My experience with trying to get even small tech things approved by the FAA:
It will take at least a year and you will never know what stage you're at. Basically, once enough people have breathed on your request, it will be approved, assuming they can find absolutely nothing wrong. If they do, you get to start over.
If you build enough rapport with some of the workers there then they will actually respond to your emails in a relatively timely fashion, otherwise you'll be completely in the dark. Once every so often you find someone who actually responds quickly and does their job well. You guard that person's contact information and only give it to people you trust.
To be quite blunt, almost everyone you encounter intends to be a lifer at the FAA and knows that simply sticking around will almost guarantee them higher pay and a fairly decent retirement package. There is zero upside for them.
This is the problem with making government jobs unionized or making them overly-cush jobs. I was talking to someone about benefits and he listed his federal benefits. I was floored. He also claimed he's more or less unfireable. I don't know how the federal government gets anything done and when it does get done, it gets done over-budget and incorrectly.(Obamacare website is probably a good example here)
They're playing retirement min-max'er and I'm playing honest citizen. They're winning at the expense of us all.
They get the credit when things go right. Whenever things go wrong, it's all on the contractors.
Based on my anecdotal experience, the government employees are simply untouchable. Even when they blatantly break the law, they still keep their jobs, and all the contractor and subcontractor employees lose theirs. Maybe they get a letter in their personnel file that keeps them from certain transfers and promotions, but they don't get fired.
The worst thing that typically happens to them is a furlough, which is a lot like a layoff in the private sector, except the workers can actually expect to be called back to work at some point. Sometimes they even get paid something for their inconvenience.
I have never seen even a single one of them assume personal responsibility for anything even remotely negative. It does not happen. The buck never stops anywhere.
I don't think so. The very structure of contract work encourages slapdash products (after all, if you've checked off the boxes, you've "delivered" and can be paid, regardless of whether you meet the customer's actual needs). I bet that if the US government hired a team of programmers who answered only to their government bosses quality would go up (I understand the UK did this and that was the result they found).
If you build enough rapport with some of the workers there then they will actually respond to your emails in a relatively timely fashion, otherwise you'll be completely in the dark. Once every so often you find someone who actually responds quickly and does their job well. You guard that person's contact information and only give it to people you trust.
To be quite blunt, almost everyone you encounter intends to be a lifer at the FAA and knows that simply sticking around will almost guarantee them higher pay and a fairly decent retirement package. There is zero upside for them.