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I am sure the 18F people landed quickly and in a place with a very large salary increase. So I doubt they will come back. Plus who would work for the Gov now ? High Talent people will go elsewhere.

I wonder how many cyber breaches will be blamed on these firings over the next 20 years. I am sure China and NK is going on a big hiring and training spree for crackers.

It can no longer be assumed that laid-off developers will "land quickly" anywhere.

That's just not the job market we're in.

The market is bad right now. I think it's terrible to assume they have landed somewhere. They likely had to move which means uprooting family.
Market-state aside, it's also a bit dismissive of what other people value.

> "Assurances that we’ll all find other jobs before too long miss the point. We don’t necessarily want other jobs. We don’t want sympathy. We want our work, and the places we’ve done that work, to be recognized and valued."[1]

[1]: https://www.hcn.org/articles/losing-more-than-a-forest-servi...

I will say I saw vast improvements in the US government digital sites in the last few years. It would be a shame to go back to what was before.

For example, the TSA Precheck application is a terrific website.

Compare that to what I saw with the US Patent Office five years ago. Absolute hell.

I was able to renew my passport fully online last year. We were finally getting somewhere with building good government tech. Really sucks that in order to prove their point that government is always useless they’ve decided to just destroy it. Hopefully picking up the pieces will be possible.
Best case our current administration's desire to replay Hoover's gives us FDR.