A brief update
mattcutts.com
mattcutts.com
I also find it ridiculous that's the standard you set for "community service."
My comment was more about my opinion of the US military industrial complex; I believe that, in general, working for the war machine in any capacity is actively harmful to the world.
Matt clarified what he'll be doing there (I think; at least, he mentioned things that are being done there that sound nice...presumably he was implying he would be working on those nice things, rather than on more effective ways to kill brown people), and I have conceded that I was assuming the worst and could have been wrong about that assumption.
There are exceptions, sure. But, on the whole, war brings death, destruction of infrastructure, disruption of families and communities, and overall negative results for both the human condition and the environment. There are probably valid reasons to wage war; but the US is a nation of hawks and war profiteers at the highest levels, and has been for decades (refer to Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech, and nothing has changed since then except the numbers, both monetary and in human lives, are bigger and the wars more frequent).
Says a guy on the Internet.
But that is a good point - we have the militaries of the US and Britain to thank not only for the internet but the computers accessing it.
And the military industrial complex has Silicon Valley to thank for its ability to conduct mass targeted surveillance through social media and browser exploits, and to kill people with metadata.
It must have sounded like the creepiest thing imaginable to young people who were already concerned about the US's saber-rattling posture, but like the Internet that grew out out of the work done at ARPA, it's now an indispensable public utility.
To give another example that's under the umbrella of the US Digital Service, https://www.vets.gov/playbook/ is an attempt to bring resources for veterans into a single website. Right now, veterans may have to navigate 1000+ websites, 956 different 1-800 numbers, and just deal with more hassle than they should.
I interviewed at the US Digital Service but ended up at the Defense Digital Service because that's where I thought I could help the most. There's some good info about the sort of projects that people at the USDS/DDS work on at https://www.usds.gov/work if anyone is interested. 18F at https://18f.gsa.gov/ is also doing great work, with the extra benefit that people can work for the 18F remotely. 18F has also been a proponent for more open source in the government: https://fcw.com/articles/2016/03/25/noble-open-code.aspx
Sentences also need to be ratcheted back sharply across the board. But it's fallacious to suggest that improving the efficiency of the justice system will harm efforts to reduce mass incarceration.
Those are good things, and I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions, based on my own very strong bias against US militarism.
And for the anti-military types out there, ask yourself if the world is a better place if decent citizens don't get involved with the US military.
You may as well label them Nogoodniks and be done with it.
The military receives no benefit from my use of the Internet (aside from the tax revenue it generates, but I don't have any good way to avoid providing tax revenue to the government).
Conways law means that changing software to meet our needs now means hanging the whole organisation. And changing government is a whole order of challenge greater than in private sector.
But I see daily the problems of scrum sprints forcing poor architectural decisions that need strong coders to push back on - and while is suspect Matt would be one of those pushing back, really the system of digitisation of government should be more - sympathetic to the challenge.
I am amazed and impressed by the XDS approach (gov.uk is a leader in this) but I remain under convinced and unable to express this coherently - I will sleep on it
Is a team of rockstars alone sufficient? No. It still needs the kind of empathetic engineers who want genuine improvement and will work to permeate their efforts through the organisation. Rockstars by definition are outstanding technically, but their mindsets can vary widely. Rockstars of the precocious, arrogant, variety aren't suited for this, but others (like Matt Cutts imo) are.
I am not saying I know of a better way - but rock stars don't change organisations. Meaningful change is really hard and conways law is a two way sword. If you can't change the organisation good luck having the software change it for you.
Here is a longer thought :
Let's look at UK schools and the department for education. The essential jobs of the department are 1) school standards and inspection (ofsted) and 2) paying the schools and so forth.
Fundamentally we don't need a whole department to funnel money from treasury to headmasters.
There are many pieces of software that Matt Cutts could work on there, a whole career. But we could remove the need for that department and hence that OSS software by political action.
This is the point I think I am making. Software literacy is soooo vital to making sure that organisations make the right choices in their software, and software is now and will be soooo deep in all organisations (they effectively become programmable corporations) that we need software "rock stars" at the highest levels of government making the highest levels of architectural decisions
But when we talk about architectural decisions at government we basically are talking ministerial level policy making.
And that implies that companies are going to need to have their it architecture decided by their internal political structures - which will have to become more democratic
So - yeah still not making a good point. But when we want people to come in and transform digital in government, they will quickly ask political questions. And they need political answers. Even though the leverage and driving power lies in what software can offer.
