18 ms·

The US digital service

326 points by S4M 11y ago

nphyte 11y ago
yes government needs good tech but we as a global community also need good leaders that understand implications of new tech , policy and innovation.
- untog 11y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but I don't see any programs that would actually help people do that on a global basis. The US Digital Service idea is great - I wouldn't want anyone to be under the impression that it isn't "big enough".
- jasonshen 11y ago
  Absolutely - and a lot of what USDS, 18f and PIF do is bring technical people into gov't not only to design and code software, but to make sure the right solution gets implemented, and help policy makers understand how effective technology gets built.
  - nphyte 11y ago
    implementing the right solutions is very subjective. There are many approaches to solving a single problem.Lets take the energy example where we have different solutions in renewables, hyro and nuclear amongst others . Now it seems that the people working on renewables dont talk to people from hydro nor with those working on nuclear. IMHO might be better for the global community where people working on a single problem communicated amongst themselves and policy makers to self select what works best.
twright 11y ago
The USDS Playbook[1] reminded me a lot of the GDS Design Principles[2] and even shares a few points. I think they also set a feeling for each of the Governments they're related to. [1] https://playbook.cio.gov/ https://playbook.cio.gov/ [2] https://www.gov.uk/design-principles https://www.gov.uk/design-principles
- gm3dmo 11y ago
  Unfortunately, we just lost the person who put together the team who put all that in place in the UK. I hope his replacement is going to be able to take the baton and run with it.
- liyanchang 11y ago
  Sharp eye! We are indeed indebted to the work that the UK has done! They are a couple years more senior (USDS just had it's 1st birthday this Tuesday; GDS is coming up on 3) and while there is much tailoring for each country's unique circumstances, we've certainly benefited from their experience.
  - robin_reala 11y ago
    We’re over 4 years old now, officially formed in April 2011.
tunesmith 11y ago
I would have been all over this a few years ago, but being married to someone who can't also move to DC for a multi-month period makes it unworkable. For my career, I work 100% remotely - I would love to do some work for the digital service if they had opportunity for remote working.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  18F is structured to support remote workers. You'd need to be on site in DC to work at the USDS though.
  - nacin 11y ago
    Yep. 18F is great, and the teams work together on a lot. Here's more on why it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888.
brandonb 11y ago
As Sam alludes to, many YC alums have joined the government in some capacity—healthcare.gov, US Digital Service, Nava, Presidential Innovation Fellows—and are on HN. Jason Shen from YC S11 recently wrote about the concept of a "Tour of Duty": http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-duty/ http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-d... If anybody has questions, feel free to ask and I'm sure one of the alumni will reply!
- notsony 11y ago
  Sounds like a revolving door...
  - bernardom 11y ago
    OK. Is that bad, in this case?
    - zacharycohn 11y ago
      No. A revolving door refers to government leaders who leave government service and go work for lobbyists. We just go back to the private sector.
      - reagency 11y ago
        He revolving door absolutely refers to working for contractors, like is common in the militsry industrial complex.
- navahq 11y ago
  Thanks for the shoutout :) glad USDS and 18F are getting the attention they deserve!
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Why doesn't the government allocate more funding to pay skilled technical workers at least close-to-market wages for the crucial work they are doing in bringing government organizations and systems into the 21st century?
nightski 11y ago
Did he take his own advice? Also regarding the rewrite of HealthCare.gov - I don't know the specifics but aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation? Is it really a fair comparison?
- eli 11y ago
  > aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation No, definitely not "always." There are many examples of big enterprise systems being rewritten that take forever and ultimately fail -- to the point where the old system is put back in place.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    I suspect there's a fair amount of survivor bias there too; initial implementations that aren't cheap and relatively easy don't tend to survive long enough to get rewritten!
- brandonb 11y ago
  The conventional wisdom is that rewrites usually fail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html This article has some specifics on the rewrite of healthcare.gov: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/meet-nava-a-startup-that-wants-to-fix-the-governments-crappy-design http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/mee...
- eonw 11y ago
  I too am curious if Sam will take his own advice and do a tour.
  - sama 11y ago
    I would like to someday. Very busy with YC for the foreseeable future.
