Not disagreeing with you, but I don't see any programs that would actually help people do that on a global basis. The US Digital Service idea is great - I wouldn't want anyone to be under the impression that it isn't "big enough".
Absolutely - and a lot of what USDS, 18f and PIF do is bring technical people into gov't not only to design and code software, but to make sure the right solution gets implemented, and help policy makers understand how effective technology gets built.
implementing the right solutions is very subjective. There are many approaches to solving a single problem.Lets take the energy example where we have different solutions in renewables, hyro and nuclear amongst others . Now it seems that the people working on renewables dont talk to people from hydro nor with those working on nuclear. IMHO might be better for the global community where people working on a single problem communicated amongst themselves and policy makers to self select what works best.
As Sam alludes to, many YC alums have joined the government in some capacity—healthcare.gov, US Digital Service, Nava, Presidential Innovation Fellows—and are on HN.
Why doesn't the government allocate more funding to pay skilled technical workers at least close-to-market wages for the crucial work they are doing in bringing government organizations and systems into the 21st century?
How much interaction does the USFS have with Congress? Do you have any idea when we'll start to see more technically-minded and possibly younger representatives in Congress who might make these issues more of a priority?
Pretty sure it's illegal for federal entities to lobby Congress. The Anti-lobbying Act makes it pretty hard, anyway. But folks like you could lobby your reps and senators and attempt to get them to increase federal pay. This is a democracy, after all, and you are the constituent.
I didn't mean lobbying Congress per se, but simply the level of interaction between the two orgs. E.g. does the USFS work on projects to help improve/streamline Congress and do Senate/House reps meet with heads of USDS and 18F.
I'm afraid my net worth isn't high enough for me to have any real say in the way our country operates at the moment. Maybe one day :)
It's off topic, but the legal status of lobbying in the US always baffles me. Today I learned It's entirely legal for a company to lobby a congressman, but not a government department. How does that make any sense at all?
A department or agency of the federal government acts within the laws and regulations set by congress and is overseen by the president. Thus, even if you wanted them to do or change something, they could not. Congress on the other hand is set up to listen to and respond to constituents (constitutionally), and thus lobbying congress is entirely legal as that it what you are supposed to do.
That problem was solved decades ago by government contracting. See above, the healthcare.gov folks formed contracting companies so they could go back to work for the govt at double the salary.
That's not a solution. At all. The contracting companies end up pulling up the ladder so that nobody else can compete in the particular vertical they've managed to commandeer. And then they lose all incentive to work hard. They wind up hiring less and less competent workers and pocketing the difference.
Contractors are a big reason why the US government has the reputation it does today.
Because paying public employees more is politically unpopular and contracting out is politically popular, both with certain ideological groups and with the firms that actually get the contracting money (and turn around and work to support candidates that support contracting out), and paying government technical workers market salaries would mean the government was better at competing with contracting firms for talent.
Did he take his own advice? Also regarding the rewrite of HealthCare.gov - I don't know the specifics but aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation? Is it really a fair comparison?
> aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation
No, definitely not "always." There are many examples of big enterprise systems being rewritten that take forever and ultimately fail -- to the point where the old system is put back in place.
I suspect there's a fair amount of survivor bias there too; initial implementations that aren't cheap and relatively easy don't tend to survive long enough to get rewritten!
Some of the other comments refer to rewrites where the intention was to expand scope / technology / scale / etc. The Healthcare.gov rewrite was simply to make a functional system. If you have a system that does A, it is absolutely easy (relative to greenfield) to rewrite another system to do A. The problem is that most rewrites don't just set out to do A, but to also incorporate B, C, D and E, with an easy framework that enables F, G and H, and...
The main problem with the original healthcare.gov was that it was built by contractors under the old contracting model of "fill as many seats with bodies as you can, win the contract, and charge by the hour". That business model creates a perverse economic incentive that doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity, and certainly doesn't do anything to create trust between the federal agency that requires software and the team that ends up building it. I would also say that the hiring bar for contractors, compared to 18F, the USDS, etc, is, frankly, pitiful.
> "fill as many seats with bodies as you can, win the contract, and charge by the hour"
THIS MAN knows what he's talking about. I wish more people would be aware of this.
What's even more perverse? When contracts are awarded based on the above while factoring in "diversity points" - different minorities count for different numbers of points. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what perversity follows.
Oh, you mean the preference for women, minorities, and veterans? Yeah, that's an interesting issue. It's great in theory, but in practice ends with quite a bit of additional bench stuffing to increase preference. And then to start a company and compete for contracts, even if you're a rockstar engineer who just happens to be white and a man, good luck competing against an 8A. It's hard to complain, because I see the value, but at the same time, UGH.
Quite honestly, it creates a class of "tokens". They nominally have jobs, but their real job (for the sake of the company being awarded the contract) is to simply be a token. Certain minorities count for more than others.
Also check out 18F [1], which focuses on pushing forward how tech and the government work together. They run a 12-month Presidential Innovation Fellows program [2] which works more intensely on innovating with specific groups within the federal government. USDS is more focused on modernizing and ensuring some basic technical functionality of a lot of the core aspects of the government (which is incredibly important and impactful, but is less about innovation -- see a comparison here [3]).
Make sure you have got a plan for 4 months as you work your way through this hiring pipeline. In other words, if you want to change jobs in December, and start working at 18F, you should be applying right now.
It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.
One of my team members is a former Army Captain and Iraq veteran. He doesn't seem to mind.
And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.
Your pay is determined by your paystub from your previous/current employer by the Office of Management and Budget (edit: they do not take into account equity grants nor intangibles). You're also required to pass a drug test, as well as a background check and security clearance.
I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.
Right, my friend said he needed to provide two years of salary information, and even then he was offered GS-13 step one. My point is that the USDS, 18F, etc, don't just offer $130k+ to anyone who walks in the door.