This is the key issue. Having spent years working on 'IT in government', at both the cabinet policy advisory level and at the IT coalface level, I've formed the view that when it comes to IT policy, 99% of the policy outcome is determined by implementation detail. I think this makes government IT policy quite unique, and it's something policy people (like myself) can't wrap their heads around.
Perfect example: the Australian 'Standard Business Reporting' programme (http://www.sbr.gov.au/). It's hard to fault the policy position: open up APIs for reporting to government. But they fucked up the technical implementation so badly that they are now 5 years in, $1bn in the hole, and have around 1% voluntary take-up. The relevant senior decision makers were completely IT illiterate and went with the "can't go wrong with IBM" route. Consequently, any developer that values their sanity won't come near it with a 10 foot barge pole.
The policy decisions were not "open an API" but also "use JSON" and "use fog keys for signing" and "implement the VAT submissions first"
The fact those policy decisions were not made is the whole point we both seem to be making
I did a stint at Australia's version of the UK GDS (www.dto.gov.au) and it was a supremely frustrating experience. Inter-agency politics, poor management and, frankly, a severe lack of technical competency at all levels were apparent. I was fortunately working in a team of (highly) technical competent people, who were had experience dealing with the the government bureaucracy. By about day two we were all bringing in our laptops and wireless internet dongles because the systems we were provisioned were utterly useless (Windows 7, no local admin, filtered internet). Our server and development infrastructure was mostly on AWS and GitHub.
Every single person in my unit has since either left, or been virtually pushed out of the organisation. Our preference for building up service-based infrastructure, developing a federated and privacy-preserving digital identity framework (distinct from a technical system implementation, which my team prototyped using OpenID Connect), and direct public participation (via GitHub) were at odds with the preferences of senior management. They preferred shiny new dashboards, a single government service 'portal' and a fully centralised roles-based permissions/authentication system for all citizen & business to government transactions.
I wish the solution were as simple as throwing technical talent at the problem until solved. However, this is unfortunately not the case. I admire the idealism of talented engineers who are willing to get involved to make a difference. I just hope they realise that, although absolutely necessary, rationality and technical merit are not sufficient for solving this problem. If they don't realise this, they're going to have a very unpleasant and frustrating time working in government.
Probably the most important attribute they'll need is 'persistence', of the same kind needed to successfully fight a guerrilla war.
http://craigconnects.org/2009/11/why-craigslist-founder-join...
http://craigconnects.org/2013/04/veterans-disability-claims-...
Good luck, do what's right with the tax payer dollars.
I'm in the D.C. area, feel free to drop me a line (email in my profile).
Sure, the DoD has an outsized impact on people's lives and a highly controversial history including both major evil and major good.
It seems to me a positive thing that someone of good character and strong capabilities would go to make things better, vs allowing bad actors to accumulate and do what bad actors do.
It's easy to say that he's of "good character" trying to make things better, but in reality he is lending his credibility to bad actors and he has little power to make things better. Keith Alexander doesn't go to defcon in jeans and a t-shirt to take input, but to sell a different image of the military.
If it's anything that is human nature it's to despite evidence to the contrary justify how bad things are not your responsibility. NSA compromised google users data and here is one of the most famous googlers acting head recruiter for the military.
Soldiers deployed in the other side of the world where they have no business to be in the first place? Securing cheap oil resources and/or control of strategic interests?
I'll take down-votes for quoting Tom any time. We will, after all, all go together when we go...
If this was about helping the military of my country, I would also find it questionable.
I guess I need to start quoting all of my replies to prevent that.
Get off your high horse and make your political, off topic statements on reddit instead.
Then just say no when the DoD asks you to work for them.
>are you suggesting we should NOT make things better for our soldiers to stay safer?
I certainly am. The safer "our" soldiers are the more people they can murder.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding with how DoD contracting works. Regardless this is too broad of a paintbrush to use.
> I certainly am. The safer "our" soldiers are the more people they can murder.
This is literally the exact opposite of how things work in the military. Regardless if you think killing is so horrible it's a bit shocking you would rather soldiers to be more likely to die and contribute to even more death.
What a strange accusation for a person involved in the military to make. Are you saying that when the army makes an offensive operation with the goal of eliminating some enemies combatants, it's because they think killing is awesome?
Because it seems to me that the reason is much the same: we must kill these people to lower overall deaths, no?
I'm not sure how you could come to that assessment but I wouldn't come to that conclusion at all (even my previous comments echo the opposite). Regardless I wouldn't consider myself part of the military at all (especially since I've left the public contracting space 2 years ago and the army wasn't my last contract anyway).
I'm doing what now?
BTW: Western countries didn't give a fuck about Gaddafi's human rights violations (except from condemning them verbally) until he started to lose power. Then suddenly they decided they should invade Libya.
