allquixotic/sog.md Secret

## sog.md

      
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              sog.md
            
          
    I work in the US Federal IT contracting industry as a software developer and tester (and a few other ancillary roles that come and go, like technical writing, recruitment, proposal support, training, etc.). A few facts about my job:

I've been with the same employer for 5 full years.
The customer (a key aspect of any contracting effort) has mostly been the same agency over the years, but I've gone on temporary assignment to other customers on five or six occasions, which really helped keep the work fresh. This customer is extremely satisfied with both my individual contribution as well as my company overall as a contractor, and both personal and formal contractor evaluations have been overwhelmingly positive (repeatedly, every few months, over the course of five years).
Further helping to keep the work fresh and challenge me, I recently transferred to a different division within my primary customer's agency. For those unfamiliar with Federal IT, this is basically like getting a new job, except your pay and boss doesn't change; you keep your existing email address and login accounts; and the work and the customer people you deal with are new/different. I still work at the same building, though.
I feel that I have been sufficiently challenged; given excellent opportunities to do different things; I've even been put on travel to different parts of the country (a good thing, IMO); my managers are great people who genuinely care about me and my career (in addition to the business); and have supported me through tough times (medical leave).
I have had vanishingly few interpersonal or political problems, and when I've had them, I've been able to address them definitively and immediately. While Federal IT does involve walking a tightrope of political issues, I've become quite adept at it, because I understand the concerns and needs of all parties involved, both within my company and at the customer. So I have been able to avoid having any "problems" for several years by simply pressing the right buttons and getting good results that make everybody happy, including me, while doing very ethical work and genuinely improving the customer's bottom line (delivering service to the public).
Over the years, several company policies that I felt inhibited my work (mostly related to IT policy, I won't go into details) have been officially and/or unofficially relaxed by supervisors and IT support personnel. This has enabled me to get work done more easily than before, and has improved my job satisfaction, while still upholding good security policies and strictly adhering to all customer data protection safeguards (the issues I had before were strictly related to stuff I was doing within my company, not on the customer's network). I have little confidence that I'd be able to get the same degree of freedom and ease of working at another position outside this company, unless I left the Federal IT sector entirely and went to a startup or something (which has its own downsides).

However... recently (this year), two of my coworkers who were my closest personal friends within the company (and day to day colleagues in the professional setting, also), have left. One of them hired on with my federal customer as a direct Government employee, and the other has remained with my company but transferred to a different position.
Both of these personal friends have urged me over the years to seek employment elsewhere because of our mutual understanding of the level of pay being given out relative to the work I'm doing. They claim that I'm being underpaid and undervalued. I disagree that I'm being undervalued, but I agree that I could be paid more elsewhere. Our mutual perception is that our company pays employees below market value, and there has been considerable attrition across the enterprise (though, less-so within my microcosm, these friends notwithstanding).
One of my friends also told me that they feel I should move on to a new job every 3-4 years just for the sake of moving, to show employers that I'm not lazy or that I want to keep challenging myself (on top of the fact that they also feel I need to be paid more for my skills). But I feel like my current job has been giving me non-stop opportunities for learning and doing different work. I'm very comfortable, happy, yet satisfied and challenged at the same time.
The nature of the Federal IT sector is such that, once positions are negotiated with the customer at a certain rate, the company can't really change that deal. They can either promote you -- which is only possible if you meet the strict government criteria for the promotion, which I don't think I do -- or they can pay you more and take a loss. For obvious reasons, most companies would prefer not to take a loss on their employees.
So, as I understand it, there's very little I can do other than trying to qualify for a promotion that would get me a substantial raise at this company. But I have so many reasons to stay that go against my friends' advice, that I'm pretty resistant to the idea of going elsewhere. There is so much downside and risk in moving to a different job:


Maybe my team at the new position will have interpersonal issues, bad apples, or management problems. The complete absence of such issues in the recent past has made working feel less like a job and more like something I do for fun. I feel like the corporate world probably makes it difficult to achieve such a high level of interpersonal job satisfaction, so perhaps I've got lightning in a bottle and should cherish it instead of moving away from it.


Maybe the stability of the work at a new position will be worse. I've got excellent stability here, in the sense that we've got a long-term contract, with a huge probability of it being renewed into the foreseeable future. Outsourcing of this work is basically impossible due to security requirements, so my position will not be shipped overseas. Even if I lost this position, my management cares so much about my presence in the company (and values my contribution so highly, as an outstanding employee) that they'd go out of their way to place me on another contract with the company. I'm virtually certain of these facts about my current position.


The federal IT sector has a ton of domain-specific, organization-specific software. While my natural fast learning ability has helped me become familiar with the particulars of this agency's software (as well as contribute a fair bit of new software of my own), I've become a bit of a mission-critical employee for the software I'm intimately familiar with, both software I've developed and software developed by others that I've learned to use and work on. I've tried documenting my software and training others, but I remain the preeminent expert on certain systems and have become somewhat of a part-time trainer in an effort to improve my bus factor (with moderate success). I don't want to leave my lovely coworkers and customer folks hanging by taking my knowledge capital out of the organization, and while I feel my skills would be translatable to other jobs in Federal IT, my systems knowledge would be worth little to another employer working for a different agency, so I'd feel like I'd be starting at rock bottom -- ugh.


... Yet I can't help but feel that my coworkers have a point, that I could be serving my career better by leaving. Perhaps my decision will be made easier by hearing from others who have been in similar situations, as well as hearing from those who are experienced in employment issues.
Should I stay or should I go? More importantly, why do you think I should stay or leave, and what will the impact be of staying/leaving on myself, my coworkers, and my customer?