"18F is a Financial Disaster" is not the title of the article and is explicit editorialising.
On a lighter note, seems like a fun place to work! And the kind of attitudes on display here seem to be the kind you'd expect from a group of people who have the VC-funded mindset, but the cost-pressures of the US's government budget.
Agreed. Many of the "unbillable" work items listed in the article seem to be establishing important procedures and tools to improve productivity and a positive work environment, which most tech companies do as well.
Makes you wonder whether the author and the poster are affiliated with one of those old-school government consulting or contractor companies that would gladly see 18F disappear so that the government would outsource the work instead.
> Agreed. Many of the "unbillable" work items listed in the article seem to be establishing important procedures and tools to improve productivity and a positive work environment, which most tech companies do as well.
I have nothing but disdain for someone spending $4,000 of public money writing a Slackbot to politely encourage you to not use the words "guys" or "dudes" [1] [2]. If that's important to you, go burn up VC dollars doing that, not tax money that is desperately needed for real work. This opinion is not about having an agenda; that's common sense.
I'm off to craft a FOIA request for the historical Slack logs for 18F.
While I completely agree with you that spending $4,000 on these slack bots is a waste of time, that is still a minute fraction of the cost of "unbillable" items listed by this article. Why not submit an FOIA request on one of the other items instead, such as the $140k spend on "developing the brand" and find out what actually involved? [0]
If you really want to be outraged by a waste of taxpayer dollars, I would recommend that you take a look at how much state governments are overspending on prisons vs education [1], wasteful spending in defense [2], and the $8.5 trillion in unaccounted taxpayer dollars spent on defense [3].
I'm the OP, and I've never done any work for any government, ever.
As for the title... to sum up +$140k of tax dollars spent on a pointless logo as anything less than a completely fucking ludicrous financial disaster would be almost as idiotic.
Also, I would hate to see how this almost treasonous waste of money could possibly be bested. In one year's time, I myself with no outside help could produce everything this entire shit organization has ever produced, and it would be higher quality. As for the logo, you could get better at 99 Designs for 80 bucks.
The United States Postal Service (USPS), (also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service), is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.
The 10-month investigation by the GSA's inspector general
found that 52 percent of 18F's work was unbillable and
included an internal project to change its logo by altering
its font, alignment and background color. In all, 727 staff
hours, or $140,104, were spent on developing the brand,
including that logo change.
It seems that the author is intentionally obfuscating this point and making it seem as if 52% of 18F's work was put towards "making the logos look hipper," which is likely not the case. While "developing the brand" includes logo work, in most cases, that is just a small part of it. Developing a UI design spec, similar to Google's Material Spec [0], would also fall under "developing the brand."
Perhaps someone from 18F can speak to whether developing the U.S. Web Design Standards [1] is part of this category because if so, I would argue that spending $140k (which is roughly 1-2 software engineer annual salaries) on such a project is certainly worthwhile since this spec is part of the foundation for many future projects.
Question for anybody with 18F here... do many of your management personnel have experience with consulting (particularly on government projects) or are your hires primarily from product backgrounds?
I'm of the mind that this is about what I'd expect from people who are generally more concerned with less-tangibles like culture and product, but I don't really know if that's the general background of the personnel hired.
My suspicion is that if you looked at most agencies you'd see this same kind of apparent frivolity but in a way that makes it less easy to track. It also bears repeating that while some of the stories presented in the article are excessive, 18f has always seemed to me to be more aimed at being a force multiplier for other agencies rather than just boots on the ground. When I worked in government non-profit (of the IRS designation, that is!) we spent quite a bit of "non billable" time doing exactly that instead of providing services directly. Once I started consulting in the private sector though, the billable hour became much more important.
I am not affiliated with 18F but do work for a major tech company. I am not convinced that the consulting model is better for the kinds of projects that 18F is trying to undertake, such as developing the web services for government agencies.
