It has its downsides of course: getting a TS security clearance can be stressful, but that goes away afterwards; not being able to tell your SO what you do other than high-level stuff; career advancement and progression can be a long process and you basically know where your salary is going to go when you first start (because it is standardized); and so on.
So if you're the actual do-the-work peon instead of someone in any of the several tiers of useless middlemen, you work regular 8 hour days, get 10 or 11 paid holidays, and when you get home you are simply done with work until the morning of the next workday. It does not matter much if you do your job well or do it poorly, because there are so many other people working on it that you will never get recognition for a job done well, nor will you get any blame for doing it poorly, so long as it does what it says on the box.
The deadlines also vary by contract, but as every layer of middlemen adds its own padding, it wouldn't be remarkable to have two years to develop yet-another-CRUD-app with zero scalability, compatibility, or interoperability requirements.
No one doing the actual work is a direct government employee, because the uniform pay schedules are completely incompatible with industry norms. The government employees are simply there to make sure the contractors do what is required.
The net result is that you can get all your work done in just 2 hours and look busy for 6, or amble through it at a sloth's pace, gold-plating everything, achieving 100% test coverage, using ordinary software as a teaching lab for industry best practices, and such.
There are plenty of downsides, of course. The work is never glamorous, and you never really have much say in what you do or how you do it. You have zero job security, as you could be out of work if the wind changes direction in Washington, DC. The codebase will always be complete garbage when you are first introduced to it. The unimaginative and slow environment is not stimulating, so you absolutely must have a hobby or side-project that can engage you mentally outside of work.
These are the same downsides you see in the private sector.
Have yet to encounter a contracting environment where is is true. In fact, I was explicitly told that since I was salaried I was expected to put in whatever work it took to make deadlines, despite only putting 40 hours down on my timecard. Considering the facility I worked in had a DCAA office embedded in it I find it hard to believe the government did not know this was going on.
It's possible we're in different countries, though :-).
When he leaves work at 5pm he actually can't access his work email. Nobody can send him anything from work on an unsecured line.
When he leaves work at 5pm on a Friday, nobody can contact him about work related things until he is on site at 8am on Monday morning.
He's a senior level unix admin. That can't ever be paged. I'd say that's pretty okay.
