My suggestion that governments shouldn't rely on third-parties for their infra, didn't go down well with HN:
Let's image we put a ban in place to prevent this revolving door. Why would someone working in the industry be willing to forfeit their post-government career, especially if they are a political appointee and might only have the role for a few years until the next election?
That is a huge disincentive to participate in governing and will likely lead to more career politicians and bureaucrats which isn't exactly an ideal situation.
Private and public sector employees could collaborate where it makes sense, just like companies sometimes collaborate on shared initiatives like working groups or open source projects.
Government can actually work better than it does in the US -- as it does in other countries -- but one must first accept the ideological premise, which seems to be what holds the country back.
That sounds great in theory, but the problem is that many of these leadership roles if not elected directly are nominated by the president and therefore they are political in nature and those politics can flow down through the organization.
For example the FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is resigning this week. Would he have resigned if Trump was reelected or would he have been re-upped for another term? Is Biden obligated to find this Republican a job somewhere else in his administration? Is Pai just supposed to retire at 48 years old? Can he go back to working for Verizon like he did for a period earlier in career? How many other people at the FCC have or soon will leave the agency due to the change in leadership?
That could be changed though. It's not how it works here in the UK. The ministers in charge of departments are political appointments, but we also have a substantial politically neutral civil service with lots of headroom for career advancement. (politically neutral to the point that you are not allowed to publically express your political opinions - posting them on social media could be a firing offence)
That's so fucking wrong, but I bet the government continually falls for this trap.
In jurisdictions I’m familiar with it would require (nearly impossible) reform of the bureaucracy to make it possible.
I lasted six months before I left. It was infuriating and depressing.
I think with enough money the nearly impossible bureaucracy reform could be possible.
Compare other hard problems and how they have been handled. Healthcare comes to mind immediately.
I made about 50% of what I do now at that vendor and was glad to leave. I truly think if people had an incentive to make things better in government and healthcare then things would get better. It was a terrible job but a good starting point. I wonder if health care vendors paid as much as google or Facebook how good things could be.
In fact there are a few people that do try to make things better, but they value their progress over money. Same with teachers. We know they make a fraction of what a tech worker does but the value they provide is immense.
I don’t know if you’ve lived on the west coast and worked in tech but if you have surely you know someone who makes an absurd amount of money at Facebook, or google or whatever and also hates what they do. Imagine if you could pay people faybu bux but to make government work. They would do it. There would be an impassioned soul who is want to make government better and would do so. Instead the government pays half rate and gets half rate old dudes who want to retire in place.
It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.
One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.
If the departments weren’t structuring themselves to survive indefinitely out of fear, then we could engineer in government.
No. I don’t live in the US and don’t work in tech. I work in healthcare and have done so in the private sector and public sector. I don’t think you have pay a an amazing amount to get good people. Decent conditions go a very long way. My public sector pay isn’t worse than my private pay, and depending on how you measure it, the public pay may be better.
Would I be right in thinking that your healthcare experience was all private sector?
Fact is computer and software, services lobby groups want the business. In the US, said business can be bought, and is.
Yes. Governments hosting their own servers is still the norm if anything, the same is true in plenty of large companies. It's not exactly black magic, especially with modern technology. Outside the HN bubble the cloud hasn't really taken over.
> I don't think this could be feasible in most countries, maybe only in China and US.
Smaller countries are easier, there is far less scale to worry about and computers are powerful enough that most government services could just about be run on a single server (in practice you probably wouldn't).
In particular, why isn't this concern addressed by the government negotiating a more favorable contract than the standard terms of service?
(Alternatively, why can the government not address the problem with legal means? In the US, the Defense Production Act can compel private companies to accept and perform government contracts.)
Bad analogy, because we're not talking about the building of bridges (software), we're talking about where they are built.
In your example, the government surely wouldn't pay to have a bridge built on private property where access could be rescinded immediately if the land owner was so inclined.
Where do you live?