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Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

I met some of the former Googlers working for the USDS. They seemed to be many pre-IPO SREs who decided that improving government was more important than being an LP at a VC fund. They were motivated by getting tens of millions of people healthcare, and along the way they encountered huge challenges - like figuring out how to reconcile VA and Pentagon records. Their passion was inspiring, and the work they do affects millions without much glamor.

If you think healthcare.gov was a mess, in the USA there are more branches of federal government, 50 state governments, and countless local governments whose technology is inadequate for serving its constituents.

Things like healthcare, visas, and electricity all rely on aging software projects. Yet, some of these systems don't have strong backups, are not automated, and may run on infrastructure like Windows XP. Some parts are ticking timebombs in terms of security and upkeep costs.

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TFA mentions ex-Googlers in the FCC, the FTC and the DOD, which are different branches of government from the USDS. TFA also says "there have been at least 15 moves between Google and its lobbying firms and those commissions." The "lobbying firms" probably had people doing less, um, technical things.

"Amey said he’s not as concerned about programmers moving over – and quite a few data engineers who worked on Obama’s re-election campaign have ended up in White House jobs – but top level executives changing jobs can raise “red flags.”"

"TFA mentions ex-Googlers in the FCC, the FTC and the DOD,"

FWIW: Some of the folks they are counting are interns, AFAICT.

Otherwise, i have trouble seeing what the hullaboo is about.

For example, Matthew Bye (Disclaimer: i've worked closely with Matthew for years) is someone they claim went from the FTC to Google.

He got a job at the FTC out of law school for a few years. Then he went to Wilson Sonshini for 3 years. Then he went to Google, where's he's been 7 years (started regular counsel, now a director).

Not sure what is supposed to be wrong with this.

Moving between private law firms and corp counsel is common, people trade off "partner track millions with crazy hours" for "sane hours and reasonable pay". Moving between government and private law firms is common too (note: there are specific legal ethics rules that cover this in both directions. I make no claim they are perfect, but they do exist!). People often start out idealistic, or in government, because they have a ton of jobs. Especially in a tough legal market, it's a good place to be. They get tired of the politics or whatever, and go elsewhere. Some to private firms, some to corp counsel.

If you want a more mundane example: Eric Hysen is listed in the data. I hired him (first as an intern, then as a regular employee) and he worked for me until I left the DC office. He left mainly because he specifically wanted to help government get better, and USDS was a very hard thing to turn down in that regard.

Again, don't see what is wrong with that.

Staring at the actual US data, i'm also not sure who the "lobbying firms" are supposed to be.

Because the data doesn't list any[1] So either they are incorrectly marking those folks as "Google" (they aren't. The lobbying firms are not exclusive to Google in any way, shape or form. It also doesn't even claim the folks who went from the lobbying firm ever handled google as a client), or it's not in the data they give.

The data also doesn't say when they left google vs when they joined government. If you click the linked in links, there are often multi-year gaps here where they worked for others.

[1] Edit: Oooh, finally found one person they list from a "Google lobbying firm" : http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/227736-obama-hi...

Not sure what that has to do with Google in any way (here's the linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marty-paone-90853718)

> Otherwise, i have trouble seeing what the hullaboo is about.

In every regulated industry there tends to be a small cadre of people who rotate through the most elite jobs in both the private and public sector. So if you're aware of that, it's no surprise that Google and the rest of the tech industry work the same way.

I think the cause of the hullabaloo may be that a lot of people didn't realize this has been going on since time immemorial. Perhaps they assumed that the people governing them were more like them, and were not, for example, financial or tech CEOs looking for a change of pace. In an age of great information transparency they are now starting to figure this out. It is part of a growing awareness that surprisingly small cadres of elites run basically everything and reap large rewards at a time when class mobility is at a low, wealth inequality is peaking, the political system is dysfunctional, the economy is sluggish, etc.

And so you get the Brexits and the Trumps, and a new level of scrutiny into just what exactly those wealthy techies are up to. Different people will render different judgments on the phenomenon but in my view it is absolutely all part of a trend where the silent majority starting to make some noise.

From my understanding, Wilson Sonshini counts Google as a client, and works heavily in antitrust matters. Can you not see the issue with someone in the FTC then being handed a position at Google's antitrust lawyer, and then Google itself? Would a FTC member doing their job, being critical of companies like Google, be offered a job with Google's defense?

Similarly, after paid Google shill (literally by his own admission) Joshua Wright finished his stint as the FTC Commissioner (amazingly, an investigation against Google disappeared during his term), he then recently got a job with Wilson Sonshini as well.

Again, you see these people as "the places they work for". He wasn't "handed a position". He applied for a job, got interviewed, and took it. What favor do you think happened here, or anywhere? What evidence do you have of this?

No, i can't see a general problem with antitrust lawyers, or really, any lawyer deciding where to work.

Private law firms hire people with government experience precisely because they know how it works. Not because they want favors, but because they have experience. The same is true of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, whoever. This is no different than hiring from "industry". The industry of antitrust lawyers includes government lawyers. You try to hire the best, regardless of who they work for.

If your goal is to prevent favors from being done, prevent favors from being done[1]. I don't see why that has any general relation to job mobility.

People either have integrity or not. Either they make decisions and voice opinions without regard to future career mobility or not.

If they generally don't, you are pretty much screwed no matter what you do here - you need to fix people, you aren't really going to fix the process[1].

If they generally do, than you should just worry about the outliers..

[1] Imagine for a second, you go so far as to have a neutral committee review every person who changes jobs, including all correspondence, video tapes of interviews, whatever. Do you believe this would fix it? No, of course not, it'll just drive any bad behavior further into the dark. It would literally not stop any problem.

