White House Launches US Digital Corps
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I would really like for things to be better than they are, and I'm still fairly convinced that software has the potential to make good things happen and improve people's lives.
Maybe this is where more people would start to disagree with me, but I would like to live in a place where government work was seen as a noble calling, or at least better, morally, than optimizing ad revenue. I would like to work with people who want to make things that solve problems for huge swaths of people who really need help.
But I read about the realities of U.S. government work, and frankly, it doesn't sound like a place I want to work. Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, slow. That's just not attractive to me.
If these impressions are wrong, I hope that the USDC has a sizeable marketing budget to correct me. If they're right, then I hope they have a plan to change things.
I don't think a lot of our really big problems are solvable without the input of a massive number of technologists, and I am worried that we're not going to have them where they need to be.
I hope this works.
Edit:
I do agree that "fast work" is probably a bad heuristic in many ways, particularly when it comes to work that requires extremely consistent outcomes, like much government work.
But shit, it's fun, particularly in software, to make quick decisions and move efficiently to solve problems. And I think you have to contend with the engagement and "fun" that moving fast brings.
Compensation is one form of motivation, yes, but there are others. There are reasons people romanticize working at startups, take up new programming languages and frameworks in side projects on their own time: it's cool, and feels good to work on. That's one lever you have to try and push as an employer of engineers (or really of people in general, but particularly people who are very in demand).
I'm not advocating for "Move Fast And Break Things," but I am saying that you have to compete with the people who do advocate for it, because that can be really fun.
My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc.
My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management.
I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.
America did seem to have a golden age. Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the new bay bridge. Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years.
Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech. Then they got to see people flying in jets. Then nuclear energy. Then they got to see people walking on the moon. All in a single life.
The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed. And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged. It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government. This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.
Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.
> The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.
The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.
I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.
My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.
Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).
The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.
The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.
We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds.
Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s.
We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes.
Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio.
We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet.
With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more.
There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together.
The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...
Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.
To drive that point home, the metal in a new car did not exist a decade ago. To someone not intimately involved with materials, that was mind-blowing
Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner.
During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution.
The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then.
This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature.
In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.”
I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.
Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries.
Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!
Pakistan is #2 and the "second most polluted" -- so extending that, USA is 84th on that list and hence the "84th most polluted", with country #106 being Puerto Rico, which is the "106th most polluted", and therefore the least polluted as per that list. So if you must reframe it as "least polluted", then USA is the 23rd least polluted on that list.
First, there are ~200 countries, not 106. Second, Puerto Rico IS the USA. Third, "84th most polluted" out of a list of 106, is just a weird way to talk. It's like saying the valedictorian of a class of 100 is the 100th most underachieving student.
The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point.
Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.
Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.
The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.
> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.
11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers?
[0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction...
I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing.
And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.
There are a lot more things considered now.
And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.
And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and…
Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?
If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
It ain't Facebook programmers on six-figure salaries who are feeding the rest of the population.
> If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
We consider this normal, because it has been happening for quite a while and painted in a negative fashion lately (Trumpism/Nationalism) but the reality, if you had an island somewhere, and you where establishing a country, you can't ask all these people to do that without some power-transfer that you hold over these countries/populations.
This is also true in the military, where a tiny fraction are trigger pullers. It is worth picturing what an army with no logistics personnel would look like.
What makes you think the square root of the company neatly aligns with high-IQ people? There are plenty of smart people who use their intelligence to find ways to avoid work, or to get others to do work for them, or to just amass power/influence in an organization by increasing head counts and making busy work, etc etc. Why assume that “smart” equals “having the company’s best interests in mind”?
Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.
Are we saying that there have never been excellent, efficient, large organizations in the past? I feel like history tells us that, at the very least, large groups of people working in tandem have accomplished pretty amazing things.
That is, I would say, not the impression I currently have of the U.S. government; but I do think it's a little overly pessimistic to say that it couldn't get there, or get measurably better, with even a generation or two of sustained effort from really smart people. Right? I guess I don't really know.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, right? Large groups of people working in tandem are accomplishing pretty amazing things, but they're not doing them in an excellent an efficient manner.
But I have an inclination to say that for an organization to to accomplish amazing things with consistency over the kind of timespan of a government or nation, the organism has to be self-sustaining.
Part of that is the capability to attract or create talented new members of your organization, and one way of getting that done is by having a reputation for, among other things, being an excellent and efficient workplace.
I've read and heard stories of places and groups like Fairchild Semiconductor, Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project; places where smart people have gotten together to do incredible things very quickly.
