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Comment by ProAm | Hacker News Reader

I would not trust our government to implement this safely, efficiently or well.

You don't have to trust them. Its open source

  https://github.com/18F/identity-idp

There's still a _lot_ of trust involved here...

Possibly silly question but how can you be sure the code on github is the same code running on the site. Not trolling, just curious.

This is a US Digital Service project for 18F. Probably the best engineers in the world working on it.

Arguable, and they are still working within/for the government. I have little to no faith.

Old reputations are hard to shake. This speech[1], by the first administrator of USDS, is my favorite to quote on the topic:

> Some of you, not all of you, are working right now on another app for people to share pictures of food or a social network for dogs. I am here to tell you that your country has a better use for your talents. [...]

> The Social Security Administration mails checks from a mainframe running COBOL, which might kind of be OK except that more than half of the workforce that maintains it is at or near retirement age. What happens then? The Department of Veterans Affairs has a serious backlog of disability claims. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service processes permanent resident applications and everything else on paper. If you lose your green card, it will take you 6–8 months to get a new one and in the meantime you will not be able to prove you have the right to be in the country or get a job.

> All of these are design and information processing problems and all of these are matters of life or death to millions of citizens and all of them are things you can fix if you choose to.

Think about the response to the hurricane this weekend - that's a government function, and we need talented people serving to make sure that people who lose their homes retain access to shelter.

[1]: https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/mikey-dickerson-t...

Fine.

The only person I know who works for USDS is one of the most talented engineers I've ever met. He's a foreign national but was recently naturalized.

He made boatloads of money off of stock options and loves the idea of solving these kinds of problems.

He owns a house in a western state but maintains an apartment in DC and jokes that he "loses money" by working for the government.

I'm sure not everybody's like him, but come on, give USDS a chance.

Hmm...you have to move to Washington DC to work for them, they won't pay for relocation, salaries are capped by federal pay grades and are lower than a tech company in SF or Seattle would pay, no bonuses (or stock options, obviously).

I'm sure they have some bright (and altruistic) employees, but I'm not sure the best engineers in the world would work there when they can earn far more compensation at a tech company.

Many people want to make software for the public good via the public sector. For some, the opportunity to do that outweighs the benefits of earning top-of-the-line paychecks.

It seems deeply cynical to correlate geographic areas with salaries and infer that the best engineers in the world will be drawn there, bar none. There are other incentives. Some might even say that engineering of this sort is better executed, or more trustworthy, when performed by people with civic motivations rather than mercenary ones.

You need to move to DC to work for USDS (https://www.usds.gov/join#relocation), but you can work for 18F from anywhere in the US (https://18f.gsa.gov/join/). The login.gov team includes both USDS and 18F team members (as the blog post says).

Also the salary cap is $161,900, as shown in this pay grade table for SF: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Not a top-of-the-line private sector salary, but not some kind of hardship.

160k is a run of the mill senior engineer salary.... The best engineers in the world can earn 300k or more in Silicon Valley. It takes an altruistic engineer to give up half his salary to work for the public.

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