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Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

I applied and interviewed with the USDS, but the biggest thing was that they wanted me to move to DC for 6+ months. I'm quite happy here on the west coast, engaged to be married, and attempting to buy a house. Moving cross-country is pretty much a deal-breaker for me.

That said, I really, really want to get involved in something that matters. My dream, for lack of a better phrase, no matter how cheesy it may sound, is to change the world. I want to solve what I call Epic Problems: malaria, clean water, homelessness, HIV, slavery, human trafficking. Or even something as simple as making a trip to the DMV as painless as picking up a prescription at the drug store.

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Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think if you want to solve Epic Problems like malaria and slavery, you are going to have to be ready to put things like buying a house and living where you like in the back seat.

That doesn't seem obvious. There are people working on banking, advertising, business software development, etc. in pretty much every major city. Why shouldn't the same be true of Epic Problems?

You can direct your work efforts towards goals that are important/meaningful to you without necessarily sacrificing everything else in your life. Conversely you can give up a good deal of your life to work on unimportant problems, and many people do.

I'm not saying you can't have any of those things and pursue your dreams, but life is not known for putting your dreams comfortably within reach. Banking is pretty universal (in every city); malaria research isn't.

Odds are at some point you will be forced to make choices; how many people are so lucky that their dream job is walking distance from their dream house in their dream city?

One less if the Op doesn't take advantage of his position.

Yes, like someone else said, that's not necessarily true or obvious. There's a DMV in every major city in the country, there are veteran services, immigration offices, department of defense, department of human resources, housing and urban development, and all the other alphabet agencies in almost every major city. There are hospitals, universities, and research labs in every major city. There are police departments, sheriff's departments, SWAT teams, FBI teams, and ATF teams in every major city. And in this day and age, remote work is a thing -- technology in general is a thing.

I don't see any reason I need to give up anything (other than maybe a huge salary) to work on these problems. The true roadblock for me, I believe, is just a lack of knowledge and education on those particular issues.

"I want to change the world and all, but I just got really comfy in this chair..."

You should reach out to 18F! While home base for them is DC, quite a few of the members are on the west coast. https://18f.gsa.gov/

What about austin?

No office there, but we have at least one remote staffer in Austin.

I wouldn't mind that kind of short tour of duty if they would pay for the roundtrip airfare every few weeks and for a room in DC. I assume only politicians would that kind of sweet deal though.

If they truly wanted to embrace technology and working on important problems in the year 2015 they'd support remote work...

We're embedded directly in project teams at agencies. I spent five years working remotely and running a major open source project before joining the U.S. Digital Service in January. I love remote work and enjoy extolling its virtues, but very simply, we could not do this job remotely, at least not for the time being.

Our friends at 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) have a lot of people working remotely, as well as offices in SF, Chicago, and New York. The nature of their work is simply different (and just as awesome).

I really appreciate the reply.

I'd be interested in learning about the restrictions at USDS that prevent it from going remote. Perhaps taking the conversation off thread is best. I imagine it's a combination of being embedded at agencies and perhaps a clearance issue?

Conceptually, I think everyone at the U.S. Digital Service would be comfortable with working on a remote team. Many of us have done it, and since we're scattered across agencies, the group itself operates in a fairly distributed fashion on a day-to-day basis.

Remote work does work at 18F, where they are often shipping projects that are self-contained and executed in-house. It's also a lot easier to build a remote-friendly culture if you start on day one, which 18F did. It's really just about the nature of the work we do, embedded on these agency projects, that necessitates being in D.C. The role of USDS HQ is simply different -- we're often grafted onto existing 'culture' elsewhere (I work on a floor with more than a hundred of product and engineering folks who were here years before we arrived), and are then tasked with helping to advise/fix/transform those projects as quickly and effectively as possible. (I'd also read https://blog.newrelic.com/2014/03/26/depth-look-team-saved-h..., which was a precursor effort.)

If you're interested in serving in the U.S. Digital Service but are in a position to be only able to work remotely, 18F is a pretty great option.

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