The one unifying theme is that they all lasted, at their peak, essentially one or two generations at most; they couldn't grow or sustain themselves.
NASA achieves amazing things, but it is not efficient as SpaceX has shown, But it has plenty of money, making it not necessary.
Plenty of retailers lack any semblance of excellence. But because workers are so cheap and they are efficient about their use, it does not matter.
And there are efficient and agile governments in other countries.
2. The government is huge, there's small, medium, and large agencies and agencies all of have their own culture. Hard to generalize across the whole thing
3. On many teams your direct management will shield you from a lot of the paperwork.
4. The average 2210 series technologist is a GS-13 which is $100k+. Not super star status but competitive in many regions and experience levels.
5. The vast majority of software development in the US government is contracted in
(The other unfortunate problem is that outsourcing firms are not typically where strong engineers want to work: they want to own their own and build their own products. So outsourcing companies aren't a good solution either.) My personal theory? Offer FAANG companies an incentive to put together strike teams to solve government technology problems. (Isn't that how HealthCare.gov got fixed? A bunch of Google people got involved?)
There are certainly technologists and scientists of equivalent or greater skill level who are happy to serve the public with such compensation, but if the government really wants to get things moving then they need to assess their compensation versus the prevailing wage for high-talent jobs in competitive areas of the country, and pay that wage. That means your top performing engineers make more than the US President (whom I believe is the most highly compensated government employee -- not considering all the perks he gets). Doesn't seem likely to happen.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect technologists to accept compensation that's 10-20-30% of what they're able to make at private companies to work for the government. Maybe our government would be more effective if it paid market rates for important scientific and technology jobs.
As to your proposal of giving government contracts to big Silicon Valley players, they already do that. Amazon already runs all the government cloud infrastucture, with Microsoft trying to get a piece. Google may have dropped the Project Maven thing, but they have plenty of other government contracts.
Congress is never going to make pay rates for engineers directly employed by the government comparable to private companies because they have to answer to voters, and voters kick, scream, and shout if they find government employees are earning high salaries. We're in the middle of a 40-year drive to cut taxes and privatize all government functions. You're not just going to turn that around.
On the other hand, give out big money to private contractors who pay their engineers well and Congress can go brag about they brought money and jobs to their home state.
Yes. And that is basically the USDS and 18F origin story:
https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/17/technology/us-digital-servi...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...
This is probably the thing you said that makes me feel most optimistic, and you sound like you actually have a decent idea what you're talking about, so that's a little bit of relief to me. I feel like it's easy to be overly pessimistic about this stuff.
$100k is a competitive salary for a junior software dev in DC. Heck, for someone right out of school, it’s probably competitive anywhere but the Bay Area, NY, maybe Seattle.
You only live once
Make your bed and sleep in it, but at least do it objectively
Regional cost of living discussions are cute - in that they masquerade as an insightful understanding of money - but most monetary thresholds do not take it into account. Accredited investor status or convincing anyone of it to get access to private equity for a better chance at making some real money? Cost of living is not a factor, its >200k income annually or >$1mm assets without including your home. Lying conveys no negative consequence but you still need the disposable money.
Being responsibly ahead of rent/mortgage payments every paycheck means an extra $1500 - maybe - in a middle market place versus an extra $4500-$7000. These are worlds apart in capabilities. Impulse buy a new console? Flight to Europe? Everything is more accessible and faster. The former amount will get eaten up by some random repair or holiday activity or friend’s life event. The latter will get you all that and everything you want and accumulation at a much higher velocity.
Saving up for various things is for the birds, we have all the same fixed amount of time with lots of randomness to shorten it. Not worth rationalizing lower comp, when the same or less work gets you 3-10x more.
$100k/yr is still enough to provide for a family of four in a huge number of places in the U.S. if you're in a more suburban or rural environment, which is still 9 digits' worth of human beings easily
For anyone who has been in the industry 5-10 years at successful corporations the max total compensation of under $150K would be taking a massive pay cut.
For some people on the team their government salary was a good step up, others didn't necessarily need the money and were there for the mission only. I was there for the mission, but certainly also needed the money.
Some degree of slowness is (in some ways) a feature because of the harm, abuse, and eventual investigations that can happen at maximum speed. Some of it is 100% not a feature.
I think it's less opaque and bureaucratic from the inside than might be expected - some of the work is ensuring that one person is accountable, and then ensuring that person can make meaningful decisions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-vi...
