Been there, done that. Worked at a government/university job for about 2 years. Very few people there cared about programming or software whatsoever. It's hard to stay motivated about anything when no one around you is fired up or cares about being there.
Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.
While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.
My experience working for a gigantic government contractor was just like you describe.
I cannot emphasize enough how soul crushing it is to work in this kind of environment. You cannot just put in your hours, go home, and work on something interesting. The apathetic monotony is instilled into your being. It grows inside of you during the day, and you take it home with you. You can't just context switch from 8 hours of mental atrophy to a motivated and productive state. Sometimes I would come home and be useless for anything but lying down and staring at the ceiling. I only worked there for a year but I was turning into a zombie.
If you go in thinking you can help rock the boat and make some changes, be careful. You may find that the changes happen to you instead. The dark side is powerful.
Yeah, I worked as well for goverment, or more specifically for military. Even most people that worked in the same department were civilans as well, they still weren't that qualified for the job(or cared).
I took like 5 years of meetings or committees to actually launch a website, and you were tied to vendors that were selected for the job like 10years before, and even it was clear that they didn't do a very good job, no-one cared or wanted to change. I only lasted a year there, I was too horrified to actually becoming one of them.
So I would guess that you can't say that goverment job is always better than private, or other way around. In both cases you might want to check out the environment beforehand. There actually are some interesting jobs that only exist in public sector and some of them are quite highly competative.
Used a programming language similar to COBOL that made me want to bang my head against the wall. Features that would normally be trivial to implement were almost impossible. Took forever to get any code moved to production. Took about a year of meetings to do something as simple as installing MySQL. Version control = Excel Spreadsheets and folders. Any suggestion to use a new tool required a special committee, more meetings, etc. No one wanted to learn anything new.
While you will have extra time to work on your own thing, you might lose your motivation and joy, and gradually become apathetic. I quit 2 years ago, and am doing much better as a freelancer.