Most tech companies invest in things such as culture, internal productivity tools, and developer and testing infrastructure that are not deliverables to clients and thus not billable. While these may incur a higher start-up cost, these are critical for ensuring long-term productivity.
Correct me if I am wrong but my impression is that the consulting world is much more concerned with delivering and then moving onto the next project, with very little shared work or infrastructure between projects.
I'm sure 18F has areas of improvement for how it spends its resources and how it tracks costs and billing. Every organization does. However, I would not be surprised if the reason 18F exists is that the government found that outsourcing this work to consultants led to higher costs and lower quality deliverables compared to products being released by tech companies and thus wanted to try a different approach.
I tend to be of the same mind, but if justifying their existence through billing their services to other government agencies is a part of their charter, then they pretty much have to consider that. Even if a significant portion of their budget is intended to be internally billed, going off on a logo redesign that "costs" 140k worth of meetings and face time to get buy-in is simply not a worthwhile use of the time.
As I said earlier I'm not sure that the billable hour is the best way to judge their effectiveness but as a long-time consultant who's worked in both government and private settings, they would do well to find a better compromise of the time.
> "At a time when federal departments were cutting budgets, it was funded under a model that envisioned it would earn back more money than it cost to run"
I would have interpreted this as meaning "would make net savings by being cheaper than projects outsourced by federal departments", not "would make a net financial gain". The latter seems highly unrealistic. I assume they're producing value for the government for the $32 million "loss" quoted.
Comrades! This seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars :-/
FTA:
The report said 18F spent about 20 hours or $4,148 on two customized "bots" for Slack, an online messaging application. One of the automated programs would monitor users' messages for the words "guys," "guyz" and "dudes," which could have been perceived as being not inclusive for women. It prompted users to consider replacing those words with 21 options that included buds, compatriots, fellow humans, posse, team, mateys, persons of any kind, organic carbon-based life-forms living on the third planet from the sun, comrades and cats.
$4,000 for some engineers to fuck around at work might not sound much but that $4,000 came from taxing people. Believe it or not but to a lot of people $4,000 is a lot of money. That $4,000 could go to school supplies, education, WIC, Medicare, etc.
It also illustrates tax payer subsidized income inequality while a lot of people are struggling. Again some highly paid engineer making more money fucking around at work than some other taxpayer delivering real value but at lower wage.
While I agree that given the information from the Inspector General's report, 18F certainly needs to be more disciplined about how it spends its resources, do you really think that 18F is the most egregious example of a government agency fucking around and wasting money? How about the DoD's $8.5 trillion of unaccounted taxpayer money [0]?
Of course it is not the most egregious. That someone else is wasting several orders of magnitude more money doesn't make it OK for 18F waste a smaller amount.
Hopefully they're just combining two efforts, because Slackbot can already reply based on certain word triggers, so you set it up so it picks one of a selection of messages when it sees the word "guys".
This is what happens when people given little or no incentive to actively create something that another would buy. When someone is trying to make ends meet AND create a product they prioritize necessities and hammer out something usable, when given free reign most just become a drain (some create amazing things given this chance though). Optimally you could hire someone who has learned this lesson.
24 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadOn a lighter note, seems like a fun place to work! And the kind of attitudes on display here seem to be the kind you'd expect from a group of people who have the VC-funded mindset, but the cost-pressures of the US's government budget.
Makes you wonder whether the author and the poster are affiliated with one of those old-school government consulting or contractor companies that would gladly see 18F disappear so that the government would outsource the work instead.
I have nothing but disdain for someone spending $4,000 of public money writing a Slackbot to politely encourage you to not use the words "guys" or "dudes" [1] [2]. If that's important to you, go burn up VC dollars doing that, not tax money that is desperately needed for real work. This opinion is not about having an agenda; that's common sense.
I'm off to craft a FOIA request for the historical Slack logs for 18F.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792768
[2] https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz...