In 1955 when that trust was super high, everyone could have trusted the government to stay out of their lives and to only interfere if we had to go to war. That’s very different from people wanting the federal government to take over healthcare, energy, housing, etc.
Of course health care was much cheaper when the doctor basically had no health care to give.
A medicine man 2000 years ago was even cheaper, practically free.
What is interesting to me (as a non-American who has never set foot in the US) is that big Government seems to have had a resurgence in Reagan's 1980s, thanks mostly to its military-related expenditure but not only. I think the final "Government is bad"/"we don't need it" coup de grâce was carried out in the Clinton years, the (in-)famous Third Way [1] which was mostly one way, to be honest, i.e. neoliberal policies carried with full speed.
It does seem that the Government and how it is viewed has started to be seen in a more positive light again, thanks mostly to the millennial generation (I hate the "generation" concept but that's the best I can come with), especially after the 2008-2010 financial crisis and the accompanying social changes (increase of economic inequality, mostly), which I find highly interesting. It was also interesting how the US was very keynes-ian in its response to the pandemic, I mean putting cash directly into people's pockets is I think more than Keynes would have hoped for.
What is a country with "less" government (by any standard you choose) and better quality of life?
> a noble calling, or at least better, morally, than optimizing ad revenue. I would like to work with people who want to make things that solve problems for huge swaths of people who really need help.
That's what we do in developing Open Source software. No government is required.
Also, there are plenty, plenty of thriving companies that do not sell ads.
However, there are a number of essential services which we want a government to deliver which we do not want to be "efficient" under this definition.
"efficiency" by definition means no reserves (because a reserve is unused capacity, which is inefficient). But this also means brittleness and failure under unexpected load. Is this how you want your healthcare delivered?
"efficiency" can also mean not providing services to unprofitable market segments. I'll leave it to you to imagine how this goes horribly wrong for many government services.
"efficiency" can also mean no long-term investments (i.e. highway systems, the internet, ...), and certainly means you can only invest in projects where you can capture a substantial percentage of the gain. And on those line, "efficiency" often means ignoring maintenance needs.
Simply put, business is great for what business is great for. But for lots of critical social infrastructure, this isn't the case.
Let's look at something simpler. The US government has proven itself inept at distributing gasoline, which it did in the 1970s (as in long gas lines in some areas and gluts in others). The oil companies, before and after, have been remarkably adept at providing plenty of gas for anyone who wants to buy it, despite refinery explosions, pipeline disasters, etc.
Before government got in the US healthcare system, the system worked well and costs were reasonable.
Internet services run by free market companies seem to be remarkably not brittle.
> "efficiency" often means ignoring maintenance needs.
The government has been ignoring maintenance for decades. The Seattle government ignored the bridge maintenance while they blew through all the money on various progressive causes, and now the bridges are shut down because they're not safe to drive on.
Government run farms have never in history been able to feed a country. The free market farms in the US fed the US and the USSR. (Kansas wheat was exported to the USSR that desperately needed it.)
No, the US government didn’t distribute gasoline. Some state governments issued rationing regulations in one or both of the oil crises, and the US government imposed price regulations during part of the latter of the two crises.
What the DOE did was allocate a gas allotment to each gas station. Stations individually had to apply for gas allotments. If they ran out, too bad. If they had too much, they couldn't allocate it to another station.
The result was shortages and gluts. The DOE proved completely incapable of adjusting to constant shifts in demand. They'd allocate based on the previous year's pattern.
So we learned.
> Distribution of mail, especially to the last mile routes that aren't profitable, does.
UPS seems to do it just fine (for packages), at a profit.
Post offices were amazing when we funded and respected them. - Pneumatic posts, https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/06/08/us-post-off...
-"In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated the American postal system as a marvel of its day"
Or even back to Cyrus the Great's "pony express" message delivery system, circa 6th century BC
I doubt you can make an efficiency assessment of something in the 6th century BC. But if you have to go back that far to find an efficient government operation, you've made my point!
This reminds me of my late father, who worked for our municipality : the municipality (the org) has no memory.
Why do you think the government is the solution? Many of us are out to improve society through industry and non-profits. You don’t need a monopoly on violence to innovate and improve the world.
I do agree that incentives to get the best talent aren’t quite there in Gov jobs but there are plenty of brilliant non-FAANG engineers out there. There would be so much low hanging fruit, it would be fun to work in a Gov job.
One of things I am lacking in my life is meaning to work. Endless Jira tickets to solve issues for a private enterprise. If I’m on a death bed, I want to be able to look back and reflect that I did something hard that others shy away from. Public service is noble and I am willing to sacrifice a lot for it.