And this is why the government has trouble attracting good people. It's not the pay that bothers me, personally. It's the bullshit policies, lack of workplace flexibility and the idea that intrusions into my own private life is at all acceptable. Oh and I have to move to the central government swamp while we're at it?
So then they pitch this as the only way people can help make things better offering below market pay along with all these trade offs?
Except the USDS, 18F, PIFs, and OCSIT are all attracting really great people. Now, HTTPS everywhere is a dubious project, sorry Konklone, but its difficult to deny that the problem of talent in government has always been one of the hiring process being controlled by contractors and the perverse economic incentives of the traditional bodies-in-chairs contracting model.
The problem we have with our project is that we're dealing with a ton of subdomains and not a lot of data I would consider "sensitive" enough to really necessitate encryption. While I appreciate the sentiment of the project, and value your commitment to privacy, for our use case it's definitely a bit of a pain in the butt.
That, and I know getting IT departments to move to install certs on their old infrastructure for things that might not require encryption is definitely painful. And the errors generated by expired certificates and "insecure content warnings" are confusing, and don't add value to projects that don't benefit from encrypted connections. We've been hearing all about it.
Honestly, now that I read down the thread, it kinda sounds like you don't have your shit together and you want to blame someone else who created something awesome for it.
It's not important whether you consider the data sensitive enough to bother doing your job. It's actually your users, which, if they've installed HTTPS Everywhere, they do.
Yes, thank you konklone. My primary complaint with the policy, and I'm hesitant to complain because, let me be clear, it is a good policy, is that we're now held accountable to a metric that adds engineering complexity and additional costs to our small team, and has created some confusion amongst our hundreds of customers who, arguably, don't serve content that, in my professional opinion, requires an encrypted connection to meet the needs of their millions of users.
I mean. They are attracting people who are better than the quality of the people the government usually gets. By a lot.
But that's a pretty low bar.
I have no idea why you're commenting to me about HTTPS Everywhere. So unfortunately I've missed whatever point you were trying to make there. Want to enlighten me?
If you're asking people for help, you need to treat them like professionals and not children. That means don't get in the way them doing their jobs, don't impose bullshit requirements like literally asking people for their urine and don't do many of the other counter-productive things that government agencies have etched in stone as essential policy.
If you can't do that, your system is broken, and won't get as good of people as it ought to and that's the problem of the people who created it, not the people who are interested in doing you a fucking solid.
Yeah. And if you find a broken system you've generally got two choices:
1) Work for it.
2) Don't work for it.
I agree it's actually complicated to determine which is more effective in creating change. But I think you and I have merely chosen different approaches on this spectrum, rather than fundamentally disagreeing about anything deeper.
"Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay.
No it doesn't. If the army started paying better would it mean soldiers aren't taking tours of duty any more?
Historically it has been a term associated with the army because it was one of very few ways a person could serve their country. I actually think it's a great repurposing of the term - despite the fact that it is a relative well-paid desk job I'd wager that a lot of people could get more money going to Google/Facebook/whatever. It's still a form of public service.
A long time ago, senators had to take significant time away from their estates / jobs to 1) travel and 2) sit and talk about crap. It was a real burden.
These days none of them are more than a ~12 hour flight away, they can fly in and vote on something and fly out, if they choose. It's less of a burden these days. Congress has also over the years found innumerable ways of enriching themselves during their terms.
Isn't everyone who works for the government somehow serving the public? I'll make sure I thank my local DMV clerk for doing their "tour of duty" next time I'm there.
The tour of duty metaphor isn't perfect, but I've always interpreted the "tour" part to refer to the term limit. Everyone in the DS and at 18F has a hard term limit. Can't speak for every municipal government, so don't know about your DMV, but most federal employees can keep their jobs beyond four years if they choose to.
I would bet that a DMV employee would appreciate a thank you, though.
> "Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay.
No, it doesn't. The term throughout its entire existence has been applied to government (particularly foreign) service assignments of limited duration, not exclusively low-paid combat assignments in the military.
> Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."
Actually, resume-padding, sometimes well-compensated, foreign-service assignments for upper-crust elites for whom such assignments were a key route to high office are one of the oldest uses of the term.
I'm a contractor under the GSA's OCSIT, sharing a floor with 18F, the PIFs, and occasionally members of the USDS that come to hang out. It's great to see the feds hiring awesome technologists and doing great things, including some of the technologies that are currently only available to teams with, as the developers of them say, "a reasonable pain tolerance". My only advice to 18F is that they should figure out pathways to provide the services they intend to provide, create a management plan, and stick with it. I would recommend them to check out the business models of Peter Corbett's iStrategyLabs, who is right here in Washington D.C. and doing great work for some really big brands, and VICE's Carrot Creative, from Brooklyn, if they want to see the agency model in action.
Really happy seeing these initiatives and the way the White House is thinking about bringing technology to the government.
I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible.
Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.
You bring up a great point and a big challenge is the way government purchases things. There have been a lot of laws passed to ensure that the gov't buys things in a fair way (as not to just give the contract to a friend) but over time those laws and policies have resulted in an extremely complex and time consuming process that only huge companies can devote the resources to "apply" for a job and win it. Once a law is passed and a policy is in place, it can be very hard to unwind (power of inertia) which is why it can take a crisis like Healthcare.gov to make sweeping changes. Teams like 18f are designed to help the gov't build the right tech in house, skipping the procurement process, and using agile methods and modern tech to build faster and cheaper.
Additionally, there are people that believe that the private sector spurred by competition can provide a better, cheaper product. Personally, I think that's more a feature of new and small companies without entrenched interests and inertia. As you noted the requirements for government contracts have made their entry into bids harder than larger companies that can afford the large upfront bidding cost in time, effort, lobbying, etc.
