Facebook's Engineering Director Is Headed to the White House
yahoo.com
yahoo.com
As someone who left federal government for private industry, I am shocked at just how much freedom I have to experiment. Thinking creatively is rewarded. I applaud the administration for attempting to get to this level... but they'll have to remove all the old tired government employees with the authority to say "no" before this plan will work.
It's a true statement that he is facing an uphill battle. However, it's heartening to hear that he's making the move because he's been doing this job already for the last couple months - just as a individual contractor on loan to the government. The fact that he's willing to keep doing the admittedly difficult but critically important work of securing White House IT speaks volumes.
It's clear that people like David are needed inside the government and you've identified the key issue - how can you retain talent in an organization that moves slower and more cautiously (and yes, sometimes a bit obtusely[0])? That's in my opinion, the beauty of USDS, 18F, the other healthcare.gov tech surge spinoff companies[1] - by concentrating enough technical talent in one place, you give everyone a place to talk shop, share strategies, and yes, vent frustrations.
USDS and others are not guaranteed success - by no means. However, they have a minuscule but non-zero chance and a little hope goes a long way. I look forward to cheering for each tiny little win they get, no matter how trivial (for instance WhiteHouse.gov is now https[2]). I want the government to do big things and watching it do simple things is the first step on a long long journey.
[0] Though most of the time, there is some rationality to how decisions get made - just sometimes not the rationale you were hoping for. Often it's because it doesn't exactly match a checkbox on a security checklist and you have to explain to them how SSH keys are pretty much like 2048 character long passwords.
[1] p.s. I hear they are all hiring. https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... https://18f.gsa.gov/ http://www.va.gov/ds/ http://adhocteam.us/
[2] Just as of a couple weeks ago, it was http only with https erroring with domain mismatch to an akamai cert. It now gets an A on ssllabs.com.
I've been really impressed with the quality of talent that USDS and 18F have been drawing, and with the quality of their output. While I'm sure there's still more friction than you'd see at a super-tiny private sector startup, I think everyone's aware that software/IT delievery needs to radically change, and there's a lot of smart, driven people who seem to be helping enact that change.
From a talent pool perspective, for every person like Mikey Dickerson (US Digital Services, Healthcare.gov overhaul) you have now 10 people that are barely able to understand what DevOps even stands for as much as 100 acronyms and jargon only applicable to government systems and regulatory measures. Mikey doesn't even have to think about an SF-86 probably - who can you clear for a TS now that's considered top talent by Silicon Valley standards when these people would have these same companies trying to knock their door down?
It is currently against young developers' best interest IMO to join anything BUT the most interesting, high-talent seeking government contracting companies IF they have any thought of going into that line of work. They must also be prepared to have their work oftentimes be thrown away and be laid off repeatedly as these projects tend to be extremely tough to sponsor now in today's post-sequester era of contracting. It's heart-breaking to see the junior developers I saw across so many companies wasting away their talent on oftentimes rather stupid work due to completely inane reasons solely related to being government work.
You're on the right hunch to where the end-game is. The end-game state with the current trajectory is 2-3 huge defense contractors that mostly do non-tech contracts stuck with loads of useless retirement-age administration amid pockets of some competent ones all in charge of scores of kids that just couldn't get into GOOD software companies... and Google, Microsoft, Amazon supplying the majority of the underlying technology. All the "integrators" will have been absorbed into mid-tier companies probably and the various Pentagon incubator-ish programs considered failures for lack of innovation AND lack of projects successfully seeded.
Myself, almost all my ex-coworkers from DoD-centric companies, and a good number of people I've been interviewing are completely throwing away their DoD / government backgrounds in their careers for greener (we know for sure) pastures. There's just not enough funding for interesting work and DoD is contracting back toward its fundamentals of creating jobs for opportunities that are really, really boring that nobody talented or interested in being able to cite an interesting project in a job interview wants to spend time on.
US DoD's leaders are not completely stupid and have finally managed to get Amazon's GovCloud approved for certain uses. IBM sued of course, but how many people even use IBM's cloud again in industry? Getting stuck in the vendor wars of its time is something DoD definitely doesn't want to do, and this time around it sounds like someone actually might get slapped for buying IBM.
He's extremely good at that. In fact, I can think of few better qualified to push through the BS of bureaucracy than him. That being said, FB is almost certainly easy-mode compared to the government.
Sure, there are many under and even unqualified people in positions that they are overpaid for, but that's largely more due to HR policies dictated by Congress and nepotistic corruption. Besides, those people who you think aren't quite possibly are incompetent, are largely doing a job that in all reality doesn't need to exist and is really only a position in order to fabricate a job for a vet or make various people money for various reasons.
The reason you see and experienced such frustration with the immovable and static nature of government / military networks is simple a matter of real national security. Reality is that on a geo-political scale that you can't even imagine exists, there are real reasons for concern and anxiety that is only stoked by the paranoia of our guilty subconscious conscience due to our own nonsense actions and behaviors.
You have freedom in the private sector, because ultimately, if a company fails, all it means is that you find another job at some other fabricated, imaginary, lofty, con job of a start up that is pumped out of "Silicon Valley" on a quarter hour basis. Failure of a nation, because some lackey wanted to experiment, means a real threat that you are incinerated, lines up looking down at a mass grave, or vaporized.
Because at the core, no matter how advanced we want to perceive ourselves in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, humanity consists of various troops of primates which a rival troop will try to kill, pillage, rape and steal our women at the first chance that presents itself as perceptually cost-benefit positive.
The President is not the equivalent of the CEO of a private corporation. And like so many of the things around technology in government the last couple of years, this one is probably more for show than anything else.
Might want to change the title to match the article's.
(Not to diminish in any way his achievements at Facebook or otherwise.)
Move Fast and Break Things
Funny, but it raises a concern: You can't take that approach to White House IT. If something breaks, the consequence isn't that users' feeds of vacation photos malfunction; instead people die, nuclear codes leak, etc.
Nobody will die if these IT people screw up.
Information and the flow of information is power. So far I don't see much sign that this Administration is actually interested in handling that power in an accountable fashion.
Until we get that priority squared away, I'm not very interested in the bells and whistles.
That turned out to be a flat lie. Recently, when the appropriate investigators went to the people who maintain the backups, they found that no one had ever asked them for the emails, and they were available. Supposedly, a criminal investigation is underway.