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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

I, like (I think) many young people, am pretty disillusioned with the current state of the U.S.

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.

View on HN

A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories.

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.

There is in Starbase, Texas.

And there are efficient and agile governments in other countries.

This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true.

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 but 11 construction workers died building the Golden Gate Bridge (which was actually pretty low for such a project at the time). How does that factor in to the story?

Not at all?

Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.

I like to imagine it's possible to build a bridge without getting any of your laborers killed.

What do you mean what's the point? Don't be intentionally obtuse.

The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.

Here is what is left out.

> 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.

Sure, but protecting workers doesn’t make a project cost 10x as much though, or take decades longer.

Protecting workers, considering the environmental impact, overall impact assessments (such as suicide prevention), public consultation, earthquake standards, wind retrofits, etc.

There are a lot more things considered now.

Don't forget all the endless nuisance lawsuits that try to stop every single project.

Honestly NIMBYism and lawsuits slow down things more than any government agency.

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.

The relative status of the US was very high at thr time.

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.

> To this day, no country has better air than the US.

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!

Sure. Norway would be fantastic but it is such a different place that it would compare to being in Alaska or Montana. Major cities in the US, like NYC average around a 30-50 (probs more like 30) on the iqAir score. That is nuts. Barcelona has many, many days on 80-90.

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.

Well, OK then, the claim changes to "parts of the USA have better air quality than parts of Europe because reasons", and I can't argue with Internet strangers making such uncontroversial claims, can I? :-)

The link you provided shows the USA as the 84th LEAST polluted of 106.

Pedantically, not really -- it shows Bangladesh as #1 on that list, and Bangladesh is the "most polluted".

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.

This is an incredibly misleading way to talk about this.

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.

> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.

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.

And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

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...

> And that's just tech. Materials science has moved dramatically. Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

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.

Batteries are a massive materials science success story. We are less than a decade away from 1000 mile range electric cars that do 0-60 in sub 3 seconds. These were Bugatti Veyron numbers a decade back, and that thing had a fuel efficiency of 4mpg.

Exactly. Look at mRNA. Nobody expected vaccines to come so fast, and be so good.

> Just look at how planes, cars are built today.

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

What specific metal are you talking about?

Are we talking America or globally? Because you're listing a lot of things that are now more correctly thought of as Asian innovations if we look at manufacturing and know-how.

Yes let’s go back to killing people to make buildings rise faster.

But, like... that feels defeatist, right?

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.

> 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.

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.

I guess that's fair.

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.

No, I am saying that excellence and efficiency are not required to accomplish something amazing.

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.

> I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society.

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?

> Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

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.

... and if we remove people who fail the IQ120+ test from power. Including economic power, meaning no more inheritance of capital.

> less than 5% are producing the actual products

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.

I think we already have that (AlQada, ISIS, Haqqani, etc...)

Aren’t the Haqqani network involved in significant smuggling operations?

You don’t think logistics is a massive part of those organizations? From fund raising, purchasing, transport, etc? I have no doubt the numbers involved dwarf the number doing the actual fighting.

> 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.

I love this.

"programmers on six-figure salaries" probably wrote the systems that coordinate and optimise the low-paid tasks you mention.

And who exactly benefits from those optimizations? Do the delivery drivers get to take a leisurely drive, or are they just expected to make more deliveries "thanks" to their optimized routes?

Have you considered that Facebook enables the transfer of power to the US dollar which enables economies like the USA and Europe to buy cheaper from other countries and impose their standards? This is not something that's accessible to most of the countries in the world, whom their main struggle is how to finance their imports.

> 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.

Whether it's possible depends on what "greatly efficient" means to you, but we could do better. There are numerous ways to improve our tax system, improve education, improve civic participation, reduce corruption and regulatory capture, improve outcomes and overhead of the legal system, incentivise innovation without prohibitive patents, reduce beurocratic overhead...

> 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?

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”?

This. You want "Get good sh*t done" people. IQ doesn't mean much if you don't know how to execute things and provide stakeholder value.

1. Things are changing, plenty of agencies like GSA, 18F, USDS are trying to modernize government technology and there are many movers and shakers in the government trying to make things better

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

What market in the US is a 100k comp competitive for a software engineer these days?

The announcement says “early career” and “recent graduates,” so pretty junior.

$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.

Staying limited to a middle market region is a waste of time

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.

Also, the pay scale completely maxes out at GS-15 step 10, with a base of $142,180 and a maximum CoL adjustment of 41.44% in places like San Francisco.

