The US digital service
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
And then of course I didn't get the job (and no feedback on why). The whole thing was maddening, took 3 months total just to get railroaded by an aggressive and imprecise technical interviewer. It sounds like great work though, wish them the best of luck. Wish I could work on their projects.
Be careful of such assumptions. Google has a lot of languages that they use, and it's not inconceivable that someone that worked at Google might be mainly a Java engineer, without much exposure to Python -- in which case list vs array is a pretty meaningful question from their perspective.
java.util.List is an interface; java.util.ArrayList is the most commonly used implementation.
Of course, the proper response to a dumb interview question like this is "You mean linked list or array, right?" Because a reasonably seasoned programmer should recognize this poor choice of terminology for what it is.
This of course is no excuse - there is a lot of work to be done and we are working on it.
Not even the worst of the descriptions of experience with USDS hiring I've seen could possibly be reasonable viewed as exacerbating the problem (mitigating it less than an ideal process would, sure; but to be exacerbating, it would have to be worse than the average non-USDS public sector hiring process.)
I don't see how. It's usually just a sweeping policy for liability or legal reasons and that's it.
Don't grasp at straws, anyone with a brain would bring proof of prescription (or put their doctor's number down!) to the test and that gets sent along with the results.
So now it's my urine and substantial pieces of my health history, including a pretty good drug-directed guess of what the actual underlying health condition is. Hope it's not an expensive one to insure. Oh, I'll write the doctor's number down too. I'll just fill out the HIPAA authorization form granting my potential employer access to my medical history. Good thing the practice's name doesn't include "behavioral health" anywhere in it.
Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?
If I saw an auth form for any medical records release I would nope the fuck out too. That doesn't sound typical or correct. I have only seen releases for the results of the test which yes, if come back positive and you have proof of legal use will indicate you've been getting treatment based on someone's guess. However, it should stop there. If someone from HR starts asking medical questions about why you are getting treatment, that sounds like it's crossing a serious line and I'd be looking into whether that's legal or not. That sounds like a company that is hiring some shitty people, never mind whether they are good or not because they have a drug testing policy.
>Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?
You want to work in a specific industry
I'm certain a lot of this behavior is illegal, but people who don't know or choose to ignore the law are everywhere, and litigation is expensive and time-consuming. I just want to build stuff, so I take these sorts of policies as a warning sign and look elsewhere.
It's demeaning, and I simply will not do it.
The USDS is suppose to be addressing the idiotic "seeping policies" that allow bureaucratic thinking to drive away those interested in working to use technology to improve performance.
That they didn't bother to fix this obviously silly bureaucratic rule that disrespects people is an very valid piece of data that you will find many less blatantly disrespectful bureaucratic rules stymying your attempt to do your work.
It might be they did a decent job fixing the many many problems with how much of government IT has been done but just failed on this one very visible and thus any marketer would tell you very important to address issue. But I doubt it. Most likely if they failed to even deal with this, the situation is pretty bad in many other ways.
USDS has done some nice things, according to stories I have read, but it seems it is just this appendage to the bureaucracy that is given some leeway due to powerful allies in the bureaucracy. This has always been the case in government and lots of good IT stuff has been done by those given power to avoid the normal IT processes by powerful allies.
But the other success isn't about an improved system it is about typical power politics in a bureaucracy. Things like sticking to bad policy that is driven by command and control thinking treating workers like drones such as polygraphs or drug testing for office workers is a sign that even the core thinking around the management system is extremely poor. In that case the management system will constantly be imposing idiotic rules on you that can be ignore only due to a powerful ally preventing enforcement (or just the incompetence of the bureaucracy to enforce the rules it set in place).
Conflict: an employer demands bodily fluids, revealing medications one is taking.
In most cases, the demand for the private medical history is unnecessary, stupid, and illegal.
I likewise would pass, but would be turned off by the demand. I do not know if I would be sufficiently turned off to turn down an otherwise desirable job - it hasn't come up.
It's certainly not personal. I just think it's bad policy for all but the most safety-critical occupations, and choose to avoid employers who insist on collecting my bodily fluids or health history.
Right, its a bureaucratic policy providing a firm and strongly negative indication of the employing entity's respect for its actual and potential employees.
EDIT: To be fair to USDS, one could argue that the policy with regard to Executive Office of the President staff is an externally imposed (its statutory, not executive order, as I understand) aspect of the kind of government culture that USDS is intended in many ways to be a leading wedge for changing, at least as it applies to the IT space, so it may be worthy of some more generous consideration than would generally be the case, but its still a negative indicator.