Of course Libya has a lot of oil reserves, so this is to be expected. Can't bite the hand that keeps your economy running...
Like it's not anyone's concern that say the US puts the largest number of its citizens in jail (25% of the worlds inmates for a country with 4% of the world's population) and of which the predominant number are black.
I mean it should concern people all over the world, and they should ask and lend support and diplomatic pressure to change that, but they should in no way interfere with internal politics, invade or attack the US for that. And that's something that hurts far more people (millions) compared to "some thousand".
Besides, what have you accomplished now? A hell hole of a country, an ex-country, with fractions fighting from several competitive sides, millions flying and hundreds of thousands dead. Yay for getting rid of the dictator, sure turned out well. And the place is a paradise now for the sex and slave trade.
Not to mention the hypocrisy of it all. Those decisions to support the rebels in official capacity wasn't because anybody really cared for the regime's victims. After all they always did and continue to do great business and have cordial relations with Saudi Arabia (how do local women fare there legally? Or search about what happens to thousands of immigrant women coming to work there as house servants etc.).
It pays to think about such events beyond what the mainstream media and the official government announcements say. Read some books, and not just celebrated books that maintain the official party line of one's government, try to find the other side's story too. And historical books, for such regions, to get perspective.
Just because someone higher up decides something, doesn't mean you don't have any moral responsibility.
If you think what the DoD does is morally questionable (and I think it is pretty clear cut that it is) then you are morally obliged to not help them with it. It's pretty easy in the software industry to find work somewhere else.
No, but they still assist those politics (and often proudly) with their engineering.
I don't really think the "it's above my paycheck concern" attitude is really moral.
>The reality is that they were there / still there so while you work to campaign for changing the reality are you suggesting we should NOT make things better for our soldiers to stay safer?
Yes, I believe we should question such things.
Unfortunately, if we give some examples about other people in other eras using similar excuses ("it was a reality, so we were just doing our job to make our military safer/more effective"), someone is going to invoke Godwin's law.
Also the trial against Hussein is widely regarded as a show trial.
For example I worked on software that helped soldiers look at patterns of IED placements to hopefully help them figure out where others were. I wouldn't consider what I worked on even indirectly supporting any type of killing but helping out people stay safer.
But no matter Russia/US it all for a good cause - congratulations
I get it. You hate war. Most people hate war, even the soldiers in our army hate it. You want change? Vote and get outside and protest. Don't shit on a DoD contractor while sitting there doing nothing.
Real change requires real effort.
I understand the need for people to have jobs. I'm not unhappy about individual soldiers, individual cops, individual TSA workers deciding that's how they want to get employment. (I'm sort of unhappy at society-as-a-whole for making the military such a good career decision for many people, but the fact remains that it is a good career decision, and I won't begrudge that.) I'm not unhappy about you, because I have no idea what your job is or what your life is like. But this article is about a person who had an extremely good job at Google deciding that he wasn't doing enough for the world and that he could make the world a better place by working for the DoD. He could have stayed at Google; he could have even worked for the USDS for any of the non-war functions of government, if he really wanted to. I think that's fair to criticize.
So the same logic would be okay with people where all reasonable career decisions require working for a company that pays taxes to the military, and both Matt Cutts and I seem to be in that situation. But I think we're both in the situation where we have plenty of reasonable options other than working for the military directly. And it specifically sounds like he took an option that is worse for him personally, because he thinks it's better for the world. I disagree it's better for the world, simple as that.
(Whether this logic would forbid working for companies that support the military indirectly is an interesting question, and I think 'BinaryIdiot has convinced me that it should.)
However, even in "peaceful" countries you'd have a hard time avoiding that, as most of them have some sort of mandatory pensions system, who in turn most likely fund arms production, which will then sometimes be sold to be used for war.
I don't know what you expect your comment to accomplish here but it's incredibly tone deaf.
That said, there are certainly peaceful tasks the military is responsible for, and we can make exception for those, like handling natural disasters, providing logistics for weather research, etc., but let's not kid ourselves, the military didn't grant the invention of the Internet for connecting the world population.
Regardless are you willing to do the same? Just as millions are employed through the various agencies of the DoD through contracting it'sthe same with the large technology companies. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and many others are actively DoD contractors. So they're making money in the exact same way and yet I never hear people telling them to stop or quit .
So are you going to continue using Google, Microsoft and Amazon knowing they actively work on DoD projects and profit off of them?
If you don't happen to live in a region where the military is the sole employer, and therefore you have the option to not work for them, and you're also concerned by the conflict of their actions vs proclaimed mission, then what justification is there to work for them directly?
