Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists

> Tech Force will include centralized organization and programming and serve as a recruiting platform post-employment.

Be prepared to struggle at the end of your two year placement because you have no idea how this is going to look on your resume two years from now. Maybe it’ll have the gravitas of having worked at the former USDS. But maybe it’ll be the black mark of having worked at DOGE. The latter feels much more likely than the former.

You will have no control over this outcome. If I had to bet I’d say they will take advantage of your junior status to get you to do the kind of wildly irresponsible hacking, slashing and AI injecting that a more senior engineer would object to and you’re going to face some tough questions in subsequent job interviews.

View on HN

Coinbase will probably look quite favorably that you have been on the inside of whatever their piece is.

Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed. I wouldn't want a spiteful employer.

The flip side is that a lot of government jobs lead to pretty good private sector opportunities working with those same agencies. If you want to contact to DOE, knowing how it works in the inside and knowing people there definitely helps.

A lot of military contractors are former military. Who better to design something for a soldier than a soldier?

> Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed

I disagree. If a persons resume contains description of blatantly harmful work how else can I interpret it but negatively? At best you’d have to chalk it up to “just following orders” but I don’t want blind obedience in a prospective employee either.

The destruction caused by DOGE is evident to anyone with eyes, as is the agency’s complete lack of achievement. I would absolutely be asking questions about why someone remained there.

These employees will be hired by the companies they helped integrate. Not a single one will look on them poorly. They will have domain knowledge, turf knowledge, and they won't argue about working with MAGA for money.

Embracing MAGA on your resume can pay dividends when they’re in power. Perhaps less so once the tide (inevitably) turns. There’s a reason a lot of gov tech folks deliberately paint themselves as non partisan.

They’ll be fine in the “defense” industry.

Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.

Ah, I have no recent insight into that world. I’ll defer to you on this, maybe the “vibe”, as it were, has shifted even there.

You seem to be assuming that someone who remained working for DOGE would even want to work for a company who would pass them over for having worked for DOGE.

That would presume they are able to see into the hearts of hiring managers everywhere

"Why is government so inefficient?"

"I would never hire anybody who worked for the government during an administration I didn't vote for!"

Come on, we can aim for a higher level of discourse than that.

Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed.

It's not always that black and white. In spite of appearances, many many companies make hiring decisions based on things other than what's in a resume.

For example, a company may have $mm contracts with another company whose owners/operators/shareholders/etc. favor one particular view, political party, or social construct. That company will most certainly look down upon the other company hiring people of a particular background.

Or the pressure could be internal. A couple of times in my life I've worked for companies where certain departments were unionized. Even if you weren't in one of those departments, if the company hired you and you had a particular background, the union would object.

The real world is very complex.

Yes and no.

I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.

For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.

> Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.

I see this a lot in the private sector too here in Seattle. It's hurting us badly.

Im all for it. Software job markets are inflated. Id be 100% willing to take a lower salary if that meant a reduction of all salaries across the board. Younger people need to be going into things like EE or MechE instead of CS in hopes of getting a six figure job out of college, living in downtown highrises, while working on something that is essentially funded by ads.

> Im all for it

All for what? Lack of initiative and independent thinking? Did you intend this to be a reply to a different comment?

> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.

Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).

Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?

I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.

Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.

I've heard of a case like that where they started fights in the workplace over their views and trying to sabotage others...

You're assuming everyone is one side or the other and there aren't people who think both sides are awful and they love making their problems with each other the world's problems.

I think it would be best to work with people that I could trust to be civil and not to scream at or enact physical violence on another person, while wearing the hoodie with my companies name on it.

Or at the least, I don't want to have to wonder if I hire a Jewish coworker if there are gonna be any issues.

If you're asking candidates to write threaded code in an interview, you are doing it wrong.

Lol?

Even before LLMs, most coding problems really are a test of efficient pointer manipulation. You either move a pointer to character in words, pointer to data in array, or traverse n-node linked lists.

This level of pointer manipulation is rarely ever needed these days, as things like sorting, searching, and parsing are all handled by functions. An LRU cache is literally a function decorator in Python.

What I care more is if someone can understand that network calls take time, that data processing is fast, and how to optimize that pipeline. Threading is not a requirement, they can do it with async as well, or even without async with just smart scheduling.

The core of the problem that makes it LLM proof is that the problem doesn't disclose anything about network latencies or data structure. So standard iterative solutions from LLM usually end up taking longer because they get stuck waiting on a single network response. And so you can clearly tell who understand the core operations at hand, versus someone who just memorized a bunch of patterns and/or using LLMs.

I think you are right that you could face some challenges during the screening process but if you get to the interview this should be easy to explain with a face saving excuse.

"The tech industry was doing poorly and I was faced with a layoff so I took whatever job I could get. While I didn't agree with the actions of the administration I felt like I could be a force for good in an otherwise turbulent environment"

As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa. The reputation hit of disreputable employers is dramatically overblown.

To be honest you can also get through issues with the resume screening process you can generally just change the wording and section headers a bit in order to avoid a quick filter out.

I'm pretty much a closet conservative working for big tech so I've had a lot of practice with this sort of stuff :D

>As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa.

The difference is, those scientists were literally the best of the best in the world when it came to rocketry.

All their assistants did not share the same fate.

But generally, unless something drastic happens politically, companies won't care that much.

I'd wager "scientist with a deep background in research of rocket propolsion technology in the 1950s" was a bit more difficult to come by than "early-career software developer who integrated a bunch of APIs and maybe wrote a frontend in React".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com