If you really want to be outraged by a waste of taxpayer dollars, I would recommend that you take a look at how much state governments are overspending on prisons vs education [1], wasteful spending in defense [2], and the $8.5 trillion in unaccounted taxpayer dollars spent on defense [3].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793035
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/01/pf/college/higher-education-...
[2] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/29/where-did-us-taxp...
[3] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccou...
As for the title... to sum up +$140k of tax dollars spent on a pointless logo as anything less than a completely fucking ludicrous financial disaster would be almost as idiotic.
Also, I would hate to see how this almost treasonous waste of money could possibly be bested. In one year's time, I myself with no outside help could produce everything this entire shit organization has ever produced, and it would be higher quality. As for the logo, you could get better at 99 Designs for 80 bucks.
"Not supposed to make money" isn't the same thing as "spend $140,000 on making your logos look hipper".
Based on the IG's comments it looks like the expectation is that 18F should be billing project hours.
The United States Postal Service (USPS), (also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service), is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.
Perhaps someone from 18F can speak to whether developing the U.S. Web Design Standards [1] is part of this category because if so, I would argue that spending $140k (which is roughly 1-2 software engineer annual salaries) on such a project is certainly worthwhile since this spec is part of the foundation for many future projects.
[0] https://design.google.com/spec
[1] https://standards.usa.gov/
I'm of the mind that this is about what I'd expect from people who are generally more concerned with less-tangibles like culture and product, but I don't really know if that's the general background of the personnel hired.
My suspicion is that if you looked at most agencies you'd see this same kind of apparent frivolity but in a way that makes it less easy to track. It also bears repeating that while some of the stories presented in the article are excessive, 18f has always seemed to me to be more aimed at being a force multiplier for other agencies rather than just boots on the ground. When I worked in government non-profit (of the IRS designation, that is!) we spent quite a bit of "non billable" time doing exactly that instead of providing services directly. Once I started consulting in the private sector though, the billable hour became much more important.
Most tech companies invest in things such as culture, internal productivity tools, and developer and testing infrastructure that are not deliverables to clients and thus not billable. While these may incur a higher start-up cost, these are critical for ensuring long-term productivity.
Correct me if I am wrong but my impression is that the consulting world is much more concerned with delivering and then moving onto the next project, with very little shared work or infrastructure between projects.
I'm sure 18F has areas of improvement for how it spends its resources and how it tracks costs and billing. Every organization does. However, I would not be surprised if the reason 18F exists is that the government found that outsourcing this work to consultants led to higher costs and lower quality deliverables compared to products being released by tech companies and thus wanted to try a different approach.
As I said earlier I'm not sure that the billable hour is the best way to judge their effectiveness but as a long-time consultant who's worked in both government and private settings, they would do well to find a better compromise of the time.
I would have interpreted this as meaning "would make net savings by being cheaper than projects outsourced by federal departments", not "would make a net financial gain". The latter seems highly unrealistic. I assume they're producing value for the government for the $32 million "loss" quoted.
FTA:
The report said 18F spent about 20 hours or $4,148 on two customized "bots" for Slack, an online messaging application. One of the automated programs would monitor users' messages for the words "guys," "guyz" and "dudes," which could have been perceived as being not inclusive for women. It prompted users to consider replacing those words with 21 options that included buds, compatriots, fellow humans, posse, team, mateys, persons of any kind, organic carbon-based life-forms living on the third planet from the sun, comrades and cats.
Do you know what 18F competes with? $4000 is literally irrelevant.
$4,000 for some engineers to fuck around at work might not sound much but that $4,000 came from taxing people. Believe it or not but to a lot of people $4,000 is a lot of money. That $4,000 could go to school supplies, education, WIC, Medicare, etc.
It also illustrates tax payer subsidized income inequality while a lot of people are struggling. Again some highly paid engineer making more money fucking around at work than some other taxpayer delivering real value but at lower wage.
[0] http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccou...