“They Have No Use for Someone Who Looks and Dresses Like Me”

I suspect this will draw downvotes but I think you're right on. The bias towards people under 30 regardless of the skills and experience that others carry is growing rapidly. Frankly I do not think it will end well and could be directly responsible for this bubble popping due to quality gets worse and worse.

Yeah, our current CEO has some weird notion that we're all going to dress to match and basically present as a uniformed presence...I think it's the silliest goddamn thing in the world.

This isn't anything unique to tech: This is something imbedded in society. I was lucky - the pharmacy I worked (more specifically, the managers at the stores I worked at) didn't care about weird hair color or viewpoints, only that we treated people well. Wal-mart wouldn't have hired me at this stage - last I knew they kept a hair color policy. My mother started getting interviews when she died her hair away from gray: Industry didn't seem to matter. My experience has always been that seeming normal and getting along with the interviewer has always been the easy way to get a job: Using a brain, unfortunately, isn't.

So what? Unless you have some SJW agenda it doesn't who builds the system, so long as the system gets build (and build well).

Washington needs geeks because they can't build the systems without us and they can't get geeks because they are washington. Geeks can build a system with (or without) a few workers.

Bravo for stepping into government and I wish you the best of luck. Dealing with the bureaucracy is always painful. After a decade in the Navy, I always thought that talented programmers could do so much for the service, but the current system wasn’t designed for them. Just take some of the people making it into Nuke School, move them to a programming pipeline, and form teams to attach to commands to help automate processes, create new processes if applicable, and help with SaaS procurements. Give the teams their own command structure and embed them in a manner similar to JAGs and Docs. Switch IT to DevOps.

Unfortunately, the current software procurement process is totally broken. It is the waterfall to end-all waterfalls. Most of the militaries ‘high tech’ is at least a decade old when it becomes operational. I remember in 2005, using a memory device the size of a brick (it’s nickname) with something like 256kb of memory. It could hold a total of 64 lat-long points. The upgrade to a card holding megabytes was still far behind a cheap thumb drive. Using an IPAD is so much better that the military started to okay flights with them.

Sadly, the military contracting process is so bad that they trap themselves with providers (HP) that border on treasonous behavior. I exaggerate, but when you make a profit off of the military and provide essentially crap, you walk a fine line.[1] Fixing this process from the top will require some serious changes and I wish I new what they were.

http://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/

Why would you work for somebody who doesn't respect you, except in a crisis situation? We will never, as a profession, get the respect we deserve until we make them give it to us. And they way to make them do so isn't to come running whenever they are in a crisis - it is to put a zero on the price in a crisis.

It might help to say a bit more about what you're looking for. (Are these jobs in Washington DC? Temporary or permanent? Do you require U.S. citizenship?)

> We're a team of a dozen or so ex-Google and YC software engineers

Coincidence or nepotism?

> ...meet a startup where competence is the only currency that counts.

I don't disagree with your overall conclusion that it's going to be difficult for government to make itself more attractive to many segments of the labor pool, but this notion that Bay Area startups are pure meritocracies is a myth.

Startups pass up highly competent candidates all the time (citing "culture fit") and while there may be somewhat less tolerance at small companies for employees who are completely incapable of carrying some weight (out of pure necessity), there are plenty of crappy, poorly-architected applications being built at Bay Area startups. You just don't encounter them every day because relatively few people actually use them.

> It doesn't matter if you're friendly, it doesn't matter how long you've been in that position, here nobody cares about these things, although being friendly is nice it is not enough, and in many places you can get by somehow in a way you can't in the Bay Area tech scene.

It's worth pointing out that many folks in the "Bay Area tech scene" would have a hard time getting by in other markets and industries if they could even get into them. Not every company in the Bay Area is Google or Palantir, and not every person who can thrive at the type of companies that are plentiful here is capable of thriving in environments where other types of skills may be more commonly required.

The valuing of seniority hits a nerve. There's an inability to reward top performers even if the person's supervisor knows they deserve more pay. Pay is heavily determined by years of experience and their step system. Granted merits do come into play a lot more regarding promotions, there's also circumstances when teams promote an individual "up and out" so they won't have to deal with them anymore. It's so hard to fire someone, it's easier to promote them....

This is a recipe to losing the best and brightest. In addition to this, the slowness and amount of red tape they have to deal with. Tech culture, for better or worse, revolves around new technology and shipping vs. gov't tech with a lot of maintenance of legacy systems. One friend told me a military base's system is running on top of Pike (language), that no one knows. There was a stackoverflow thread that show about 6 people on the site uses it...

     It doesn't matter if you're friendly, it doesn't matter how long you've been in that position, here nobody cares about these things, although being friendly is nice it is not enough, and in many places you can get by somehow in a way you can't in the Bay Area tech scene.

The problem is that this attitude overflows into everyday lives, and that's why people protest the Google bus. People don't want to live in a world with insensitive assholes that get their jobs done. They don't want to live in a brave new world devoid of history and culture, segregated by industry, education, age, and class.

They especially don't want to live next door to the enlightened bay area techie that can't stop complaining about his company's acquisition by those darn Texans.