In my eyes, it's entirely possible the USDS is and ca be successful because it's new. I think it's (unfortunately) entirely possible that in 10-20 years they will suffer from the same bloat and inertia problems large companies and existing government agencies do. I'm not sure how to combat that, but having a way to revitalize large companies or government agencies without losing too much of the existing internal knowledge and expertise would go a long way towards helping combat this, but I'm not sure what that is. There are probably numerous successful companies that have done this that I'm entirely unaware of, so maybe there is a good amount of information on how to combat this...
GDS are doing a great job on this in the UK by building a platform for small companies to pre-register as government IT suppliers, covering everything from phone systems to cloud hosting and bespoke software. One of the things I really like about the work they're doing is that one of their performance metrics is increasing the number of small businesses getting government contracts.
To be clear, 18F is not be "skipping the procurement process" and has released their own Agile BPA which is great. Skipping the procurement process would be the sign of a bad workaround.
A critical part to fixing "the problem" is both creating vehicles for new kinds of companies to access government and reduce the overall risk of government officials purchasing from those companies.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM / Accenture / Whatever" applies in government as well, but the appetite for risk can be even lower than in the private sector, with higher costs of entry.
Top-level butt-coverage from the White House / OSTP and another agency demonstrating that it is possible and creating the contract vehicles to get more agile / lean / innovative businesses in the door goes a long way to solving this problem.
It isn't just taking on risk by trying something new. Even a known better solution can result in assuming risk.
Take a long existing systematic problem which produces 100 bad effects a day (people getting double billed, database errors, what have you). Someone thinks of an improvement to reduce this to 10 bad effects a day instead. A major improvement. But they don't do it.
Why? Because anyone who approves of the new system is now the person responsible for the 10 errors a day. It goes from 100 errors per day because that is just how the system works to 10 errors a day because of Bob two cubes over. Bob ends up being blamed for the 10 errors far more than being congratulated for the 90 that no longer occur.
There's almost no pipeline for "smart software folks with industry experience" into DC right now. "Big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money" as you put it, is realistically the only option available to the decision-makers.
USDS and 18f are trying to change that reality in part by creating that pipeline. It only works if good people are willing to put in the work.
Because those giant companies have an army of managers and accountants that will be sure to check every box and cross every t. A group of Valley engineers is thoroughly less thorough.
Often the thought isn't "let's give this to a big corporation." Often, the way the proposals and contracts are written, only big companies could reasonably respond.
I just want to be as sure as possible that they never get around to fixing the traffic ticketing system.
God forbid the state cops ever realize how many times the local cops have pulled me over, or vice versa, and that's before we even get out-of-state violations involved.
Good lord, keep them away from the traffic tickets. COBOL is just fine for that.
I've had a lovely problem of having a Dutch last name and the officer writing my middle name as "Van", then trying to inquire about said ticket in a system which apparently you can only search by name or ticket number (which I lost), only to be told "no record found" and later getting a notice that my license was suspended from the DMV.
The USDS Playbook[1] reminded me a lot of the GDS Design Principles[2] and even shares a few points. I think they also set a feeling for each of the Governments they're related to.
Unfortunately, we just lost the person who put together the team who put all that in place in the UK. I hope his replacement is going to be able to take the baton and run with it.
Sharp eye! We are indeed indebted to the work that the UK has done! They are a couple years more senior (USDS just had it's 1st birthday this Tuesday; GDS is coming up on 3) and while there is much tailoring for each country's unique circumstances, we've certainly benefited from their experience.
I would have been all over this a few years ago, but being married to someone who can't also move to DC for a multi-month period makes it unworkable. For my career, I work 100% remotely - I would love to do some work for the digital service if they had opportunity for remote working.
The government spends millions on shitty contracts and programs that goes billions over budget. Don't work for them unless you are getting at least market price.
It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly.
By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses.
The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?
It sounds high to me too and I'm was on the team that rebuilt the login system. From what I know about it - we knew how much it cost us[0] and didn't have the support and maintenance contract figured out yet so we reported out 4 to build and no more than 4 to maintain and the number has kind of stuck.
I would say that I (very naively) thought that it would be easy peasy to rebuild all of healthcare.gov. I was wrong. There are all sorts things that make it much harder than you'd expect in a private sector environment.
I do think that there are probably ways to get this cost even cheaper - however, from a software profiling perspective, moving it down an order of magnitude or two is a huge win and that it's a pretty clear choice between further optimization compared to an order of magnitude change on a VA, immigration, or other system.
[0] I'm not actually sure how exact this number is either - lots of help required from people from all different contracts - so this is an upper bound estimate
There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.
On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?
That's totally fair; I've done minimal work around government, and I don't claim to be an expert on this at all. I just know that successful contractors are rewarded disproportionately for their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Also, that was especially the case with healthcare.gov.
Tor was started at the Naval Research Laboratory. There are smart, hard-working people in government service. The politicians, however, often have monied interests involved in preventing efficiency (pork barrel politics).
Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics:
"woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork."
Ok, how long will that take?
"I can probably have it done in a week."
It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week?
"Yeah, maybe two."
But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.
No, they already knew the answer to the question which he fully understood, and he lied about the program because it was top secret, and they were using a public hearing to try and out the program. They already knew about the program and even so if they wanted to truly find out without breaking national security they could have held a closed door session.
I'm wondering about the sources of laws and norms about "oversight". On the one hand, Congress and committees have a subpoena power and individual members have an immunity for what they reveal on the floor. On the other hand, the Executive manages to enforce security clearance requirements against individual Congressional staff (not against the members themselves, I believe -- though they get them to follow procedures for information security that are analogous to what a regular government employee would do).
And the committee members seem to have a pretty strong tradition of keeping classified information secret -- but isn't that just a tradition? Couldn't a member just decide that the public ought to know something in particular and hence reveal it? Is it a tactical decision about hoping to achieve better cooperation with witnesses and sources in the long term?
