Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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"Believe it or not, there are some very smart people working in government. They actually don't need us in Silicon Valley to tell them how to do stuff."

I know -- very condescending, isn't it? Gee, it's a good thing these really smart folks are showing up. What would we have done without them? A broken system must obviously be full of incompetent people.

I wish these guys the best, but this is 90% bullshit and 10% reality.

Just to cite one, small (?) problem: in commercial IT, if you don't like the work somebody is producing? You fire them. In government IT, no such thing exists. Managers spend years shuffling around poor-performing employees in a desperate attempt just to keep the lights on.

I could go on, but it would all just wash over folks. This is a movement, dammit! We all feel so very excited! This time is different!

So I will help do whatever I can -- blog, comment, debug, whatever. But I will not become suddenly blind to the realities of the system that we are attempting to change. That doesn't do anybody any good. That ain't cynicism, that's reality. Hope is not a strategy, and you can't fix a system you can't honestly describe. (or understand how it got that way)

Hi Daniel, thanks for your perspective.

My own perspective: There are amazingly smart people working in government, and even working for many of the contractors commonly cited as examples of The Problem. Many of these individuals are not effective not because they're incompetent (and therefore need to be told what to do), but because they are not empowered, or they lack confidence or a team of people they can use to propel good solutions forward. Bureaucracy and internal politics are rampant. One way to look at what we're trying to do here is to act as a nucleus of tech expertise inside these agencies, to attract and empower those individuals to do the right thing while providing air cover from the White House when they're prevented from doing so.

That being said, there is a vanishingly small number of actual engineers working for the government. Normally this role belongs to the contracting companies. The incentives here frequently encourage overly large, excessively complex designs, and implementations that maximize the number of humans rather than good engineering practices. By improving technical literacy within government we improve the government's ability to identify bad contracts and methods to prevent these situations from happening in the future.

We are not blind to the fact that there have been other attempts before us. The key differences I see are (a) support from the top and (b) funding.

Please email me if there is any way I can help. Also, since I both teach team performance enhancement and have a lot of big org experience, I would be very interested in hearing how things go.

Best of luck!

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