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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

This should not happen, yet time after time we see that critical American infrastructure and systems are run worse than a pre-revenue bay area chat startup. American infrastructure needs to invest and hire/pay for the same quality that bay area startups do. Let four people go that are inept and less qualified and pay a single solid person market salary.

Besides the fear and chaos potentially caused to people in Hawaii there are financial implications if the stock market were open.

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American infrastructure needs to invest and hire/pay for the same quality that bay area startups do.

Looking through the Github and Slack system status pages for this month so far ... I don't know that's exactly the model to follow.

20 minutes after everyone has already figured out that they've been hit by a missile, you'd get an alert: "We are currently investigating reports of increased explosion rates."

>"We are currently investigating reports of increased explosion rates."

Status lights will still all be green

All status lights were hosted on S3 and the AWS datacenters were hit first.

The government needs to employ lots of people. This necessarily means they will employ some low-quality people. It's such a difficult problem to produce high-quality work with low-quality employees that most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible at the cost of turning down many potentially good ones. It'd be nice to see some effort to make working with high quality-variance employees successful, but I think the reason we haven't seen much of a convincing, scalable answer yet is simply because it's a really hard problem.

>most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible

And look at the results! Those companies never have outages or push out defective code into production or allow security vulnerabilities through speculative execution say.

I'm being a bit sarcastic but glass houses, etc.

Throw more money at it, the bay area solution. Right. It's just the lazy inept workers you say! Pay someone twice as much and surely they will be more competent!

In my mind the focus should be on the process for sending such an alert and how it could of gotten through by accident.

I'd say take a look at Reed Hastings model at Netflix. Capitalism works. Netflix treat's their company like a professional sports team. Pay for the best available talent you can. Fire fast if you don't perform.

Government projects work with contractors, either directly or through contracting agency. They pay well and have good projects. I'd venture to say that government have equal or better people than what you find in startups.

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