The frustrating thing is that there are some amazing things you can do at the civil service and there are also amazing candidates that are interested in doing them. But my biggest gripe with the civil service is hiring. The whole process, restrictions, etc are just insanity. I was once at the hiring side at a certain department and could’t reject a candidate during the filter phase because the candidate met all the “civil service competency requirements”, even though the technical skills were completely different. So had to waste lots of people’s time to interview the candidate, to then tell the candidate that we don’t work with the technology that they were looking to work with, which resulted in a pissed off candidate because we wasted that person’s time. Unbelievable.