We can follow up with you to let you know where you are in the process, but we'd need some sort of identifying information in order to do that.
Also, your response sounds extremely canned, not gonna lie. Why not just say "Sorry about that, pm me your name and I'll look into it and fix the other dozen folks while I'm at it."? I see emails like yours all the time from middle management who don't quite know how to manage, but have such a large audience that they feel obligated to act "professional". It's a "human" issue, so just write a response like a human :).
Also, we believe it's important to have the team you might work with do the interviewing, not just HR. Which unfortunately means we're often the problem - a fire with a client and suddenly you're down an interviewer, and we're not quite big enough to gracefully rebound and find a new one last minute.
All of which to say: not excuses, but hopefully gives you insight into some of our scaling troubles.
It doesn't sound like it's entirely your tream's fault, then. Not having enough time because of fires and such often screams to me of bad management towards the middle/top. And considering who you work for, that makes sense.
At the very least you now learned about them. I want you to read this: http://mikerowe.com/2015/08/otw-rejection/
And let me relate to you: I get turned down for jobs all the time. It is not because of capricious reasons that I wish were the case, but it's because of me not knowing something. Yes, it's maddening because they throw out good candidates along with the bad to minimize risk to them. The same facts happen to me and you, but try to have the perspective on them be as positive as you can.
Having said that, I'd be minded to look dimly on a candidate who tried to sidestep that question with 'but I use Python and they're the same there, so it's just a question of semantics' and did not try to clarify the question with me.
That's not to say that failing to know that terminology should automatically result in rejection, but understanding that is not an unreasonable expectation when hiring something other than a narrow-focus language-specific code grinder.
It's a principle-agent problem - having a strict filter gives the interviewer a way to deflect blame when they hire a bad candidate. This is at the expense of the company both through additional bad hires and through extra time and money spent interviewing.
It was a computer science question, not a programming question. If a particular tool doesn't implement one of the fundamental data types that is an interesting point you can talk about.
But the question sounds like the interviewer wanted to make sure you understood the time-complexity difference between the two.
If you've never done that style of interview it is important to realize that the goal is quite different to making sure you understand a language's syntax.
I just turned to the two most relevant books that I had on my shelf. Neither Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, nor SedgewiCk's Algorithms in C refer to a list without a qualifier. Knuth speaks of Linear Lists, and then goes into a description of Linked lists, doubly linked list and circular linked lists, and Sedgewick refers exclusively to Linked lists.
If I went to an interview for a Java role, and was asked to choose between a list and an array I would assume they meant java.util.List, if it was a Scala role I'd assume scala.collection.immutable.List; I think it's entirely reasonable for a Ruby+Python dev to be confused about what set of terms the interviewer is drawing from.
If you want to ask a generic CS question, then preface it appropriately, and be precise about your terminology.
If anyone asking "why is it so bad" actually genuinely wanted an answer, here is part of one: There's some finite amount of process change that we can absorb per unit time. We have tended not to prioritize process improvements that would reduce the risk of an individual getting a bad experience, in favor of ones that will increase the total yield of qualified hires. We know we are paying a price for this, so we keep an eye on places like HN to see how high it is.
[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
It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.
One thing I'll say about government work -- you're not really breaking new ground, from a technology perspective. (Unless you're at DARPA I suppose.) Don't come into thinking you're going to innovate in some bleeding-edge area. But government was left so far behind the consumer technology curve that basic, competently-executed, well-designed software that's fast is an _enormous_ leap forward. 2008-era web tech is sorely needed across government. In a way, that is the innovation: dependable software that reliably delivers services to people for whose user-experience has never been put on the same playing field as consumer online services.
If you're interested in being part of the rebel alliance, and for whatever reason USDS or 18F aren't right for you, consider contracting. There's enormous opportunity to make real change and see your code help others. Believe me, small teams can have a big impact on government, even from outside government. If you want to know more about Ad Hoc, get in touch (http://adhocteam.us/). We also have projects with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and state Medicaid programs.
I never thought I'd be a government contractor. I did the startup thing, and just happened to get roped into the HealthCare.gov rescue. I can tell you it's sometimes frustrating, but always satisfying work. And there are several avenues in.
Piling on: If you're interested in being an early employee at a growth startup working with the government, check out Nava! (I work for Nava)
Our hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189
A big part of why certain organizations fail on the technology side comes from how they perceive the use of systems on their network. For instance, in the NSA example, I asked if I could make programs to make things easier (having never made an application in my life) and the grizzled old veteran analyst handed me the Perl Cookbook and said "Go to town.". Compare that with my CIA contracting job where I was explicitly told not to program, programmed anyway, and proved that we could effectively make programs in-house instead of waiting for months on a separate contract to fulfill our needs. That programs savings to taxpayers dollars, by the way? About $10 million.
