time finding  someone.  You can also consider that the hiring process to work for a federal contractor is flawed as well. Companies that win bids to do federal contracts are often bound to unrealistic parameters for hiring.

For the purpose of this article I would like to focus mainly on the IT federal contracting as that is where all of my experience on the subject comes from.  I live near the Washington D.C. metro area, and I have been working in IT for over ten years.  For many of those years I was grunt “contractor” working at some of your well known federal agencies.  Why would I continue to work as a contractor when I clearly loathe the concept, you ask? Quite honestly, I didn’t know any better.  I was Neo before he took the red pill, happy and clueless, being used as a grunt as long as the paychecks were coming in.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of staffing companies in the area that bid on numerous IT contract positions for the federal agencies.

The general concept behind being a contractor at a federal agency is that you work with federal employees, do all of the same type or tasks a federal employee would do, except you do not have the job security of a federal employee.  Most companies that hire you to contract, will hire you as an at-will employee.  As an at-will employee you could be dismissed from your job without warning.  You have very little chance of recourse if this happens.  I would love to tell you that the only contractors I have seen dismissed were due to poor work performance, however I would be lying.  I have seen way too many contractors let go due to some unwarranted perception or a bias coming from a mis-informed federal manager.

As a contractor, you will never be officially a part of the cool kids, “federal employees.”  Like most popularity contests, you face all of the problems of not being a part of the click.  You have to abide by a different set of rules even though you share the same office space.  For example, I used to work for this agency that had this huge fancy enclosed computer room that we called the fish bowl.  We called it the fish bowl because two sides of the room were mostly glass.  Whenever the agency needed to give a tour, the visitors would be taken to the fish bowl to see all of the fancy machines and hard workers behind the glass.  The federal boss made a decision that no one could eat or drink while at your cubicle. If you had the need for a snack, you could leave it outside the room and go outside the room to eat.  I didn’t have a problem with the rule at first, until I realized that it didn’t apply to the federal employees.  I watched them eat their lunch, and some times their dinner, right in front of me.  I later found out that one of the federal employees complained to the union, and the union overturned the manager’s request for us not to eat in the room.

Accrued leave was another sore spot for me for several reasons.  As you may already know, the federal government is closed on Columbus Day and Veterans Day. I would also like to throw in Black Friday, an “unofficial government holiday.”  Most contracting companies will not pay you for those days. Either you use your leave or you have to come into the contractor’s home office that day to be compensated.  My other issue with accrued leave is that for example, I work for Company A for three years and have 120 hrs of leave built up.  If Company A loses out to Company B when the contract is up for rebid and I am fortunate enough to be retained by Company B, I have to start all over from zero leave.  You end up doing a job for 4 yrs but then all of a sudden you have the same amount of accrued leave as someone who just started yesterday.  I have seen only one instance of a company winning the bid and then to grandfather the employees so they retained their accrued leave.

The most nerve-racking time for a federal contractor is when the contract you are on is placed up for re-bid.  It is a non issue if the company you are working for wins.  However, if another company wins, all bets are off for several reasons.  More often than not, the winning company severely under bids the contract to win.  Therefore, you can expect that when the changeover happens, some people will not be retained, and it’s possible the lucky ones that do hold onto their jobs will be asked to take a reduction in salary. Workplace morale is usually at its lowest point during this time.  I can remember my initial reaction when I was asked to take a $7,000 pay cut.  I can tell you that it wasn’t a positive one.  I dropped a few f-bombs, however I reluctantly agreed because having a paycheck was better than none at all.

I am sure there are some individuals out there who find being a federal contractor to be a wonderful experience.  If that is the case, I must admit I am jealous because I didn’t have those experiences.  I am no longer a federal contractor nor do I have the desire to ever do it ever again in my life.