Also, the productive groups tend to have more active small team management and less direct leadership from on high. That may seem counter-productive but in government organizations it keeps everyone more engaged and indicates there is actually a lot of work to be done.
Essentially, the moment you have to join the Army, you might as well look for the best possible place for you. This make the top units (whether technology units or otherwise) extremely competitive, and filled with the top talent the country can offer. In addition, these top units become desired in the resume, further increasing their desirability.
Zuckerberg directly said in a 2009 interview that "unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough".
Email me at the address shown on that page, or the one on my HN profile, or even better both.
This wanting to be "better morally" than your fellow citizens is a disease. It seems to be one of the root problems afflicting Americans these days.
Is it wrong to have standards just because some people won't meet them?
The fact some people get off on perceived superiority is a separate issue, and not one that will be quashed by treating all work as morally equivalent.
We can do math, you can do math, everyone with marketable skills is reaching the same result
You don't have to rationalize it
This suggests you are not disillusioned with its past state. Ok, well, it's a start. Please consider reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the USA" (also available in audio form), to further your disillusionment.
> Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, slow.
Well, possibly, but - _that's_ what's bothering you? Not how the US kills a lot of people? Supports dictatorships and oligarchies? And internally, caters to the rich much more than to the masses, so much so that drinking water is dangerous to drink in many places? How it spies on everyone all the time?
The speed is not the main problem here, I would say.
> When I joined USDS in 2016, I came with an outsider’s perspective, technical skills, and desire to use my talents for good. I thought I would serve for just three to six months. More than four years later, at the end of this month, my service at USDS will end. When technologists join USDS, they sign up for a limited tour of duty. I am no different, and it is my time to step down. I’m so grateful to have been a part of this team. And I am enormously proud of everything our team has accomplished across two Administrations. [emphasis added]
From: https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/the-next-chapter-...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/...
And the work I do is far more straightforward than e.g. "fixing the IRS" (which is what, IMO, such services should be doing). It is no surprise that we see little to no output from USDS beyond "style guides" and powerpoints. Certainly nothing that would affect me, personally.
Coincidentally, I have also worked with US Government as a sub-contractor in the past (or to be more exact, the company where I ran all of engineering worked through a federal contractor), and I can tell you it's the most inefficinent environment I can imagine. Endless meetings, budgets 10x larger than they need to be disappearing into the void, nobody knows anything or cares to know. You're lucky if you find even _one_ dude (and it's invariably a dude at those places) who knows what he's doing on the other side, and you hold on to him for dear life.
If you told me I have to make any kind of meaningful difference in that environment in 6 months, I'd politely decline the job. But that's with the benefit of the hindsight, which I will concede some of these otherwise supremely qualified people do not have.
https://github.com/federal-courts-software-factory/open-case...
The government needs long term thinking for its software and hip frameworks and trendy startups are not it.
Happy to provide more clarity as needed and answer questions you have!
Where can we find the code for those projects?
The repo you linked is empty. The GH profile says FCSF was founded in 2020, but none of the 5 visible repos contain any new code:
- brand-guidelines (not software)
- open-case-filing-system (empty, created 6 days ago, but in another comment you said this the main focus?)
- open-source-policy (not software)
- ef-cms (forked from another org)
- mousejiggler (forked from another org)
We have hundreds of projects that are ready for public consumption. We have over 200 developers that contribute code together in the federal judiciary. Watch this space. It’s coming.
In the meantime, take a look at: - Code.gov - data.gov
But from what you wrote it sounds like you're working in private repos, and will publish stuff at some point in the future.
Have I understood correctly?
I am a former public servant. I earn after 2 years of experience what they paid people with 6. And I don’t work for a FAANG or even a decently funded VC firm, but am guessing that I am now significantly underpaid (initially signed up for it for interesting work, but that went away so fixing that presently). And I live in Canada, where salaries are already compressed.
That working at a not well paying startup can rapidly outpace the government is a huge problem for digital infrastructure.
According to this site, GS-15 10 is $143,598.00/year (I was curious and I figured others here would be too)
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
USDS has the whole short-term tour/prestige going for it, though, so they can plausibly get people to take a temporary pay cut as an act of public service.
I think there's some of "this is shiny and new and putting the plane together as it flies" excitement that's different now (from what I saw in 2015 when with 18F), but USDS is better positioned thanks to long-developed trust to get more things done, IMO.
Granted, that's usually in expensive metros, but it's not like DC is cheap either.
