Comment by kalvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalvin | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of (understandable) cynicism here. But if this makes you mad and you want to do something about it, email your links/resume to jobs at hcgov dot us.

We're a team of a dozen or so software engineers (many ex-Google and YC) who've been working on fixing Healthcare.gov for the future, since December. We're actively looking for experienced software engineers. Several have joined in the past few months.

(If you've seen this comment before, we were looking, but now we're very-much looking.)

The external environment may be frustrating compared to what we're all used to, but internally and day-to-day we're running like a startup-- github/node/backbone/AWS/asana/standups/etc. We're finally shipping and we're going to keep shipping.

Change starts with a small group of thoughtful, committed software engineers (...paraphrasing...) and there are many groups now seeding different parts of the system; our area is Healthcare.gov and associated systems. Because we began in a crisis situation, and other unique factors, some of the usual downsides mentioned in this thread don't apply to us.

Email us! We can also refer you to the other groups referenced in the OP if they make more sense for you.

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.

If you don't help them though,the citizens suffer.

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?

Actual nepotism: "we're a team of painfully inexperienced and/or incompetent people, some of whom aren't even engineers, but we're all from the Dickerson family 'cause the boss-man is a Dickerson".

Bro-ism.

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