(I'm also wondering where the whole concept and structure of oversight comes from -- I think historically and constitutionally it has to do with the budget power but it seems like it's developed pretty far beyond that.)
So you admit he lied to Congress and the American public, but think it was justified? What do you think would have happened had Clapper told the truth?
> "They chose to make these statements in public that weren’t accurate," Wyden added. "They could have declined to answer the question in an open hearing. They have declined to answer questions in an open hearing before. At that hearing, he declined to answer other questions."
Declining to answer is the same as admitting it exists, which he wasn't permitted to do.
It is no matter anyway, the chairman knew the answer to the question before it was asked, and he just wanted to expose the program, which Clapper wasn't going to allow to happen. Just because you are able to chair a public committee doesn't mean you also have the right to expose top secret government programs you happen to not like.
In Citizenfour, Snowden specifically highlights Clapper's testimony as one of the factors that solidified his decision to go public. Clapper not only deceived the American public, he quite literally was one of the reasons the program was ultimately exposed.
And I'm glad it was exposed. Spying on every single one of your citizens' interactions and logging that information indefinitely in secret for later inspection has no place in a free society.
Re: declining to answer, other questions were presented in advance for that very hearing and declined in advance by Clapper – they were not asked, and they were not entered in to the record. See the parent Politifact article for sources. Did declining those questions expose secrets?
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal level ruled that the metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" and is therefore not supported by law, i.e. illegal. This happened on May 7th, 2015 and is public record.
It was illegal then and it's illegal now. The circuit court didn't say "as of May 7th, 2015 this is illegal"; they said that the NSA exceeded the scope of surveillance authorized by Congress in October of 2001.
You claimed the metadata collection program was "written about at length" and viewed as "OK". This is evidence from the judicial branch of the US government it is not, in fact, viewed as okay.
Paying taxes is by far the greatest submission you could do to support the regime. Taking the govertment's money to help social services is far more noble than sending the govt a check that is used to buy spies and bombs.
My thoughts exactly -- I would much rather be helping raise awareness of government surveillance and developing measures to abate it, instead of giving them even more technological power. The front-end of services like healthcare and immigration can be improved all we want, but that doesn't affect any fundamental change in the way things are done (it's a fancy website, but you'll still be waiting 5-10 years for your green card). I struggle to see why anyone who is technologically savvy would want to do this.
Why do you want the government to be more efficient, so they can purchase more bombs, build more black sites to torture, have more cash to hand out to 'moderate' Syrian rebels?
You want to further empower a government which seeks complete domination of its citizens and of the world.
Does it matter? You have no real response than childish name calling. Instead you rather forget the awful crimes the US engages in on a routine basis, as if helping them free one hand isn't the same as assisting the other hand in murder and torture.
To be fair, howterrible's tone is arguably far worse - he makes accusations that he must want [insert negative extreme not backed by evidence], and goes more in depth as with trying to connect silverstorm with malformed reasoning.
At the least silverstorm phrased it as a question in wait of an answer, which is a lot more civil than the outright hostile attack that aimed more to accuse than to enlighten.
That's a great point, good IT would definitely help. But it doesn't seem like we're making any real movement towards replacing the current bureaucratic mess with well-designed systems. Then again, I didn't know there were alternatives to the DMV until this very moment.
I would disagree with that in the abstract. Delays in workflow can be addressed, or at least surfaced, by better back-end tech and reporting, and 18F's repos are public on GitHub.
It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA. "Helping the US government" in the case of the digital service means things like making it easier for immigrants to apply for a green card by building a web application that replaces paper forms. What the digital service is actually doing is helping US citizens receive government services more efficiently. Which is completely different from "helping the government" the way you phrase it.
> It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA.
Does the US Digital Service hire people who strictly refuse to assist in any way with any of the operations of the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, DEA, or any other oppressive agency?
If so, I'd reconsider, but I don't think they would hire me under those terms. And if they did, they wouldn't appreciate me saying "Fuck off!" if they tried to assign me to one of the projects to prop up one of these agencies?
I can't answer that, you'd have to ask them but everyone I spoke to at the digital service said their work was specifically delivering government services to citizens. I don't think they work with the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS etc. It's not a catchall organization that works with every federal government department.
(Member of USDS) - The answer is no, sorry. We prioritize assignments based on their potential to do the most good for the largest number of people, and do not pressure anybody to work against their conscience. But we can't reconcile rigid individual pre-conceived ideologies with the need to run a coherent and diverse group.
Consider the opposite scenario: should we hire somebody who "strictly refuses to assist in any way with providing government handouts to undeserving moochers?" Such a person would be an obvious liability, given current priorities.
If I hired the first group and not the second, then we'd become an explicitly partisan and ideological operation, that still has to work with a Democrat administration and a Republican Congress. That's a whole new level of pain that I need like a hole in the head.
Yes it is fair. During the stasi regime it wasn't OK to work for the government in any capacity, the same goes for a multitude of corrupt governments whose primary end is domination and control of it's citizenry.
At this point if someone willing works for the US government they are no friend of mine, because they are actively assisting an institution which flaunts the law, destroys the lives of innocents, tortures without consequence, and routinely murders hundreds of thousands of civilians.
That the great Sam Altman shills for such a morally bankrupt entity is revolting and should give everyone pause. The US government clearly has no intention of reforming, providing them any assistance is akin to providing any terrorist organization with material assistance only on a much larger and more devastating scale.
The US government has become practically unresponsive to even the gravest of crimes, such as torture and pervasive surveillance of it's own citizens. Crimes committed by those in power are either ignored, fined a percentage of their profit, or wrist slapped while those who oppose the powerful have their lives ruined.
Yes, a morally good person can no longer work for the US government, a threshold into evil has been crossed -- was it acceptable to work for the Stasi, for Mao or Stalin? No it wasn't, and isn't acceptable to assist the US government.
