Paying over the market rate for talent is how you attract good employees. Every business has to do it because trained specialists don't get out of bed for a 5 figure salary.
I find it astounding that a forum of tech workers are talking about how overpaid government positions are. As if anybody here actually believes the public sector is where career money is.
I was hoping for an explanation for why this is a key agency, or why it's more interesting news than cuts at any other agency. None are given in the article.
Why is Schneier now using publications like wired as tech sources? That post is filled with what look like SEO links to publications funded by USAID.
Is Schneier himself now in on the take? I used to trust him. (edit: oh I see it wasn't written by him but by a ghostwriter for a different publication. Still he loses some of my trust for this drivel on his blog)
I’m still so confused. You’re talking about the article I posted a link to? Did you think I hadn’t read it?
Edit: I guess I’ll try to respond in good faith, even though I don’t totally understand why you’re asking me about this. If you click through to the Foreign Policy article, you’ll see Bruce Schneier listed as the first author before Ottenheimer.
But really, I’m not trying to imply whatever it is you’re inferring. By all means, draw whatever conclusions you like from Schneier’s authorship!
Interesting. But Chesterton's Fence assumes we can always find out why something was put there, but often we can't, which makes adding barriers easier than removing them—leading to a buildup of unnecessary rules over time?
The GSA facilitates the adoption of cloud services like the Cloud Information Technology (IT) Program and FedRAMP. So there are some areas where I'd say the GSA is key. Firing 60 early career staffers in technology as the article mentions doesn't seem too impactful to the mission. But selling off real estate and consolidating the staff could have a bigger impact as career staff ponder the "fork-in-the-road".
I'm concerned that this will have negative effects on both national security and government efficiency.
As an employee of a DoD contractor, we make use of several FedRAMP approved SaaS products that allow us to securely handle controlled unclassified information. Using these services has allowed us to quickly scale to meet the requirements of the national security programs we have contracts with by allowing our infrastructure engineers to focus on improving internal processes rather than manage a bunch of self hosted services.
There were a handful of other products from companies like Atlassian that we were hoping to be able to use in the next several months as they work through the FedRAMP approvals process. Unfortunately, FedRAMP is a component of the GSA's Technology Transformation Service[0]. With upwards of 10% of the workforce being laid off, I have to imagine this will slow approvals substantially. If this isn't addressed, this will only hurt the ability of US companies and government agencies to do their job.
A lot of political posts have gotten flagged lately, ostensibly for not being technology-related, but this one is explicitly about tech and software (and AI, no less). Can we get it restored?
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 53.1 ms ] threadMy cousin worked in government for decades and told me she was obscenely overpaid for one of her last jobs.
I would prefer this one were removed and replaced with Schneier’s article at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977, currently at 150 upvotes.
Is Schneier himself now in on the take? I used to trust him. (edit: oh I see it wasn't written by him but by a ghostwriter for a different publication. Still he loses some of my trust for this drivel on his blog)
>This essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer, and originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
Edit: I guess I’ll try to respond in good faith, even though I don’t totally understand why you’re asking me about this. If you click through to the Foreign Policy article, you’ll see Bruce Schneier listed as the first author before Ottenheimer.
But really, I’m not trying to imply whatever it is you’re inferring. By all means, draw whatever conclusions you like from Schneier’s authorship!
> "Chesterton's fence" is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
As an employee of a DoD contractor, we make use of several FedRAMP approved SaaS products that allow us to securely handle controlled unclassified information. Using these services has allowed us to quickly scale to meet the requirements of the national security programs we have contracts with by allowing our infrastructure engineers to focus on improving internal processes rather than manage a bunch of self hosted services.
There were a handful of other products from companies like Atlassian that we were hoping to be able to use in the next several months as they work through the FedRAMP approvals process. Unfortunately, FedRAMP is a component of the GSA's Technology Transformation Service[0]. With upwards of 10% of the workforce being laid off, I have to imagine this will slow approvals substantially. If this isn't addressed, this will only hurt the ability of US companies and government agencies to do their job.
[0] https://tts.gsa.gov/services/products/