Tech-starved government seeks industry’s best, brightest | Hacker News Reader

Tech-starved government seeks industry’s best, brightest

detroitnews.com

12 pointsrmason22 comments

As a remote worker who may not exactly be the best and brightest but for whom the pay for the digital service is close enough to right to be appealing and who'd probably be a real asset to them, aside from getting hired apparently being a months-long process I stopped even looking when it became clear most of the positions are short "term of service" things. If I'm going gov it's for the retirement and bennies. The long haul. A "term of service" that takes a bunch of unusual effort to get and pays just OK holds zero appeal.

Where did you look for jobs?

The USA Jobs site for them, IIRC.

Someone posted it in an HN Who's Hiring once so I checked it out, got pretty excited, got a little bummed about the application process and how long it takes but the directions were very clear and I've got a guy who's basically a government bureaucracy expert to read over my stuff for me so I was resigned to dealing with that crap.. but then I realized that it's all (current postings, upcoming postings, the ones the poster had claimed were revolving evergreen posts even if they weren't marked as open) defined-term rather than regular, actual employee, and then got very unexcited.

Not worth the effort if there's a hard expiration date on it, or even the specter of such, when the retirement, healthcare, and stability parts are much of the appeal. Plus what if I finally get to work on something I'm actually kinda proud of, then have to leave? No. Not putting in unusual effort for that.

That sounds like a USDS† position. My understanding is that they do things that way due to unstable budgets, because their pay is out of whack compared to the rest of the government (because pay at an equivalent position outside of the government is much higher).

† https://www.usds.gov/faq

USDS and 18F make their rounds on HN periodically. The mandatory relocation without relocation stipend, required drug testing, and security clearance all make recruitment difficult.

Edit: Oh yeah, the short terms hurt as well.

Not really learning from the private sector are they?

Local governments aren't that much better, sadly.

https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=...

Senior ops gig, exempt from civil service rules which means essentially a three-year at-will gig. Below average pay, below average benefits.

I spent a little over 3 years in USDS and it changed my life. If you are interested in working on high impact projects that affects hundreds of millions of Americans, I would strongly recommend that you give it a try.

And the Democratic party's Iowa Caucus fiasco proves (once again) that they should indeed ask the nerds to take care of their technology! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Iowa_Democratic_caucuses#...)

What? That was the exact opposite lesson from that debacle:

Instead of being wowed by shiny new technical solutions promising superiority being hawked by "the nerds", stick with tried and true methods, especially when it comes to critical ventures like an election. "Move fast and break things" is the absolute last thing anyone organizing an election should want.

Except the contract to develop the software went to a political crony instead of a qualified nerd.

"Department with budget for 50 devs and 180 already on staff seeks suckers to work for wealthiest institution on earth."

I liked the part where they referred to them as "technicians".

One thing I have observed about software and organizations is that big, intractable problems in code are often rooted in big, intractable problems in the organization that produced it. If you look at a codebase and find that choices in one half are half-incompatible with the choices in the other, the likely explanation is that the organization itself has factions, each of which insists on doing things its own way, and management can't or won't step in to resolve the deadlock.

In short, working for dysfunctional organizations means all your time as a programmer is spent catering to the dysfunction.

Now, is it possible for an organization to be functional when all its priorities have been set by congress? Or the president? This president? Or worse, whose priorities have been set by this president and the congress that is diametrically opposed to him?

Count me out.

> One thing I have observed about software and organizations is that big, intractable problems in code are often rooted in big, intractable problems in the organization that produced it.

You've paraphrased (intentionally or not) Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

I appreciated the allusion to Conway's Law here. I will say that in a government of 2M+ people, there's a ton of problems that are completely non-partisan that everyone would like to solve where technical expertise can make a real difference.

Stop drug testing and there would probably be a pretty big application boom.

Fun fact: the reason that USDS applicants (who would work within the Executive Office of the President) have to take a drug test goes to a Clinton-era legal battle that went to the Supreme Court: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-03-mn-24917...

I wonder if it would be possible to model work for the USDS in terms of side projects. I would not want to take a leave of absence from work to serve in the USDS, but I would definitely love to put 10-20 hours a week on the side for a really meaningful side project.

I don't know if that model would be tenable, but I think it would attract many people who already spend that kind of time on side projects.

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