The rise and fall of 18F

This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve worked in (not fed) .gov for many years. Most government jobs are structured as career jobs, not gigs or places for mid/high level individual contributors to land.

When you want more senior talent with specific skill sets, you need contractors or short term appointed people who work for the government, but don’t have all of the rights or need to climb the ladder that career employees do.

Anything the gummint does pretty much needs to scale immediately to 400 million users, can never experience a data breach, and needs to stay available constantly, possibly for decades, or maybe even forever.

The loss of the 1890 census records by fire is still significant today. If every copy of the quarterly reports for GE from 1982 were lost, the impact would be much smaller. The current cloud service offered commercially today are plenty good enough for even some of the hugest public companies, but not quite good enough for an entity with vastly different goals and needs. The different flavor of requirements might mean that private sector business will never offer a suitable class of service. Currently, some agencies run their own data centers, so the necessary expertise certainly exists, but that is not currently contributing in any way to a common infrastructure.

This isn't a fedgov pathology. It's a business process reality. Unit tests, version control and package management are nice to have, but 3 decades of reliably executed business process are more important.

* Job security only for your 2 year term (unless you renew by another 2 for a max of 4 years). After that, you need to leave government service

* Health care coverage was similar to major tech companies in the Bay Area. However, vision / dental benefits were worse.

* Pension benefits only start after 3 years of government service, so most working for 18F will likely not receive these.

But I agree that for other government positions these are good perks.

[+] I'm aware that USDS and 18F are independent branches.

Pay was about similar to Twitter (not counting sizable stock based compensation and bonuses, so of course a big pay cut all in all). Pay was significantly better than startups. When I worked at Google I was leveled quite low, so the comparison wouldn't be fair.

Zero perks (no free coffee, etc). Retirements benefits only kick in after 3 years of government service.

I definitely didn't join 18F for money. I was in for the mission and potential impact. I also liked the idea of being able to move around the country if necessary while keeping the same job.

Now you could look at improvements we might make to the VA at this time and oppose them, saying that any improvements we make to the government during a Trump administration legitimizes his administration and priorities.

As for me, I've had enough of that. It's the "party of 'no'" all over again. If you think the 18F is doing something specifically nefarious, name it. Otherwise, if something is a benefit to the American people, I support 18F, the Digital Service, or whoever taking it on--and I suspect that most of their work falls into this relatively uncontroversial category.

Actually, Republicans voted for the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts at a higher propensity than Democrats did. Neither would have gone anywhere without substantial Republican support, including for cloture.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Now, the Republican policies take less than has previously been taken from the rich, and take more than has previously been taken from the middle-class and poor, but not just yet, so it actually increases the deficit by a trillion dollars in order to make it more palatable.

So, yes, the Republican policy as exemplified in what they actually pass is to transfer money to the rich and borrow money to do so.

Republicans do transfer money to the rich. And they do it hand-in-hand with the Democrats. They will even do it right in front of your face, as they are claiming to be transferring money to the poor.

Where, pray tell, do you think all that annual budget actually goes? Most of it isn't ending up in the pockets of the people actually doing the work that the money is ostensibly buying. Military spending is not going into soldier's paychecks. Medicare and Medicaid spending is not going to physicians and nurses. There is an entire ecosystem of middlemen that do little more than subtract the politics and volatility out of the government money and turn it into a reliable cash flow. For this, they keep a fraction. It is every bit as legit as the finance wizards on Wall Street that can turn market chaos into investment-grade securities by mathematically separating risks from returns, and the people doing it with gummint dosh can get just as rich.

It is entirely due to the semi-privatization of government services. Rich people grow richer by operating a privately-owned business that serves only one customer, who frequently asks them to name their own price, and then doesn't bother to haggle or shop around.

For every young genius that strikes the jackpot with a unicorn startup, there are hundreds of banal and unremarkable suit-fillers reaping mere millions just from knowing a guy that knows a guy with an inside line on appropriations, and from having enough money to credibly submit a contract proposal.