Why I Chose to Be a Government Advisor

by | Jan 22, 2017 | Aggregated, electronic government, Opinions

A year and a half ago I agreed to become advisor in the cabinet of the deputy primer minister of my country (Bulgaria). It might have looked like a bizarre career move, given that at the time I was a well positioned and well paid contractor (software engineer), working with modern technologies (Riak, Scala, AWS) at scale (millions of users). I continued on that project part time for a little while, then switched to another one (again part time), but most of my attention and time were dedicated to the advisory role. Since mid-December I’m no longer holding the advisory position (the prime minister resigned), but I wanted to look back, reflect and explain (to myself mainly) why that was a good idea and how it worked out. First, I deliberately continued as a part-time software engineer, to avoid the risk of forgetting my (to that point) most marketable skills – building software. But not only that – sometimes you become tired of political and administrative bullshit and just want to sit down and write some code. But the rest of my time, including my “hobby”/spare time, was occupied by meetings, research, thoughts and document drafting that aimed at improving the electronic governance in Bulgaria. I’ve already shared what my agenda was and what I was doing, and even gave a talk about our progress – opening as much data as possible, making sure we have high requirements for government software (we prepared a technical specification template for government procurement so that each administration relies on that, rather than on contractors with questionable interests), introducing electronic identification (by preparing...