The broader USDS family is focused on delivering better services. But one area we're starting to focus more on is policy itself. One thing that struck me about the federal government is just how little internal harmony there exists between agencies. Just because the NSA does or says something doesn't mean everyone here agrees with them or even really has to support them. Because the USDS HQ team is located in the White House (and OMB), there exists the ability to engage directly with decision-makers and influence policy and (at least sometimes) the behavior of agencies.
You are so far beyond the looking glass you can't even recognize your own slave mentality. Gotten any transaction over at the white house on prosecuting torture?
Thinking that your masters will be so happy you improved IT efficiency that they'll listen to you is mind numbingly naïve, they simply will use you as they would any tool and when you've done your job put you back in the toolbox.
Do you think Stalins tailor had much impact, maybe his gardener or chef? You don't stop evil people from being evil by helping them.
Fwiw, the US Government is pretty big. And it's not like we all get secret decoder rings and meet up once a year to figure out how to trick the public in the next year.
There's a lot of organizations with a lot of different goals.
When Clapper and the rest of the SIC rots in prison for their lies against the American people, and Snowden and Manning are free, I'll reconsider. Until then, I'll walk my own path and do good my own way.
Why not boycott the US entirely, then? The American public is also part of the government to the extent that they vote and participate in public debate. And I'm sure most government agencies knew just as much as the rest of the country about what the NSA was up to before Snowden.
Did the people that charged $200 million to build healthcare.gov get to keep the money after the project failed? What about the people that allocated that money, do they still have their jobs?
It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.
Any idea what the compensation is like? Would the "tour of duty" be considered a sacrifice or is it a viable way to make a living for a talented engineer?
Market for the people USDS is hiring generally is higher than that in cash, plus better benefits, plus 50-100k/yr in equity. There is some sacrifice, but not an insurmountable one.
Why do you put it that way? Everyone serving in military takes home a paycheck, but that doesn't make them mercinaries.
The top tech talent that we aim to attract to USDS often can make far more than these salaries staying in the private sector, so appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements is what we have to do to recruit.
Of course, if you're a student, they have no problem pulling you out of the classes that you might be paying several hundred a day to attend, without comp...
The actually-doing-tech-work GS levels (GS-10 to GS-13), by comparison, are 50-60k. That is where government pay is still the big impediment.
$116k/yr for your entire mid/late career would also suck (compared to 200-400k in industry), but for <2 years, I can't see that alone being a huge issue, unless you have kids in college, are paying for a mortgage elsewhere, etc.
Honestly, that's much better than I was expecting. Two years working to improve our shitty government systems in exchange for a quarter of a million? Sounds like a fair short-term deal, even if higher comp is available elsewhere...
I'm currently at the US Digital Service so figured I'd add some color. There are many subtleties about how government hires that makes this a really interesting question.
We are brought in either under Intermittent Consultants or Schedule A hires. This means that in exchange for being able to hire you by name rather than going through a more structured process through USAjobs.gov, you can only work for 2 years. Therefore, no matter what the pay, it's probably not a viable long term career.
It's also important to note that this is probably a good thing - I've been at Healthcare.gov and USDS since Jan of 2014 and I'm finding that I'm getting adjusted to some of the bureaucracy. It's therefore actually key to balance experience with fresh perspectives.
I'd also say that the salary ranges - it's in part based on what you used to make in the private sector but has a hard ceiling. For everyone who comes, it's more than enough to survive but not a long term career move for anyone. And of course, there are no stock options or equity stakes :D.
I'm not an expert (by any stretch of the imagination) on federal hiring policy, but my appointment is 2 years, with the opportunity to extend another 2 years. No clue what happens after that.
I'm not certain about the exact intricacies of the Schedule A hiring authority so I may be corrected by someone later - but my understanding is that this would not be possible to be rehired under the same hiring authority. People have joked about doing both a Schedule A and an Intermittent Consultant[0], which would allow you to do 4 years (2x2) - as we've just hit our 1st birthday, no one has tried it yet!
[0] There are some slight differences in how pay, retirement, and some other benefits are distributed, so they are mostly but not entirely interchangeable.
Pensions have a 3 year cliff - but you're only allowed to work for 2 as a schedule A and you don't accrue years as an IC so one can conclude with very high confidence that I will not have a pension :D.
Overall, it doesn't sound like you get strung out to dry in any particular way. Seems like it's mostly a "sacrifice" in the sense of putting your ordinary professional opportunities on pause for a little bit- although if the program becomes highly reputable, it could actually be good for you professionally.
Many of us move to DC. However, 18F also has teams in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Raleigh, Tuscon, Austin, Dayton, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara, Seattle, and Portland.
I had never lived in DC before joining USDS, but soon added a new favorite city to my list! I definitely never felt strung out to dry either.
Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive".
Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service.
How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.
I think the notion is that knowing what software versions a government IT system is using internally will help attackers, for example because they'll know about likely vulnerabilities in those systems. There are definitely some attackers who are interested in, say, government and military healthcare IT systems, because they can use those to get personnel records (or maybe even more nefarious applications).
"Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.
As a general rule, I try to avoid saying things like that unless they're published elsewhere. In this case, they advertise the info. And best of luck getting into these systems without a clearance.
Wearing my python core dev hat: a litany of security fixes, python3 compatibility stuff, useful stdlib modules, dict and set comprehensions, probably more stuff I can't remember.
One change that comes to mind that someone might see as trivial: "{}".format("foo") works in 2.7 and not in 2.6 (in 2.6 it must be "{0}".format("foo")).
Hi Niels. I have contacts within the DoD HPCMP and have run Python 2.7 on several of the heavy machines available on the Army side of the fence. I work for Continuum, which provides both a free and a commercial Python solution that are basically "drag-and-drop" installs on x86 hardware, and when I was at the Army Corps of Engineer Research Lab I worked on an open source tool called HashDist that, among other things, simplifies the deployment of Python stacks on HPC hardware. Feel free to get in touch with me via my contact information at http://aron.ahmadia.net if I can be any help.
