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Comment by joelanman | Hacker News Reader

I work for the UK Government Digital Service - my views don't necessarily represent my employer.

There are lots of comments here around the idea of whether you would work for a government if you disagreed with their political views.

What I love about working on GDS projects is the potential to improve so many people's lives. People often don't have a choice when it comes to interacting with government - it's often a legal requirement, and there's only one way to do it.

So, even if sometimes I may disagree with aspects of policy, the reality is there is going to be a digital service based on it. And I can help a lot of people by being part of making it as simple as possible.

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There's also the possibility that, with an established Digital Service, feedback can be given to policy makers to improve the creation of new laws and make them more efficiently implementable. This might mean the difference between a law/policy that can be easily implemented using existing software, or something that has to be done by hand, costing billions - and those policy makers might not realise this.

Relevant XKCD, imagine this with lawmakers: http://xkcd.com/1425/

That's an excellent point, and has happened with the UK GDS. With user research you can make a strong case:

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/06/20/i-fought-the-law-and-the-...

That's the blog I was trying to find! Thanks, it's a great read, and points out an advantage of having in-house people with some ability to push back/negotiate :)

Slightly off-topic, but I'm a big fan of the design and UX improvements that the GDS is bringing to gov't services. Please keep it up!

Thanks for posting this.

Imagine what would happen to the country if, after Obama was elected, every single right-leaning person employed by the government up and left. Government services rely on continuity, particularly stuff like welfare and social security (in the US). Imagine if you had to completely retrain that workforce every four years.

Well, even you lean left or right, you're still leaning on the need to have a paycheck. But your point is well made.

>So, even if sometimes I may disagree with aspects of policy, the reality is there is going to be a digital service based on it. And I can help a lot of people by being part of making it as simple as possible.

healthcare.gov wouldn't have worked if the geeks hadn't fixed it and without that ObamaCare would look different. I doubt anyone would disagree with me saying that ObamaCare was the most politically divided program in years which means that ultimatively the geeks made policy on a very controversial issue. I think you are underestimating the kind of influence your work will have.

To take a current UK issue: without geeks there is no way the government will be able to implement snoopers charter. In this century the politicians can't do anything without some geek being involved - and we can't ignore that.

Yeah but if you disagree with something the government is doing, why would it be any better if you're making it easier?

This is exactly what scientists who commit war-crimes would say. I am not accusing you of anything like that but that's the logical extreme.

That's why I said "aspects of". If I fully disagreed with a project and thought it was evil, I wouldn't work on it.

However, that's not normally the case. There may be aspects I disagree with, and if you get to do research, you can often show problems and affect the direction of the project. But after all, I could be wrong. I've done enough research to know that :)

Working for change from within the system is definitely a legitimate position to take.

That said, the objections I'm reading here are centered around supporting a government that actively tortures political activists and captured enemies. I think the phrase "if you [disagree] with their political views" trivializes that position.

I'm not a fan of bundling up "government" like that. After all, it is a huge, huge organisation, and the torturers occupy a space entirely different from those who help you file your tax return.

No one who eats meat can have morals stronger than those of the butcher.

Of course, that implies that U.S. citizenship is already tainted---if you aren't actively protesting, working for the government in an unrelated area isn't any worse.

> That said, the objections I'm reading here are centered around supporting a government that actively tortures political activists and captured enemies. I think the phrase "if you [disagree] with their political views" trivializes that position.

Unless you're designing some kind of torture software, I think you're massive reaching to make one apply to the other.

Nothing about doing better e.g. tax software, road planning, or similar is going to help the US Government torture detainees.

Realistically there are millions of US Government connected jobs, it is just unrealistic for everyone to boycott them because another part of a massive government did something ethically and morally wrong.

Agreed. Even if you think the tax code benefits the $interest_group_of_choice, reducing the number of automatically flagged audits, for example, due to better algorithms, is a win for everybody.

Without actually proffering an opinion on the government, your argument has a problem. To the extent that streamlining some bit of the government with software frees up resources to be used elsewhere in the org chart by folks engaged in activities with which you disagree, a software developer would absolutely have enabled the offending activity.

I suppose you could counter that the abhorrent practice of intentionally wasting resources to ensure that subsequent budgets don't shrink will tend to prevent the torturers from getting the additional funds you free up with your advanced tax or road planning software, but there remains a good chance you'd free up resources for something within the department that would cause someone to be worse off than they were before. The only winning move is not to play. (OK, that was an opinion on the gov't)

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