Realistically, a lot of people on the left do not like "techies" and feel that devs at Google, FB, et al are horrendously overpaid relative to their contributions to society. So while the Democrats may be okay with the general principle of, "the government should be able to pay more to get the people they need", I think they'd balk at actually paying FAANG-level prices for engineers. Almost 200k for a new grad CS major? That's a hard sell to a party that focuses more -- or at least advertises itself more -- on the poor and working class.
Is it wrong for me to think that those numbers shouldn't be super far apart?
It's an important and necessary step, but the challenges their "Fellows" are going to face are predictable. Locked-down development environments, IT policy dictated by faraway admins who may not even be in the same state let alone the same building, no access to production or production-like environments. Then, when the crop graduates in two years, throw out the institutional knowledge they gained when they walk out the door.
If the government really wants decent talent, then tie employment to college loan forgiveness (on top of high GS salaries) and ensure that there is a possibility of "up" to go with up-or-out HR policy.
That's changing at the federal level. They know they've got a problem. Why shouldn't federal software be as easy to use as the best web software? If you've ever tried to use it you will quickly learn that isn't the case.
Some sites will only work with IE and no other browser. Developers in two years can make a huge difference for making the government be more agile and operate better.
I always suggest joining a local Code For America brigade. Work on a local project and see if it is for you. If you find yourself drawn to it then consider applying for a two year stint with the federal government. You can really make a difference!
In my bitter experience, as soon as the customer's procurement department insists on paying in dribs and drabs (milestones) the project is locked into the waterfall methodology.
https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/?_ga=2.123875274.19435526...
The US Digital Services Playbook likely needs few modifications for use at state and local levels? https://github.com/usds/playbook#readme
"PLAY 1: Understand what people need" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play1
"PLAY 4: Build the service using agile and iterative practices" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play4
Do [lawmakers and aides] make good "Product Owners", stakeholders, [incentivized, gamified] app feedback capability utilizers? GitLab has Service Desk: you can email into the service desk email without having an account as necessary to create and follow up on [software] issues in GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/Gitea project management sytems.
> That's changing at the federal level. They know they've got a problem. Why shouldn't federal software be as easy to use as the best web software? If you've ever tried to use it you will quickly learn that isn't the case.
"PLAY 3: Make it simple and intuitive" https://playbook.cio.gov/#play3
> Some sites will only work with IE and no other browser. Developers in two years can make a huge difference for making the government be more agile and operate better.
US Web Design Standards https://designsystem.digital.gov/
From https://github.com/uswds/uswds#browser-support :
>> We’ve designed the design system to support older and newer browsers through progressive enhancement. The current major version of the design system (2.0) follows the 2% rule: we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov. Currently, this means that the design system version 2.0 supports the newest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 11 and up.
> I always suggest joining a local Code For America brigade. Work on a local project and see if it is for you. If you find yourself drawn to it then consider applying for a two year stint with the federal government. You can really make a difference!
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_for_America :
>> [...] described Code for America as "the technology world's equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America". The article goes on to say, "They bring fresh blood to the solution process, deliver agile coding and software development skills, and frequently offer new perspectives on the latest technology—something that is often sorely lacking from municipal government IT programs. This is a win-win for cities that need help and for technologists that want to give back and contribute to lower government costs and the delivery of improved government service."
It's hard to imagine they change enough of the surrounding culture to give these folks enough clout to make hard but necessary changes.
Would love to see Matt Cutts weigh in ;)
I can't tell if this means they will just hire a dozen junior web developers or if it's more than that. There's is a lot the government could do but they really need to attract a different skill set. The FIPS standards are incredibly out of data and only cover a very small amount of software.
Imagine if common but insecure/open by default software stacks like MongoDB, etc. had a FIPs like mode that would disable super permissive settings.
30. Not 3,000? Last word about technological initiatives at the IRS made it sound like the entire team bailed due to bureaucratic slow-downs and piss-poor incentives?
That said, there are plenty of mid-senior programs for tech talent. There haven't been the same pipelines for more junior talent.
So ageism. It's bad enough that SV flagrantly violates employment law with discrimination, but now the government is in on the game as well.
Age isn't on them, because that wasn't an issue at the time the Frankfurt School developed its theories. Gotta stay theoretical and dogmatic, otherwise the whole house of cards might collapse.
Maybe I'm in cynical, but I'm very familiar with some of the previous high profile attempts and the state of fed tech procurement. These programs seem to attract too many activists, and just like most of the SV tech giants, the tech becomes a means to a political end instead of the goal, and we all know how that turns out.