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> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.

> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?

Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.

Not true it was managed by the government

https://www.businessofgovernment.org/sites/default/files/Vie...

And you are going to tell me that some people would rather work for the government now where they are constantly insulted, had to desk with DOGE and every year there is a threat they might not get paid?

Yes, that was what the US Digital Service was built on. People who were competent who cared more about service than top Big Tech comp.

You are free to use those keywords on this site’s search function to find comments from those who both worked there and led it for more context.

Just looking at what they have done before 2024, I don’t see anything besides the botched healthcare.gov rollout

The links below should surface their impact reports between 2016 and 2024.

https://www.google.com/search?q=usds+impact+report

You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.

Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.

In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.

Yes I’m sure your anecdotal bubble is more statistically valid than telling a 22 year old if they have a choice between working at BigTech making $160K+ a year or work in government and make $70K, they are going to choose to work for the government.

Myself personally, I worked on the other side of the consulting - government divide. I saw a lot more people jump on the consulting side than the government side. I never heard one person say “I would love to take a 40% cut in pay and go into the office and deal with government shut downs. Sign me up!

But why in the heck would anyone want to work for a government that constantly insults them, forcing RTO and making people move to South (where I am from).

Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.

I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).

This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.

Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).

The entire “BigTech doesn’t have work life balance” is copium and the DMV isn’t exactly a low cost of living area. How many departments outside of what NASA are doing anything exciting? Maybe in medicine the CDC.

> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.

Well, that's not the worst that can happen - Oregon had the idea to let Silicon Valley company Oracle do the job...

In the aftermath of what was likely the most spectacular failure among state-run Affordable Care Act health exchange site launches, the state of Oregon has filed a lawsuit against Oracle America Inc. over the total failure of the Cover Oregon exchange.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/oregon-attorney-...

As a result of the ongoing problems, in April 2014, the board of directors voted to close the state-run exchange and adopt the Federal HealthCare.gov exchange beginning in 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon

Turns out Oregon even got some money out of Oracle in the end?

Gov. Kate Brown announced today the settlement of the six lawsuits the state and the company filed against one another after the failure of the Cover Oregon health exchange website.

The settlement, valued at $100 million, includes cash payments to Oregon as well as a six-year license agreement for products and services that Brown said can be used to "significantly modernize state government's IT systems."

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html