    - 11y ago
rasmi 11y ago
Also check out 18F [1], which focuses on pushing forward how tech and the government work together. They run a 12-month Presidential Innovation Fellows program [2] which works more intensely on innovating with specific groups within the federal government. USDS is more focused on modernizing and ensuring some basic technical functionality of a lot of the core aspects of the government (which is incredibly important and impactful, but is less about innovation -- see a comparison here [3]). [1] https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows [3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...
- mbseid 11y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. Know a few people who work there and they are doing some cool things. I love how they work in the public and really advocate open source. One cool project is their analytics reporter: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter
- nacin 11y ago
  18F uses the same hiring pipeline -- applying through https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... will get you considered for both!
  - konklone 11y ago
    Yep, and we have some extra 18F-specific information here: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/
  - mattdeboard 11y ago
    Make sure you have got a plan for 4 months as you work your way through this hiring pipeline. In other words, if you want to change jobs in December, and start working at 18F, you should be applying right now. It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.
brandonmenc 11y ago
> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty I really can't stand this language. "Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay. Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty." [1] http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hiring.aspx http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hir...
- vippy 11y ago
  One of my team members is a former Army Captain and Iraq veteran. He doesn't seem to mind. And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Your pay is determined by your paystub from your previous/current employer by the Office of Management and Budget (edit: they do not take into account equity grants nor intangibles). You're also required to pass a drug test, as well as a background check and security clearance. I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.
    - vippy 11y ago
      Right, my friend said he needed to provide two years of salary information, and even then he was offered GS-13 step one. My point is that the USDS, 18F, etc, don't just offer $130k+ to anyone who walks in the door.
    - deleted 11y ago
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    - walshemj 11y ago
      Exactly you could argue that civil servants should get more pay to make up for the lack of share options (adjusted for pension of course) I bet at Cheltenham the BT staff on secondment are told don't mention sharesave to the Civil Servants :-)
vippy 11y ago
I'm a contractor under the GSA's OCSIT, sharing a floor with 18F, the PIFs, and occasionally members of the USDS that come to hang out. It's great to see the feds hiring awesome technologists and doing great things, including some of the technologies that are currently only available to teams with, as the developers of them say, "a reasonable pain tolerance". My only advice to 18F is that they should figure out pathways to provide the services they intend to provide, create a management plan, and stick with it. I would recommend them to check out the business models of Peter Corbett's iStrategyLabs, who is right here in Washington D.C. and doing great work for some really big brands, and VICE's Carrot Creative, from Brooklyn, if they want to see the agency model in action.
jordigg 11y ago
Really happy seeing these initiatives and the way the White House is thinking about bringing technology to the government. I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible. Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.
- jasonshen 11y ago
  You bring up a great point and a big challenge is the way government purchases things. There have been a lot of laws passed to ensure that the gov't buys things in a fair way (as not to just give the contract to a friend) but over time those laws and policies have resulted in an extremely complex and time consuming process that only huge companies can devote the resources to "apply" for a job and win it. Once a law is passed and a policy is in place, it can be very hard to unwind (power of inertia) which is why it can take a crisis like Healthcare.gov to make sweeping changes. Teams like 18f are designed to help the gov't build the right tech in house, skipping the procurement process, and using agile methods and modern tech to build faster and cheaper.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Additionally, there are people that believe that the private sector spurred by competition can provide a better, cheaper product. Personally, I think that's more a feature of new and small companies without entrenched interests and inertia. As you noted the requirements for government contracts have made their entry into bids harder than larger companies that can afford the large upfront bidding cost in time, effort, lobbying, etc. In my eyes, it's entirely possible the USDS is and ca be successful because it's new. I think it's (unfortunately) entirely possible that in 10-20 years they will suffer from the same bloat and inertia problems large companies and existing government agencies do. I'm not sure how to combat that, but having a way to revitalize large companies or government agencies without losing too much of the existing internal knowledge and expertise would go a long way towards helping combat this, but I'm not sure what that is. There are probably numerous successful companies that have done this that I'm entirely unaware of, so maybe there is a good amount of information on how to combat this...
aerovistae 11y ago
Can we vote on what they work on? I just want to be as sure as possible that they never get around to fixing the traffic ticketing system. God forbid the state cops ever realize how many times the local cops have pulled me over, or vice versa, and that's before we even get out-of-state violations involved. Good lord, keep them away from the traffic tickets. COBOL is just fine for that.
