Kupor: Government tech roles fail to attract engineers by focusing on contractors
Scott Kupor · The Person Who Runs HR For 2 Million Federal Workers · Oct 2, 2025 · at 20:14
Scott Kupor, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, explains the structural hiring bottleneck in government engineering roles on The a16z Podcast.
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“The other problem we have with getting, you know, engineers here is many jobs in, in the engineering organizations are managing contractors. Right. And so if you're some like, you know, super smart person, you know, whatever coming out of, you know, MIT computer science or something, like you actually want to do something cool. You don't want to actually manage some external contractors. And so we've got this endemic problem, which is we're missing talent. Therefore we go to contractors. Therefore we can't actually recruit talent because the job is to manage contractors.”
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