dnesting

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Government is not a place where modern collaboration tools thrive. This has less to do with "broken IT" (though that's part of it) and more to do with the government's unique legal, oversight, and compliance burdens, and a lack of modern collaboration tools that can accommodate them.

The projects in which we are most successful are also not projects where people can easily contribute remotely. Some agency teams allow remote work but the jury's still out in my opinion as to whether these people are as effective as others.

The projects in which we are most successful are those where we have been able to quickly bring a lot of relevant experience to the table, not just knowledge and skill.

This was written not long after USDS was founded, and I recall thinking even then that many of his comparisons were not entirely accurate. The comments you read here are going to be more complete and up to date.

There exist people that are happy to take a personal statement and attribute it to the author's employer to score political points at the author's expense. When I use this disclaimer it's chiefly for my own benefit.

Hi, really sorry that you feel this way. Delays on the order of a few weeks aren't unexpected at this point, but we shouldn't have people that have been waiting for a response of some kind for much longer than that. We're still growing the team (including those doing the recruiting and hiring) and we appreciate everyone's patience.

We can follow up with you to let you know where you are in the process, but we'd need some sort of identifying information in order to do that.

I'm really sorry about your experience. In many ways we're still a fledgling startup. We don't trust the regular federal government's hiring process, which means we have to build our own from scratch, so we have our own recruiters, coordinators, and when we aren't fighting fires or developing software, we're the ones actually doing the interviews. The process was maddeningly slow for a while but it's improving.

The broader USDS family is focused on delivering better services. But one area we're starting to focus more on is policy itself. One thing that struck me about the federal government is just how little internal harmony there exists between agencies. Just because the NSA does or says something doesn't mean everyone here agrees with them or even really has to support them. Because the USDS HQ team is located in the White House (and OMB), there exists the ability to engage directly with decision-makers and influence policy and (at least sometimes) the behavior of agencies.

Yes, the USDS HQ team is part of the White House which means you have to be a US citizen. 18F is part of GSA and they have more flexibility in hiring. Agency Digital Service teams are being hired directly into various agencies, and each agency will have its own citizenship requirements I think.

If I (as a software engineer) want to improve the way IT works in the government, can you suggest a better use for my time and skills?

Why do you put it that way? Everyone serving in military takes home a paycheck, but that doesn't make them mercinaries.

The top tech talent that we aim to attract to USDS often can make far more than these salaries staying in the private sector, so appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements is what we have to do to recruit.

It is an explicit goal to create lasting Digital Service teams in every federal agency specifically to ensure longer projects (those that actually involve (re)building something) have long-term support. Generally the short-term engagements USDS has are either to help agencies put a fire out, or to provide recommendations that the agency can then choose to implement with their own people.

The simple answer here is that government agencies are funded by congressional appropriations and salaries are regulated. The "government" may be rich, but that doesn't imply that it's easy to pay people market rates, and even if it were, there's a finite budget out of which to pay them that could instead be used to hire more people.

In many ways I'm actually glad this situation exists: it has the effect of filtering out people that care more about their market worth than the mission.

Don't assume that every piece of dysfunction you see can't be fixed. Many of these systems are mind-bogglingly complex and can't be replaced in one go. It seems entirely reasonable to me for a system undergoing modernization to have a modern piece interacting with the user feeding an old paper-based process behind it. That's obviously not the desired end goal but it seems like a perfectly reasonable intermediate one.

We're pushing for short-term engagements for a variety of reasons, but the big one is that the people that we want to attract most are people that already have nice jobs at companies with great pay and perks. It's hard enticing them to leave all of that to come work for government, but it's easier to entice someone to take a leave of absence to do it for 3 or 6 months. Many of the people joining as engineers fall into this category.

Congress decides how the executive branch is paid and how it should use that money. Free food and other "free" perks run afoul of that.

Super sad to hear this story and we've circulated some of these comments internally within the USDS. We know the hiring process is backlogged and isn't very transparent.

Please keep in mind we're still operating like a startup that had an engineering mission it's executing on before it had a mission to scale up. We don't trust the existing government hiring process, which means we have to do it ourselves. This means guilting our existing engineers into finding time to review resumes and do interviews instead of fixing something that's on fire. We are trying to hire good people, not just anyone that shoots a resume our way. But we are still a small team. Please don't judge what we're trying to do solely on how well we can get through resumes and interviews. We're working on it, and we have some ideas and plans to do some work to both improve communication and work through the backlog, so don't give up on us yet.

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.

The USDS is recruiting federal employees, not contractors. Base salaries can be competitive with typical engineering positions in Silicon Valley. The big difference is the inability of the government to pay anything equivalent to stock/options, bonuses, or perks like free food.