Thank you for this feedback! Adding to what Nacin said about our involvement. We have started work in this space, and care deeply about the electronic health record systems at both the DOD and VA, and connecting critical information between the two systems, as well as data exchange with private sector (downtown). Also, major kudos to being a Navy doc who understands what it means to upgrade Python!
Yup. I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. This project is really important for two reasons.
1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users.
2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.
> I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this.
Thanks! We loved the opportunity to assist the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) with the dashboard. They've been around since ~2012 and have been doing the legwork to get agencies to participate in the program for years:
If they want to call it a tour of duty, here's an idea to attract talent: offer student loan repayment like the military does. I have no interest in leaving my current position, but if I was offered equal pay, plus having the majority of my $80k in student loan debt chipped away after a few years, I'd be the first application on the stack.
I'm not against it, but my worry is that the US government will use this "attracting of top tech talent" to help with government services as a "backdoor" (pun intended) to recruiting some of them into the NSA later on, especially now that they seem to have a problem with recruiting hackers post-Snowden revelations.
First they get them to "feel patriotic about helping the government" and then getting them to spy on everyone seems like just another next step.
Hopefully, though, it will work the other way around and this top tech talent will manage to convince the old people in the government to do less of that.
> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty serving our country at some point in their careers. We need better technology in government.
STOP. WAIT. THINK. As an entrepreneur, you don't want to lose opportunities down the road, or have doors close on you. Look how Huawei gets blasted because the founder served in the Chinese army. Or they may be some open-source projects you want to help out on and people don't want to trust you.
"We want to hire you, but we see here that you improved the digital systems affecting the lives of millions, so I'm afraid we won't be moving your application forward at this time"
Will this scale? For me it looks like a kind of organizational anti-pattern. Imagine you are working in your project, then comes the "Know it all" guys trying to redo everything you know about. After rebuilding everything they will leave, take all the credits and leave the bomb with you.
It is an explicit goal to create lasting Digital Service teams in every federal agency specifically to ensure longer projects (those that actually involve (re)building something) have long-term support. Generally the short-term engagements USDS has are either to help agencies put a fire out, or to provide recommendations that the agency can then choose to implement with their own people.
I've met a lot of the U.S. Digital Service people and it is an amazing organization. I had a list of concerns (how they work with contractors already in place, how things would evolve with a new administration, whether they would get sucked into long term staffing at agencies, etc) and they had addressed all of them.
There are a few negative things as overhang from the rest of government (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose), but those are the reality, and don't diminish the value of the program in any way.
I would strongly recommend looking into USDS to anyone who who wants to make a difference in tech. It is a great place to go in the middle of a longer career at a post IPO company like Google/FB, or are between projects.
Thanks for the kind words. Yes, we have made progress. Yes, there are still quirks. Yes, there is more to do. Come help!
As a YC alum, while I find some strong similarities between Digital Service and a small growing startup, there are indeed some additional hoops that we go through as a part of the US government and that's part of the tradeoff you get for being able to help government agencies that have huge impact!
> (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose)
As an 18F employee, I can't speak for USDS, but I know 18F can (and does, I think) employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor). I've also never taken a drug test.
Yes, the USDS HQ team is part of the White House which means you have to be a US citizen. 18F is part of GSA and they have more flexibility in hiring. Agency Digital Service teams are being hired directly into various agencies, and each agency will have its own citizenship requirements I think.
Not necessarily. For example a L-1A visa is a non-immigrant visa for intra-company executive or manager transferees. Spouses of L-1A visas are in L2 status, which allows them to apply for work authorization.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadJason Shen from YC S11 recently wrote about the concept of a "Tour of Duty": http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-d...
If anybody has questions, feel free to ask and I'm sure one of the alumni will reply!
So Congress would have to pass a law to fix that particular problem.
I'm afraid my net worth isn't high enough for me to have any real say in the way our country operates at the moment. Maybe one day :)
Contractors are a big reason why the US government has the reputation it does today.
No, definitely not "always." There are many examples of big enterprise systems being rewritten that take forever and ultimately fail -- to the point where the old system is put back in place.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/mee...
generating new companies and helping them bring ideas to light is also an asset to our country/world/society.
THIS MAN knows what he's talking about. I wish more people would be aware of this.
What's even more perverse? When contracts are awarded based on the above while factoring in "diversity points" - different minorities count for different numbers of points. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what perversity follows.
Remember Sam described Ellen Pao as doing a good job when in fact she did a terrible job and had to resign from Reddit.
Now he wants developers to go on a "tour of duty"? Makes a mockery of combat veterans who come back with horrific injuries and mental scars.
[1] https://18f.gsa.gov/
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows
[3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...
I love how they work in the public and really advocate open source. One cool project is their analytics reporter: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter
https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/
It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.
I really can't stand this language.
"Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay. Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."
[1] http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hir...
And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.
I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.
I bet at Cheltenham the BT staff on secondment are told don't mention sharesave to the Civil Servants :-)
So then they pitch this as the only way people can help make things better offering below market pay along with all these trade offs?
Good luck with that.
Well, I like it. =)
The problem we have with our project is that we're dealing with a ton of subdomains and not a lot of data I would consider "sensitive" enough to really necessitate encryption. While I appreciate the sentiment of the project, and value your commitment to privacy, for our use case it's definitely a bit of a pain in the butt.
That, and I know getting IT departments to move to install certs on their old infrastructure for things that might not require encryption is definitely painful. And the errors generated by expired certificates and "insecure content warnings" are confusing, and don't add value to projects that don't benefit from encrypted connections. We've been hearing all about it.
It's not important whether you consider the data sensitive enough to bother doing your job. It's actually your users, which, if they've installed HTTPS Everywhere, they do.