If you ban job mobility, would that stop any problems? Given the number of senators/congressman/etc indicted for having their houses renovated for free, etc, i'm going to go with "no".

If your problem is integrity, people without integrity are going to be much more creative about the favors they get, how they are done, etc.

Changing job mobility will not change this. As evidence: It literally hasn't, in the past 200 years.

The only thing it does is hurt the honest people.

We're talking about people who directly move in and out of Google or Google contractors, and places which have a immediate and direct conflict of interest with Google. Which inexplicably, almost without other justification, seems to avoid any sort of legal action against it. And this isn't a one-off case of one employee moving around. It's a significant, recurring process.

And in the case of Joshua Wright, long before he revolved his way into an FTC position, he was already receiving money under the table to fabricate "academic studies" supporting Google's antitrust position, which they then used as expert references to their claims. We already have a corrupt individual who's engaged in unethical practices on Google's behalf, which then also moved into a government position where he had an extreme ability to protect Google from government action.

We've long understood that transparency in government in terms of where money changes hands, where people are employed, and similar factors are key in preventing corruption. People may not be the places they work for, but they are representatives of their employers. If this wasn't understood, political donations wouldn't require the disclosure of a donor's employer.

You seem to be suggesting we should dismiss our entire understanding of how corruption occurs, because the evidence points very clearly that corruption is happening between our government and Google. Honest people, unfortunately, are not involved here.

Note for other readers: DannyBee is a Googler and claims in his profile to be a lawyer, so presumably has worked with the Google, FTC, and WSG&R people discussed here.

These sorts of career moves are extremely common. I work in the IT department of an AmLaw 200 firm and our attorneys regularly leave to work for clients and vice versa.

> "Amey said he’s not as concerned about programmers moving over

But the article is. The very first thing in the article is Mikey Dickerson's face. To call him a "top level executive" at Google is not even close to true, even if he has a high rank in his new role.

I don't feel this gets enough focus. When you're working at a place of high prestige and global impact, you're going to want to keep that up where you skills can continue to benefit many (whether your original employer is one or ther other).

So I'm a software engineer in SF who would love to work on projects like you mentioned. Where do I look and what do I look for?

I'm not associated with USDS, but email me (see profile) and I'll get you an intro.

USDS is hiring! https://www.usds.gov/join

If you want to work remote from SF, check out 18F: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/

It looks like 18F isn't hiring currently: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/open-positions/

We're briefly pausing accepting new applications while we evolve how 18F plans for open roles.

You might also want to try becoming a Code For America fellow for a year working in cities:

https://www.codeforamerica.org/do-something/work-with-us/fel...

Looks interesting. Unfortunately they are not currently accepting applications.

Binti makes software that is transforming child welfare services administration. We work together in SF and are growing rapidly. Info in profile.

What's your stack like?

Binti's main SaaS web product is a conventional monolithic Rails/Postgres app that delivers value in heaps and heaps, and remains super fun to hack on. We're building the monolith up higher and higher, and looking forward to soon chipping off a service or two (perhaps in Elixir?). Specific engineering roles we have open are for someone that is highly-opinionated on the front-end stack/practices, a security specialist, and a UX/a11y specialist. We're using Kubernetes for cluster management.

Also hiring in sales and customer success.

Interesting. Thanks for the info. Is no recent rails experience an issue? I have django experience (years worth) but anything recent with rails (nothing after rails 2).

Not an issue at all, we could probably benefit from your perspective :)

That comment convinced me to follow up. :)

Also check out adhocteam.us. I don't work there, but they're doing important work for HHS and VA.

Thanks for linking to them. I found their code challenges and they are interesting (I do them as a hobby).

Also check out Nava-- we're a part of the original team and continuing to improve Healthcare.gov and work on other projects, and we're actively hiring for software engineers in SF and DC. See profile for details!

This seems really interesting! Is there a way to learn more before applying? :)

Email: jobs@navahq.com

Background: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-se...

Jobs: http://navahq.com/careers

Thanks for the info.

Thanks for this. In my experience at USDS over the last year, it's absolutely true.

The problem with gov is that everything is slow has hell / old tech on top of corporate contracts with the like of Oracle / SAP. I don't expect to improve things there because of all thoses problems + layers of bureaucracy.

I think that it's a problem of "outsource" vs "in-house." Government is like a microservice architecture where each service being built by a different corporation with a non-technical PM leading integrations. Then, it gets maintained by basically nobody and is expected to work in perpetuity.

From what I have observed, having an in-house technical team at the government - even small - aids all of these projects.

In fact, that's basically what this team is - SREs - professionals at running and maintaining code. A small integrations / uptime team that understands the implications of design decisions aids everything.

That's one problem, and it's a total drag. Another one I encountered was the sheer weight of the crushing mediocrity. Everybody just punching in, staring at their computers, going through the motions, and punching out to commute home. Nobody cared enough to try to make anything better, it's just keep your head down, collect your pension in 40 years, don't cause too much of a kerfuffle.

I would imagine that silo'ing all these projects in outsourced contracts and agencies really exacerbates this whole mess. It would be far better to centralize the IT infrastructure of the federal government, perhaps even into its own agency. For compliance, cross-integration, security, and just efficiency, doing it in house would make far more sense.

I've seen the distributed approach done at a university and it was a total bureaucratic don't step on my toes mess - when they centralized, things got organized very quickly.

I've seen it do the opposite at a college. I would say always allow room for external auditing. Every few set of years. To disallow for coderot and even "developermold" which essentially produces coderot. I believed the same.

I think we need maybe either a tech branch or sub-branches per branch of government. Contracting is great and all but we need consistent development not one time fixes. I'm sick of hearing about how our government got hacked here or there every now and then.

I feel okay hearing about improving backups, may be some automation, etc, but "age" should not only imply these things. Age seems can often also imply "understood."

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