Comment by dogman144 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogman144 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

DDS hires professional engineers at a special paygrade pegged to their civilian pay stubs for a 2 year tour of duty fixing pressing issues in DoD tech via pretty broad authority to sidestep

A) the usual senior military slow-roll* in the way of these fixes

B) the sh**y govt contractors who made the tech and usually get paid to fix their own bad tech.

DDS Hires a lot of motivated engineers who would be in civil service but for the $180k -> $90k paycuts and fear of bureaucratic hell. It is run by one of the ~founders of opentable who, post opentable riches, was flying on 9/11/01, decided to join the Chicago PD as a result, did west Chicago homicide until the PD discovered his past, he then stood up Chicago’s data-based policing technical approaches, and eventually the Obama admin heads about him asked him to take over DDS (iirc, +/- details there).

Cool stuff and I’d work for them in a second, probably need another few years in private sector though.

> DDS hires professional engineers at a special paygrade pegged to their civilian pay stubs

I wish USDS would do this as well; I feel like they'd attract a lot more talent. Although perhaps they want to attract exactly the kind of talent who would take a big pay cut out of a sense of service/duty.

> Cool stuff and I’d work for them in a second

For myself, while I recognize that military is a necessary evil in the world we live in, and I have a ton of respect for the people who put themselves in harm's way, working for an org with a .mil address would be against my values. I'm so torn, though, since (e.g.) the Internet itself came out of the DoD. It's a hard pill to swallow for me sometimes that a lot of essential civilian tech was originally developed by or for the military.

Theres a strong argument that people,with this outlook are needed in DOD.

It’s the whole those who seek power are least suited to it schtick.

I understand your reluctance and you of course make your own life choices but something to consider.

> attract exactly the kind of talent who would take a big pay cut out of a sense of service/duty.

90% (might be a bit generous) of the people so attracted will not be the kind.

I think it’s ok to have that self awareness about where your values line is, when it’s paired with understanding that you’re able to abstract away that public service to someone else who does it for you.

A ton of folks want to have a free lunch in that respect, especially in tech. God help them if Amazon wins the JEDI contract while they work there, but other nefarious work FAANGs get up to while employed at one is ok as long as it’s ~out of sight. Like the Dragonfly project at GOOG...

Similarly, there’s this issue of so much fundamental tech came out of huge DARPA grants, NIST work, and so on. It’s ok if you don’t want to be the one working with DARPA/DDS, but tech’s roots are so tied to them that it has to be ack’d.

The line of folks who “would be in the DoD but for X” is long, and it’s a comically reoccurring conversation for people who do DoD work. That conversation is much different if that awareness exists, though.

This is quite interesting — glad I asked!

The org has done really interesting things under a few different political climates. To the extent it’s safe/neutral to say we’re entering a more pro-govt can-do env, I think they’ll have a cool next 4 years as an org.

Some of the projects they talk about doing have huge value-adds to technically underserved groups like military families during mandatory base moves every few years. Those groups are totally dependent on following the system as designed (get your travel voucher here, your goods shipped here, etc) and much of it depends on single option, very janky govt, almost intranet-like, porfals. Iirc, one of their projects was fixing a portal was leaking SSNs like gangbusters. Normal times, that’s a 6 month -> 10 year process to work with the contractor. DDS did it fairly quickly.

I don't know Brett super well so I can't speak to the rest of his background, but it's not correct that the Obama admin asked him to take over DDS.

DDS's founding head was Chris Lynch, who served in that role until the middle of the Trump administration, when he left government service and that's when Brett got the job.

There ya go. +/- details.

I saw him present on DDS and his backstory at BSidesLV a few years ago and did a bit of non-profit govt<>tech chatter with the team there.

Correct, it was in the middle of the Trump Admin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com