For what it's worth, I pinged someone about it.
8,941 karma · joined March 14, 2010
This is such a fascinating problem, and could have real benefits for society. Imagine uncovering ancient works that would otherwise be lost.
Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.
If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.
I know what you're thinking: why not _A Truck Full of Money_, Kidder's book about Paul English, the founder of Kayak? It's a fine read, but I found _House_ to be more contemplative and open up wider vistas (for me, at least).
Kidder is a great writer. I think people might enjoy _House_.
Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.
I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.
Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.
That article is a bit short on details. Some other recent articles I thought were more helpful included https://www.healio.com/news/rheumatology/20220428/mark-cuban... and https://www.drugtopics.com/view/the-good-the-bad-and-the-mis... . The second article is written more from the perspective of independent pharmacies.
The first article includes this snippet: "If there is reason for optimism, though, it lies with the medical background of Oshmyansky, the company’s co-founder and CEO, according to Gewanter.
'The radiologist Cuban is working with knows the business,' Gewanter said. 'Between the two of them, it is not difficult to imagine that they will figure out where the gaps are and how to exploit them. We can only hope that when they do, our patients will be the beneficiaries.' "
I think YC made a fantastic choice including Alex's company in YC, and it's been a pleasure seeing what Alex has done and is doing. I'll stop there for now.
The data that the government has is often smaller scale than industry, but it usually represents people who are genuinely in need of help.
It's a really remarkable window of time right now to make government work better for the public using technology and design.
Please consider applying, or just ask here if you have any additional questions!
In general, it's really useful to be around the table with stakeholders. In a COVID world, that's less important, but when we get through this, it really does make a difference if people can be in DC.
That said, these times are definitely an experiment in how to do remote work well.
USDS has been doing a lot of impactful work lately, and we need more engineers, designers, and product managers to help improve US government services for the public.
There's a lot of government systems that are facing high levels of load/stress right now, and we need the US government to work well right now. If you're an engineer/SRE or designer or product manager, please consider applying.
And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking about https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/ , which has only grown more hilarious to me over time.
We have been reworking some of our competencies on product and delivery, but I'd still like to see whether it might be a match.
On the transition between administrations, we've been fortunate to have solid support in both administrations. It's been a non-partisan issue to make the government more effective and efficient using technology. No one wants archaic computer systems that could break and risk delivering services to the public. I feel very good about our ability to prioritize projects based on their impact, and we've been able to continue to work on vital services.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs recently released a new online tool that makes it much easier for Veterans to apply for compensation claims. Based on user research, if the claim is for something like PTSD, it encourages the user to take a break and also includes crisis line info. Because the tool is digital instead of paper, it eliminates entire classes of mistakes and means that claims are processed a lot faster.
Lots of government systems need to work so much better for people. Why not join us in DC to tackle some really impactful projects? I'm always happy to answer questions if people want.
For product marketing, the closest role to that might be content strategy, which has proven quite useful.