> I can't imagine government employment and software engineering culture ever meeting.

In which case I suggest you read up on DARPA, CERN and Fraunhofer. And speaking of innovation, the Manhattan Project certainly produced some powerful technology, although IIRC not by "new kids in their dorm rooms".

It is entirely possible that simply being unfriendly is a form of incompetence. It can be a pretty good marker for team dysfunction. I've had a few passive-aggressive teammates - I have a low threshold of tolerance for it.

I work neither in SiVa nor the Bay Area ( by choice - no offense, but no thanks), I work in Texas and nobody in the building knows everything needed to do just about any one thing.

Government employment is "risk-aversion first" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Think of the gummint as an insurance company with an army. It'll make more sense. It takes all kinds.

People who reach the highest echelons of government, whether it's research or bureaucracy, don't get there by sitting on their ass and drawing a paycheck. It's a ridiculous fairytale dreamt up by sad little idiots who believe themselves to be special because they're cogs in the wheel of private industry.

None of these bespectacled t-shirt wearing, hoodie-ensconced "whizzes" would have a job or a place in society if it weren't for government employees and the projects they undertook.

Mind elaborating on your experience with the TX/SF foulup?

The current title definitely caught my eye. Not sure there's a need for a change.

Actually can we get it submitted with a title that explains what it is, and then have a mod change it to the first H1 on the page without comment? Thanks in advance

There are multiple layers to the woes bedeviling government IT (and government work in general).

The contract award process is indeed broken and often awards contracts to the large fish who fail regularly. Part of that is because 'prior performance' carries signifiant weight, meaning that if you're Lockheed Martin and you've done a 15000 user enterprise resource planning project before you have a leg up on the 50 person IT shop that hasn't, even if said IT shop is far more competent.

But really before you even get to the contract, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the full time government employees making the IT decisions are flat out incompetent. The contractor might have smart people that can do excellent work but if the FTE continually makes bad strategic decisions the best coders in the world are not going to be able to deliver a great system. The original article goes a little bit into that where it talks about how technical people in government don't have the power.

Another problem is that government people are rarely held accountable for their failures. They in turn often don't hold contractors accountable.

Then there's the fact that the government has systematically reduced the amount of full time employee programmers in favor of contractors. That isn't necessarily bad in some ways, but basically it results in the government paying a lot more money to get the same technical expertise. The argument is usually, "Yeah but we don't have to pay for a contractor's benefits." Yet the government is paying 2 or more times the cost of a full-time employee per year for the contractor bill rate.

I think for government IT to truly improvement there needs to be some serious structural changes to the way government work is done from contract awards to employee accountability to the composition of the government work force. It really will need to come from the top, and unfortunately the people at the top usually don't make things like that their priority which is why we're here today.

I read the articles. I am not sure what to think now that I know the reason Obama was reelected was because a bunch of smart people got together and wrote software. Not sure if that is the way the system is supposed to run...

Or perhaps...

  Obama: 10 of your SREs to help us fix a production system we can't understand.
  Larry: ... you'll only need 1.

If you don't hold a clearance weed usage won't really be a problem. And if you do apply for a clearance, past marijuana usage is not necessarily a disqualifier. What they're screening for is substance abuse that might be problematic enough that they could compromise your ability to keep secrets. And they want to see that you don't lie about past use. I know more than one person who has smoked weed in the past and still gained a clearance.

But really I think the absurdly slow and convoluted gov't application/hiring process, lower pay, and paltry starting annual vacation are bigger deterrents to joining government IT.

They're just excluding citizens of those two states with drug usage history.

Unless you really do believe that, because it's legal, all citizens of those states use marijuana. In which case the above still holds true as that's not a correct belief.

Not that I disagree with your sentiment.

The fact that in government work spending money wisely is not critical the way it is in private sector is a component of the problem. But I think the more fundamental problem it points to is a lack of consequences for poor performance. An agency can waste a lot money but rarely does any experience consequences for it. A department can fail miserably on big initiatives, small initiatives and everything in between but again, rarely does anyone get fired or even disciplined for that. Even in the most high profile government IT failure in US history, no one was asked to resign.

Start creating real accountability for government organizations and the right people can actually rise to the top and the wrong people can get weeded out (rather than waiting until the bad apples retire). People will start paying a lot more attention to their budgets when they're actually held responsible for using them wisely.

> Instead of cutting budgets where people can save money, they should be increasing budgets of those people that can save money or spend it wisely.

While that sounds like a simple solution, it would incentivize people to make ill-advised cuts one year so the budget could be increased next year. Really all that needs to be done to end the end of fiscal year spending spree is to not reduce budgets when an organization doesn't spend all of it in a given year

Yeah the poor environment can be frustrating and demoralizing. Recently I had to deal with an environment where I wasn't allowed to deploy code to the development server myself. I had to copy code to a shared drive and wait for a scheduled job to copy the files up, and it only ran every 15 minutes at best, sometimes an hour.

I had to fight to get that changed but it's just indicative of the serious dysfunction in the organization.