What it boils down to, if I were at Red Hat, and I got presented a project to work directly with and for the military, I would kindly decline. But I would still work on Fedora and/or RHEL because those aren't exclusively for the military.
You can work for an arms producer on automatic assault rifles, but then you cannot reasonably expect me to believe you're under the impression that the products you build are purely for hunting and sports. Then there are arms which you can work on that are unlikely to be used by the military and primarily for hunting/sports, and assuming hunting is for controlling wildlife population, it's understandable why it's morally acceptable.
You offered your work experience as a specific example of how you could work for the DoD without being involved in killing people. I think there's no good way to discuss the validity of that example without being a bit callous, since it involves a) your personal work b) discussions about killing people c) politics, but I think the commenters here handled it appropriately. I certainly think it would have been worse for the discussion for it to go unchallenged.
The commenters are largely tone deaf in this arena. They never call out any large technology companies for doing the exact same thing. Google and others actively work on the same projects. They are all DoD contractors. HN seems to think anyone involved in the DoD complex is accountable to some degree for military action then completely ignore all of the west coast companies involved in the exact same thing.
(Also, war is messy. I know that the insurgents also kill civilians, and I'm certainly not supporting them any more than I support the US military. I'm advocating pacifism, and if you want to say "well, pacifism doesn't work because other people want to wage war", sure, that's a debate approximately as old as the idea of pacifism itself.)
I'm sure that's not what you meant, but this sounds like damning with faint praise :)
Precisely no part of my current job involves killing people. I think I'll stick with my job.
Cool.
I work with dozens of peaceful, bright people, on projects that are responsible for keeping people safe without violence or conflict or any nonsense like that. Many of the people whom I work with wouldn't swat a fly, so I don't really concern myself with the thoughts of people who have no clue what they're talking about, like commenters on HN who google "depart of defense not really about defense???" and then think they've stumped me. Honestly.
Exactly. Then why did you bring the name up? Nobody was even talking about the name before you posted; seems rather silly to complain about people discussing it now.
Oh the irony.
Reminds me of the clip of the Us Marine pointing a gun in the face of unarmed protesters screaming "GET BACK WE ARE HERE FOR YOUR MOTHERFUCKING FREEDOM"...... yeah right mate, you just keep telling yourself that.
Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927587 and marked it off-topic.
> Large institutions are complex, neither completely good nor completely evil. I don't think that's too much to ask users of an internet forum intended for intellectually substantive discourse to understand.
Except you did not intellectually substantiated anything, but your own/company's opinions.
Nor it makes sense for you or anybody else to arbitrarily mark the parent as a flamewar comment.
You are very free to have and express your own opinions, you should others have and express their own, though.
Reminds me of the study:
> People with more agreeable, conscientious personalities are more likely to make harmful choices. [1]
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-green-mind/201406/a...
Substitute "Diplomatic" for "Polite", and it makes sense.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11927709 and marked it off-topic.
I question the need for 'defense'.
(It's as absurd as it sounds, and yet that's essentially the US strategy for defending from terrorist attacks)
Random applications of overwhelming force too have situations in which they're appropriate. Fighting terrorism is not one of them.
I guess that's what a culture of militarization does to you: You start to confuse the police and the military.
There's also a question of intellectual maturity. Consider that Noam Chomsky has spoken many times about good things that were done with DoD funding, as well as about how no one can rightly condemn others for not being in a pristine moral position because no such position exists (pointing to his own career at MIT as an example). If the deepest and most trenchant critic of American militarism understands this, I think internet commenters who fancy themselves critics of American militarism can be expected to understand it too, at least in this corner of the internet. If you want to condemn others or blare with ideological megaphones, please do so elsewhere.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11928952 and marked it off-topic.
Google's partnership with our current administration has me increasingly uncomfortable. Before this year, it was generally limited to former Googlers in DC, or former government employees at Google, but this year, we have two major, very high level Google employees working directly for the Department of Defense.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
Anyone have an idea what this would be? I presume it's the CPU/GPU underneath, but I've never heard this before. Does this happen to anyone else?
Desktop motherboards are known for high-frequency sounds in response to varying load - the source are the low-voltage regulators for the different CPU domains.
As for the OP, well, consider me skeptical of the idea that "digital government" can have a significant effect on governance itself. The problems within government agencies lie in a mix of politics, policies, processes and people, with a healthy dose of iron-triangle confusion of interests where applicable. Better digital can improve an agency's operations, but can't address whether those operations are fundamentally misguided.
Which shows some hesitation, apparently, to work with the DoD. Except for all the Googlers working with the DoD.