Contractors use shell games to hide owners, cheat taxpayers
Just want to chime in and say the vast majority of people working on government contracts fall into two categories:<p>1.  Hard working folks trying to do the right thing (approx 20-50% of the people)<p>2.  People who are coasting and nominally meet whatever requirement for the position (some combination of experience and certification usually) who can barely get the job done, but they are friendly and don&#x27;t cause trouble (by getting in the way of the people who actually DO get something done) so no one bothers them and they get to collect a paycheck.  (50-80%)<p>Many from category one turn into category 2 as time goes by, because #2 is actually the optimal strategy.<p>Most companies also tolerate #2 because the client isn&#x27;t complaining and they are making their cut on the person&#x27;s hourly rate.  So everyone&#x27;s more or less happy and life goes on.<p>Also note that the distribution of people doesn&#x27;t significantly vary based on whether the employer is SDVOSB&#x2F;WOSB&#x2F;whatever.  However, the largest companies (like Accenture) do tend to have a higher proportion of #2s, but also a higher proportion of extremely charismatic &quot;relationship managers&quot; who flatter, gladhand, and overall stroke the client representative&#x27;s egos and fantasies to cover up for it.<p>The government contracting business has plenty of well-meaning, hard working professionals in it.  But there&#x27;s also a lot of not so much waste, fraud, and abuse, but &quot;skating by&quot; going on as well.<p>The main reason is due to the obstreperous rules, bureaucracy, stagnation, and old tech, the jobs pay above market AND tend to provide excellent work&#x2F;life balance.<p>Source:  I&#x27;ve been a gov&#x27;t employee, then worked in contracting, went to private sector, now back in contracting.  I&#x27;d like to think I&#x27;m in category 1, and I have many, many days when I am extremely jealous of my colleagues in category 2, who make just as much money as I do but do about 20% of the work.<p>One last edit:  I find it funny that one SDVOSB owner was considered &quot;Service Disabled&quot; because he tore his ACL playing football for Navy.  But I&#x27;m a little bit in the &quot;don&#x27;t hate the player, hate the game&quot; camp on that one.  I&#x27;d start a company, too, in that position.  Doesn&#x27;t mean I&#x27;m doing shitty work, just means it&#x27;s easier to award me the work.  They are two different things.