So get your shit together! :)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-...
But that's a pretty low bar.
I have no idea why you're commenting to me about HTTPS Everywhere. So unfortunately I've missed whatever point you were trying to make there. Want to enlighten me?
That obviously doesn't resonate with you, but it does with some. Which is fine- you don't have to be interested.
(Sure, a no-bullshit government to work in would be great, but we don't have that yet)
If you're asking people for help, you need to treat them like professionals and not children. That means don't get in the way them doing their jobs, don't impose bullshit requirements like literally asking people for their urine and don't do many of the other counter-productive things that government agencies have etched in stone as essential policy.
If you can't do that, your system is broken, and won't get as good of people as it ought to and that's the problem of the people who created it, not the people who are interested in doing you a fucking solid.
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
No it doesn't. If the army started paying better would it mean soldiers aren't taking tours of duty any more?
Historically it has been a term associated with the army because it was one of very few ways a person could serve their country. I actually think it's a great repurposing of the term - despite the fact that it is a relative well-paid desk job I'd wager that a lot of people could get more money going to Google/Facebook/whatever. It's still a form of public service.
Great, then just say, "I did two years of service. For pay." Like, is a Senator doing a "tour of duty?"
A long time ago, senators had to take significant time away from their estates / jobs to 1) travel and 2) sit and talk about crap. It was a real burden.
These days none of them are more than a ~12 hour flight away, they can fly in and vote on something and fly out, if they choose. It's less of a burden these days. Congress has also over the years found innumerable ways of enriching themselves during their terms.
I would bet that a DMV employee would appreciate a thank you, though.
It's a limited period of service at an outpost.
No, it doesn't. The term throughout its entire existence has been applied to government (particularly foreign) service assignments of limited duration, not exclusively low-paid combat assignments in the military.
> Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."
Actually, resume-padding, sometimes well-compensated, foreign-service assignments for upper-crust elites for whom such assignments were a key route to high office are one of the oldest uses of the term.
I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible.
Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.
In my eyes, it's entirely possible the USDS is and ca be successful because it's new. I think it's (unfortunately) entirely possible that in 10-20 years they will suffer from the same bloat and inertia problems large companies and existing government agencies do. I'm not sure how to combat that, but having a way to revitalize large companies or government agencies without losing too much of the existing internal knowledge and expertise would go a long way towards helping combat this, but I'm not sure what that is. There are probably numerous successful companies that have done this that I'm entirely unaware of, so maybe there is a good amount of information on how to combat this...
A critical part to fixing "the problem" is both creating vehicles for new kinds of companies to access government and reduce the overall risk of government officials purchasing from those companies.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM / Accenture / Whatever" applies in government as well, but the appetite for risk can be even lower than in the private sector, with higher costs of entry.
Top-level butt-coverage from the White House / OSTP and another agency demonstrating that it is possible and creating the contract vehicles to get more agile / lean / innovative businesses in the door goes a long way to solving this problem.
Take a long existing systematic problem which produces 100 bad effects a day (people getting double billed, database errors, what have you). Someone thinks of an improvement to reduce this to 10 bad effects a day instead. A major improvement. But they don't do it.
Why? Because anyone who approves of the new system is now the person responsible for the 10 errors a day. It goes from 100 errors per day because that is just how the system works to 10 errors a day because of Bob two cubes over. Bob ends up being blamed for the 10 errors far more than being congratulated for the 90 that no longer occur.
USDS and 18f are trying to change that reality in part by creating that pipeline. It only works if good people are willing to put in the work.
18F is helping to change that with our Agile BPA!
I just want to be as sure as possible that they never get around to fixing the traffic ticketing system.
God forbid the state cops ever realize how many times the local cops have pulled me over, or vice versa, and that's before we even get out-of-state violations involved.
Good lord, keep them away from the traffic tickets. COBOL is just fine for that.
[1] https://playbook.cio.gov/
[2] https://www.gov.uk/design-principles
By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses.
The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
I would say that I (very naively) thought that it would be easy peasy to rebuild all of healthcare.gov. I was wrong. There are all sorts things that make it much harder than you'd expect in a private sector environment.
I do think that there are probably ways to get this cost even cheaper - however, from a software profiling perspective, moving it down an order of magnitude or two is a huge win and that it's a pretty clear choice between further optimization compared to an order of magnitude change on a VA, immigration, or other system.
[0] I'm not actually sure how exact this number is either - lots of help required from people from all different contracts - so this is an upper bound estimate
I know I'm not alone here, either.
They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.
On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?
Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics:
"woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork."
Ok, how long will that take?
"I can probably have it done in a week."
It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week?
"Yeah, maybe two."
But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.
http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com
> As a result, the Committee itself became complicit in an act of public deception.
Good, let's imprison them all for perjury then, not just Clapper.
And the committee members seem to have a pretty strong tradition of keeping classified information secret -- but isn't that just a tradition? Couldn't a member just decide that the public ought to know something in particular and hence reveal it? Is it a tactical decision about hoping to achieve better cooperation with witnesses and sources in the long term?
(I'm also wondering where the whole concept and structure of oversight comes from -- I think historically and constitutionally it has to do with the budget power but it seems like it's developed pretty far beyond that.)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/mar/11/...
It is no matter anyway, the chairman knew the answer to the question before it was asked, and he just wanted to expose the program, which Clapper wasn't going to allow to happen. Just because you are able to chair a public committee doesn't mean you also have the right to expose top secret government programs you happen to not like.
And I'm glad it was exposed. Spying on every single one of your citizens' interactions and logging that information indefinitely in secret for later inspection has no place in a free society.
Re: declining to answer, other questions were presented in advance for that very hearing and declined in advance by Clapper – they were not asked, and they were not entered in to the record. See the parent Politifact article for sources. Did declining those questions expose secrets?
