As it was explained to me by someone smarter, developers look at working at places like Facebook and Amazon to be the most amazing job in the world. All these perks, all these cool gadgets available to the lucky few who get past the strange interview process. What they don’t think about is that working on the same page, the same bugs, the same fixes day after day gets tedious... but not just that...

Working on government contracts, that’s the cool stuff. You, not only, get to see deeper into the very backbone of how the country functions (not saying it works all the time, but you do get to see it,) you also get to work on things that potentially might help someone.

You work on a site that shows the amount of money that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs needs to train their recently-discharged veterans or FEMA could go here to save their water or the money HHS needs to disperse those vaccines, etc.

Based on your site, how it’s laid out, how the information is displayed, how people can obtain the information (i.e. desktop site, mobile, iPad, etc.) you might just be able to help someone. You might just be the genius developer between information being pushed to where people can see it, utilize it, use it as an example...or...to where it just gets lost in the fold. How often this happens to where ­information that could really make a difference just isn’t easy to find, and therefore false or not-nearly-as-approximate data is used, causing incorrect information all together.

The government may not be the most stable at this point: top officials at odds, EVERYONE at odds. Just think for a moment, if given the opportunity to join a team that might have the potential to do some good, isn't that better than losing your passion for humanity to getting that CSS fix out before someone's mobile site looks like there's a line next their profile picture that shouldn't be there? *rolling eyes*

It's probably not fair to refer directly to Facebook or Amazon. The point is younger, older, experienced, non-experienced: developers want to work in an "environment" (heh) that will make them feel that they've made a difference. So choose your favorite cause and get involved! Make that difference!