Just a warning about the state: even in the best of circumstances, you will not be working with the latest and greatest tech. You are often legally prohibited from just playing around with something new to see if it will work. The team segregation alone will make you run for the hills if you&#x27;re used to startup life.<p>A few examples of my current environment (which I love, I&#x27;m a private-sector employee currently contracted to a state government agency, but some here would absolutely hate it):<p>- The entire stack is .Net. I like .Net so this is fine for me but some people would hate this.<p>- New code is regularly written in VB. We are free to use C# when we want, but we can&#x27;t use F# (nobody at the state knows it), and there are several state developers who don&#x27;t know C# and refuse to learn it to the point of outright hostility.<p>- New code is also written in Fortran because reasons. The floor I&#x27;m on alone probably has about $550k&#x2F;yr in payroll dedicated solely to maintaining existing mainframe applications.<p>- No write access to the test db schema. Have a change that requires a database schema change? Send it over to the DBAs and it&#x27;ll show up in a day or three. This is not just because I&#x27;m a contractor, the DBAs are the only ones with this access.<p>- 8 hours (including lunch) and out, on the dot. This is great for work-life balance, but when everyone else works 7-3 (or earlier) the office is a ghost town for several hours every day.<p>- The level of bureaucracy is staggering. I mean it regularly gets to the point where it seems like a caricature. Make something ridiculous up and it&#x27;s probably happened here.<p>Some people thrive in this environment - it hasn&#x27;t bothered me the last few years, but I know a lot of HN&#x27;s target audience would not be caught dead working for a state agency.<p>And everything you said regarding consulting companies is spot on in my experience :)