We do take for granted that we can do something like type `npm install` and programs magically get pulled from disparate parts of the internet and work. On government networks, you have to work with code that's been vetted over a 3-6 month process, leaving you with the baseline items (the node binary, for instance) but requiring you to rebuild the modules you need. I'm of course referencing networks that are completely air-gapped from the internet, that is.
You ain't part of no Rebel Alliance, man. You're full Empire, and you helped build a Death Star.
Jason 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.
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.
> 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.
There's a lot of organizations with a lot of different goals.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
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.
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.
Erm. Serving your country does not equal to serving the government. Often the government in place actually has an active role in destroying the country or making it worse. Look at the NSA - are the NSA folks really serving their country or their goverment first ?
Serving your country/honour/helping the group are rhetorical tools used convince people to sacrifice themselves (their human capital, and sometimes their bodies) for this group.
Governments are extremely powerful (obviously), and part of that power comes from co-opting people. A metaphor can be seen in the Matrix. To quote Morpheus:
> The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
The hacker culture is being co-opted wholesale. Technology is powerful—both as an economic driver and a competitive advantage against other groups—, so it's not unexpected that the human capital which are tech savvy are targeted.
People can't be forced to do anything—unless they break the law at which point they will have the full force of law brought down upon them, with no mercy applied (if members of the gov choose!). As such, people with skills need to be convinced to work with government, and that's where the rhetorical tools are implemented.
When you read comments about how governments help the people they preside over, you're reading the grass-roots propaganda from those which Morpheus talks of. The businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, coders!
Do as you like, but it's important to know the message conveyed in the blog post is from a member of the business-class who has been fully co-opted, and doesn't follow the very advice he gives! And why would he? It's much more profitable (in the board sense of the word) to use his platform as a tool of marketing and persuasion for said establishment—I.e. getting others to make sacrifices, so those with control can live with impunity and in-group-largess (with the cost borne by society).
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:
(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.
Do you treat this as a job with a certain known tenure, or rather as a sabbatical? It seems like they want specific periods of work, but how does that fit with a regular job where you're vaguely working for a company indefinitely?
How does relocating to the DC-metro area fit in with that? Relocation is expensive and a hassle, after all.
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
The US government, like all traditional states, is just a really official type of organized crime. The DNA of the state is past its expiration.
The big wins they are having is enforcing OSS licenses for bespoke development, pooling purchasing into rolling 6-9 month call-off frameworks and generally waving the agile and cheaper flags.
I am not convinced that the idea of a sort of Peace Corps couple of years will be the solution - if we get government software based on an infrastructure of OSS then it's likely both private and public developers will be familiar with those Eco systems anyway.
Mikey Dickerson (head of USDS) at SXSW: Why we need you in government https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw...
Previous HN discussion on USDS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819
That been said, I don't believe USDS/18F/GSA in big need for engineers from my own experience. So don't afraid to apply :)
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...
A bunch of young guns parachuting in isn't going to have much effect unless someone with a lot of political capital, spends that capital forcing change.
Otherwise, the young guns will just get sidelined. I've talked to people in the Presidential Fellows program, and they get sidelined a lot. Nothing actually changes.
And forget about bringing in new, better vendors for government contracts. There is an entire skillset required to bid on and get government contracts, and the people that know how to build good technology, have no idea how to get the contracts. And the people that know how to get the contracts, specialize in that, and have no idea how to build good technology.
How do you think that garbage-ass company from Canada (that isn't even allowed to build tech for the Canadian government) gets recruited to build Healthcare.gov at some huge inflated expense.
And BTW, you can't even get people in the know to talk about this stuff, because anyone that does is shitting on their own career prospects if they tattle on the system.
The Healthcare.gov fix worked because the President supported that intervention. Can every place that Digital Service serves get that kind of support? If it does, then that will be amazing. But I sort of doubt the President can micromanage and give support to a thousand interventions in a thousand different departments, all with their own little fiefdoms.
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 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) Work for it.
2) Don't work for it.
[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.
I think they also try to have foreign service officers do different types of jobs (aside from technical jobs like communications specialists, who always do the same thing) for instance, I think most of the foreign service officers have to do a consular rotation where they're working with people on passport or immigration or travel issues rather than on political or economic issues.
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.