I used to be a GS-15, Step 5 for a short stint in government while living in SF. I was within $5k of the pay cap due to the location adjustment. Cap was somewhere around $165k at the time. Still, this was significantly worse than my job before and after.

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.

You'd be surprised what you find if you peek out of the HN/valley/techbro bubble.

So which market then? Because that’s not competitive in DC, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Minneapolis, Dallas, Austin…

Yeah but like, those are still huge cities

$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

If they're offering remote work from anywhere in the country, including areas with low cost of living, for recent college graduates, maybe this makes sense.

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.

100k/year is roughly 5-6k/month after tax in most places. You can buy a house for 2.5k/month. Seems like enough for most

Agreed, except that you can buy a house for a lot less than 2.5k/month.

Where the hell are you getting 2.5k/mo? The mortgage on my 350k house is 1600!

That seems low for $350k, unless that excludes tax and insurance and a sizable down payment was made.

I think many people are not saving enough for retirement. $100k for a family of 4 in many suburban areas could be tight if sufficiently funding retirement accounts.

Here in Portland, which is a relatively cheap city compared to most tech centers, $100K isn't enough to get the attention of any dev who isn't just out of school, and even those devs will have an easy time getting something better-paying in a year or two once they have some practical experience under their belt.

That's not true. The average salary for a Software Engineer is $101227 per year in United States. Data > personal anecdotes. Many SWEs earn less than that.

Portland might be cheaper than SV, but I think it's still in the top 25% most expensive (just my impression).

> there are many movers and shakers in the government trying to make things better

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.

Until the government is willing to pay technologists market wage salaries, they're better outsourcing technology work. For some reason, they're willing to pay massive prices for contracts to firms, but not hire employees at compensation levels on par with FAANG companies. I'd probably be earning 10% of my current income if I worked for the government.

(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.

> (Isn't that how HealthCare.gov got fixed? A bunch of Google people got involved?)

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...

It's not some reason; it's the law. The GS pay bands are set by legislation. No matter what some federal agency wants to pay, they can't pay more or less than Congress has allowed them to. Procurement budgets don't work like that. You still have a capped pot of money, but you can choose to allocate that to fewer projects because the contractors doing the work pay their labor high enough rates that the cost of a project is too high to pursue more.

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.

> Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, slow. That's just not attractive to me.

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://playbook.cio.gov/#play6

Never in the history of the USA have young people – or really anyone else for that matter – liked the government. It's against what this country is really about. There are a lot of countries in the world (maybe even the majority) where a government job is the gold standard and what everyone aspires for, but that is very unlikely to ever happen here.

The data disagrees with your first statement. Certainly true since the early 2000s, but we don’t have to be fatalistic about this.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-vi...

“Trusting the government to do the right thing”, which is what that pew research is checking, is a constantly moving target.

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.

In 1955 needing to go to the doctor didn’t bankrupt your family.

I mean really? In 1955 people were worried about a literal nuclear apocalypse.

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.

For white suburban middle class it didn't. For black people it absolutely did.

Undermining faith in the government has been a right wing project since riiiight around the time the federal government took a strong role in passing and enforcing civil rights law...

Nope, it’s been a theme since around the time of the federalist papers.

People liked FDRs government a lot.

And I'd say that goodwill was passed through into the 1950s and most of the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the accompanying hippie/student movements started to put a big dent in that, followed by Watergate, of course.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

Nobody ever? I'm surprised how big the US government has become then, especially with the low salary.

For a country that isn't supposed to like its government, we sure have a lot of government.

At least in terms of taxes as a percentage of GDP, we have less than almost every other Western country.

What is a country with "less" government (by any standard you choose) and better quality of life?

No government in history has been efficient. There are moments of brilliance in government operations, but it is never sustainable nor transferrable.

> 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.

> but it is never sustainable nor transferrable.

This reminds me of my late father, who worked for our municipality : the municipality (the org) has no memory.

"Efficient", meaning delivering maximum goods/services for minimum cost, may be a good thing in a business context.

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.

> But this also means brittleness and failure under unexpected load. Is this how you want your healthcare delivered?

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.)

Distribution of gasoline doesn't seem like it should be a government role. Distribution of mail, especially to the last mile routes that aren't profitable, does.

> Distribution of gasoline doesn't seem like it should be a government role.

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.

UPS couldn't easily do letters since the government made competition with the USPS expensive or outright illegal in some situations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

If the USPS was efficient, it wouldn't have been necessary to outlaw the competition.

> The US government has proven itself inept at distributing gasoline, which it did in the 1970s

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.

> No, the US government didn’t distribute gasoline.

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.

