Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

View on HN

As well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lobbying firm.

It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, because well, it's been 20 years, but in my 10 minutes of Googling, here's the first former OTA project lead I managed to find today (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/).

The OTA was (and should still be) a group of people with the expertise to sythesize a large body of research in a topic. You don't learn those skills making Facebook's "like" button load 20% faster. You learn them by spending a good chunk of your 20s reading thousands of pages of research for your PhD.

At the same time, I'd prefer people with practical tech experience, not academics who have rarely experienced solving real world problems (as opposed to theory).

I doubt that PhDs from Boeing or FFRDCs are going to real strangers to "real-world research problems."

At the same time, are they experienced in CRUD apps? Probably not. Solve the right problem with the right people.

What in the world difference would it make if they're familiar with CRUD apps? They're not writing code for government infrastructure

The OTA doesn't need devs and Facebook engineers, they're not developing CRUD apps, and they don't need to know what CRUD is. They need to be well educated, qualified professionals who are capable of advising the government on technology issues that affect the whole population. They need to be well-rounded and capable of seeing things both from many perspectives, including those of tech company engineering departments, federal law, and scientific pursuits.

Thank you! I appreciate the correction!

Sounds like sci-fi writers might best fit the bill.

A concept used to great effect in the novel Footfall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall

I'm struggling to think of something more irrelevant to the technical needs of legislators than some fad storage technology.

It's not a tech, and that's sort of the point.

An analogy might be 'designed an actual building - even a warehouse' when talking about an architect.

They wouldn't hire anyone who thought that "seeing eye-to-eye" was a prerequisite for academic rigor. They released reports that were highly regarded for their rigor (the article even mentions that). So if they were given the responsibility of researching the effect patents has on the tech sector, that's exactly what they'd do.

I find it disturbing that you'd actually want an OTA that only hires people that agree with you. That's not their purpose.

The tech industry has demonstrated supreme amounts of power in the political sphere.

I'm not crying for the political ills of Zuckerberg or Apple or Google. Furthermore, the tech industry is far removed from blue-collar middle class America, with an average of twice the wages and relatively insulated from the ills of globalization.

Just remember: Technocrats are a political group just like any other. You and I may be part of them, but remember that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka: EFF) is a lobbying group funded by technocrats, with ideologies that don't necessarily match the average (non-technocrat) American.

Again, I'm a technocrat like most others in this site. I am a programmer by trade and generally agree with the issues brought up by the EFF. Just don't get trapped inside of the "bubble" that is Hacker News or even Reddit. There is a big world out there.

> An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?

Honestly, I'd prefer that to the status quo. No solution is perfect but the current situation is an absurd caricature of a shitshow.

The ignorance displayed is terrifying because these people are professionals at gathering public support.

This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress.

Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.

The USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of what the US has ever done with tech.

Agree, and a model which Congress would be wise to adopt...if Congress had competent guardians at its helm. But I digress.

It's also what the government can afford. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com