> Did declining those questions expose secrets?
Unsure, but not relevant to the parent argument.
On a much smaller scale, I still remember the thrill of renewing my vehicle registration online, as compared to the slow, slow, slow DMV.
You want to further empower a government which seeks complete domination of its citizens and of the world.
I have no real response because I have tried to have discussions with your ilk a million times and we will simply never see eye to eye.
At the least silverstorm phrased it as a question in wait of an answer, which is a lot more civil than the outright hostile attack that aimed more to accuse than to enlighten.
Does the US Digital Service hire people who strictly refuse to assist in any way with any of the operations of the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, DEA, or any other oppressive agency?
If so, I'd reconsider, but I don't think they would hire me under those terms. And if they did, they wouldn't appreciate me saying "Fuck off!" if they tried to assign me to one of the projects to prop up one of these agencies?
Just a small note, immigration is DHS.
Consider the opposite scenario: should we hire somebody who "strictly refuses to assist in any way with providing government handouts to undeserving moochers?" Such a person would be an obvious liability, given current priorities.
If I hired the first group and not the second, then we'd become an explicitly partisan and ideological operation, that still has to work with a Democrat administration and a Republican Congress. That's a whole new level of pain that I need like a hole in the head.
At this point if someone willing works for the US government they are no friend of mine, because they are actively assisting an institution which flaunts the law, destroys the lives of innocents, tortures without consequence, and routinely murders hundreds of thousands of civilians.
That the great Sam Altman shills for such a morally bankrupt entity is revolting and should give everyone pause. The US government clearly has no intention of reforming, providing them any assistance is akin to providing any terrorist organization with material assistance only on a much larger and more devastating scale.
Yes, a morally good person can no longer work for the US government, a threshold into evil has been crossed -- was it acceptable to work for the Stasi, for Mao or Stalin? No it wasn't, and isn't acceptable to assist the US government.
Thinking that your masters will be so happy you improved IT efficiency that they'll listen to you is mind numbingly naïve, they simply will use you as they would any tool and when you've done your job put you back in the toolbox.
Do you think Stalins tailor had much impact, maybe his gardener or chef? You don't stop evil people from being evil by helping them.
There's a lot of organizations with a lot of different goals.
It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.
(From va.gov/ds/, where I work, I believe this is the same for all the other Digital Service teams though)
The top tech talent that we aim to attract to USDS often can make far more than these salaries staying in the private sector, so appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements is what we have to do to recruit.
Which is why everybody loves getting a letter asking them to turn up for jury duty, right?!
* You don't have to spend a full day in a courthouse doing nothing during the selection process
* The government guarantees you will continue receiving your normal income during the trial
$116k/yr for your entire mid/late career would also suck (compared to 200-400k in industry), but for <2 years, I can't see that alone being a huge issue, unless you have kids in college, are paying for a mortgage elsewhere, etc.
We are brought in either under Intermittent Consultants or Schedule A hires. This means that in exchange for being able to hire you by name rather than going through a more structured process through USAjobs.gov, you can only work for 2 years. Therefore, no matter what the pay, it's probably not a viable long term career.
It's also important to note that this is probably a good thing - I've been at Healthcare.gov and USDS since Jan of 2014 and I'm finding that I'm getting adjusted to some of the bureaucracy. It's therefore actually key to balance experience with fresh perspectives.
I'd also say that the salary ranges - it's in part based on what you used to make in the private sector but has a hard ceiling. For everyone who comes, it's more than enough to survive but not a long term career move for anyone. And of course, there are no stock options or equity stakes :D.
[0] There are some slight differences in how pay, retirement, and some other benefits are distributed, so they are mostly but not entirely interchangeable.
Overall, it doesn't sound like you get strung out to dry in any particular way. Seems like it's mostly a "sacrifice" in the sense of putting your ordinary professional opportunities on pause for a little bit- although if the program becomes highly reputable, it could actually be good for you professionally.
I had never lived in DC before joining USDS, but soon added a new favorite city to my list! I definitely never felt strung out to dry either.
Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service.
How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.
Loose lips sink ships, doc.
"Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.
http://centers.hpc.mil/users/COSTQuickRef.html#Python
There's a ton happening here. From http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/dod-start-its-own-dig...: "The new team is already working to transfer electronic health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs from DOD."
I prefer writing python in the least-clever way I can, which doesn't require a lot of language features.
https://analytics.usa.gov/
Between immigration and weather one can cover 70% of queries right there ;) And thanks to sama for the write up.
1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users.
2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.
Thanks! We loved the opportunity to assist the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) with the dashboard. They've been around since ~2012 and have been doing the legwork to get agencies to participate in the program for years:
https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/
First they get them to "feel patriotic about helping the government" and then getting them to spy on everyone seems like just another next step.
Hopefully, though, it will work the other way around and this top tech talent will manage to convince the old people in the government to do less of that.
STOP. WAIT. THINK. As an entrepreneur, you don't want to lose opportunities down the road, or have doors close on you. Look how Huawei gets blasted because the founder served in the Chinese army. Or they may be some open-source projects you want to help out on and people don't want to trust you.
2) Are we really so selfish as to say "I would like to, but working for my country would look bad on my resume, so sorry"?
Right...
There are a few negative things as overhang from the rest of government (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose), but those are the reality, and don't diminish the value of the program in any way.
I would strongly recommend looking into USDS to anyone who who wants to make a difference in tech. It is a great place to go in the middle of a longer career at a post IPO company like Google/FB, or are between projects.
As a YC alum, while I find some strong similarities between Digital Service and a small growing startup, there are indeed some additional hoops that we go through as a part of the US government and that's part of the tradeoff you get for being able to help government agencies that have huge impact!
As an 18F employee, I can't speak for USDS, but I know 18F can (and does, I think) employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor). I've also never taken a drug test.
Doesn't that just mean permanent residents?