There actually have been efficient governments. I'll leave aside the terrible efficiencies of some government atrocities, and instead look at when public works were seen as noble.

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

Just because the government commits atrocities doesn't mean they were efficient at it. Nor does "amazing" mean efficient, either. The USPS was inefficient enough that Congress had to make it illegal to compete with them.

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!

> I, like (I think) many young people, am pretty disillusioned with the current state of the U.S.

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.

You need a monopoly on violence to make and enforce laws, and laws are a critical piece of the puzzle to solving some problems, especially collective ones.

If you want to improve things, join and make the change you want to see. Working in the government would be challenging and that’s exactly why you should do it.

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.

I've worked in and around government for some time and the reputation for being slow and bureaucratic is well deserved but my observation is that it's a trade off. You can have government services that are fast or corrupt. Make your choice. It's generally slow because if you don't want it to be corrupt you're going to have to have processes, procedures, oversight, etc. basically bureaucracy. If you want it fast, people are going to take advantage of the lack of oversight to enrich themselves. You might find slow government services frustrating but I think a corrupt system would be much worse.

If you are hired in to contribute to the core mission of the organization (whatever that may be) then you are much more likely to be in a high-functioning group and enjoy your time there. Even within those groups there will be the occasional 'cautionary tale' but that helps everyone else find their path.

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.

A society where quickest decisions are made would be either 1) dictatorship or 2) non-human, i.e. AI based. Would that be a good society to live in, I can't tell for sure. I can say for sure that democracy is designed to be slow and inefficient with regards to decision making. We humans need time to understand, think and argue. We have slow decision making system so that we may reduce chance of error. I think "fast and efficient" are wrong benchmarks.

There's another option - direct democracy, assuming everyone has a neural implant and constant network connection. Then any important decision could be voted in a matter of minutes or hours.

Call your members of Congress and tell the staffers who answer the phones that you want to see them improve pay for government workers.

Who wants to see that? I certainly don't

Anyone who wants a functioning government capable of dealing with big challenges like the kinds we face today and will face throughout the 21st century and beyond.

The majority of these challenges are direct result of the government's corruption and incompetence. See e.g. housing crisis, or student debt issue, or massive drug proliferation.

Disagree. The government doesn’t have the right incentives to solve problems. It should set constraints, not dictate solutions.

Firing bad government workers is part of the path to that. Higher pay for those remaining could be implemented in conjunction, perhaps.

Software cannot solve societal issues it can only scale them

Interestingly, Israel has solved a lot of these problems by making military service mandatory.

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.

I can imagine this works well in Israel, but for most countries, mandatory service is a complete waste of resources. Paying huge amounts of money for people who do not want to be there get skills they do not need, at the point in life which is rather valuable. From defence point of view (for a country not likely to be involved in a war in its territory), its way better to invest that in training professionals.

Facebook's slogan was never "move fast and break things", by the way. It was shortened to that by the public. The actual slogan was "Move fast and don't be afraid to break things".

Ironically, that's the ex-post corporate "damage control" spin on it. The intended slogan was always the former:

Zuckerberg directly said in a 2009 interview that "unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough".

ketzo, see the message on my givehub.org placeholder page. I'm love to donate this domain to someone who'll make good use of it, or even better team up with some folks to do some good.

Email me at the address shown on that page, or the one on my HN profile, or even better both.

Aside from the fact there is also that the work of US Government employees and contractors directly or indirectly helped kill hundreds of thousands of people. In Iraq, Afghanisthan and elsewhere. And not to say if Snowden story relevals anything they are nothing short if being corporate mafia if they want to be.

> better, morally, than optimizing ad revenue

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.

Why is that bad? Do you think it's worth reflecting on why it bothers you?

Because it gives you permission to see (a large percentage of) your fellow human beings as evil, and yourself as superior. I think it's worth reflecting on why it doesn't bother you. There is nothing evil about someone who works in advertising so they can support their family.

This is an absurd defeatist argument. Having morals and standards does not mean you want to feel superior. This is a surefire way to make sure we all lose moral compass, guiding principles and refuse to excel.

Whose morals? There is no universal moral truth although Western countries may agree on a core set to the point its universal, but morals changes over time pretty significantly so when OP says “morals” what they really mean is “how I think the world should be”.

Who says it has to seen as rising above others, rather than simply living up to your own ideals?

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.

> Currently, only 3% of the federal tech workforce is under age 30

We can do math, you can do math, everyone with marketable skills is reaching the same result

You don't have to rationalize it

> I, like (I think) many young people, am pretty disillusioned with the current state of the U.S.

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.

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