- deleted 11y ago
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- batbomb 11y ago
  I've had a lovely problem of having a Dutch last name and the officer writing my middle name as "Van", then trying to inquire about said ticket in a system which apparently you can only search by name or ticket number (which I lost), only to be told "no record found" and later getting a notice that my license was suspended from the DMV.
- kathypham 11y ago
  Request noted. :)
tomjen3 11y ago
The government spends millions on shitty contracts and programs that goes billions over budget. Don't work for them unless you are getting at least market price.
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adamkochanowicz 11y ago
Is it me or does $4M annually still seem like a high cost?
- deleted 11y ago
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- javajosh 11y ago
  Not just you.
- giaour 11y ago
  That sounds like the salary of 20 engineers (+ some managers, office managers, and cleaning staff time).
- dec0dedab0de 11y ago
  Not really if it includes salaries, datacenter space, and support contracts for hardware
- tikhonj 11y ago
  It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly. By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses. The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    Your forgetting the costs of the FS pension
- Kluny 11y ago
  It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?
sarciszewski 11y ago
If I were to dedicate any time to helping anyone, I feel like my time would be better spent helping the Tor Project than helping the US Government. I know I'm not alone here, either.
- allworknoplay 11y ago
  I share the philosophy, but a) this isn't volunteering, it's a job, and b) massively streamlining service delivery helps a LOT of people. They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.
  - nacin 11y ago
    There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.
    - sarciszewski 11y ago
      Have you replaced any terrible ones? ;) On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?
    - allworknoplay 11y ago
      That's totally fair; I've done minimal work around government, and I don't claim to be an expert on this at all. I just know that successful contractors are rewarded disproportionately for their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Also, that was especially the case with healthcare.gov.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  Tor was started at the Naval Research Laboratory. There are smart, hard-working people in government service. The politicians, however, often have monied interests involved in preventing efficiency (pork barrel politics). Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics: "woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork." Ok, how long will that take? "I can probably have it done in a week." It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week? "Yeah, maybe two." But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.
jcnnghm 11y ago
Did the people that charged $200 million to build healthcare.gov get to keep the money after the project failed? What about the people that allocated that money, do they still have their jobs? It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.
- kingkilr 11y ago
  Small note: the $200 million dollar figure wasn't for all of healthcare.gov, it was for the _authentication system_.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  If you do something and the client doesn't like it, do they get their money back? Of course not.
  - jcnnghm 11y ago
    There's a big difference between not liking something, and it not functioning.
jchendy 11y ago
Any idea what the compensation is like? Would the "tour of duty" be considered a sacrifice or is it a viable way to make a living for a talented engineer?
- kingkilr 11y ago
  Salary range is $116,021 to $158,700. (From va.gov/ds/, where I work, I believe this is the same for all the other Digital Service teams though)
  - notsony 11y ago
    So basically it's more "mercenary" than performing a "tour of duty" to serve your country.
    - rdl 11y ago
      Market for the people USDS is hiring generally is higher than that in cash, plus better benefits, plus 50-100k/yr in equity. There is some sacrifice, but not an insurmountable one.
    - dnesting 11y ago
      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.
      - notsony 11y ago
        > appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements Which is why everybody loves getting a letter asking them to turn up for jury duty, right?!
        jchendy 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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niels_olson 11y ago
Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive". Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service. How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  > I'm trying to get REDACTED to "modernize" to REDACTED Loose lips sink ships, doc.
  - crazypyro 11y ago
    Can you elaborate on your point for others?
    - schoen 11y ago
      I think the notion is that knowing what software versions a government IT system is using internally will help attackers, for example because they'll know about likely vulnerabilities in those systems. There are definitely some attackers who are interested in, say, government and military healthcare IT systems, because they can use those to get personnel records (or maybe even more nefarious applications). "Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        In this case it gives an increased false sense of safety in having security by obscurity, which ends up being the worse path.
  - niels_olson 11y ago
fitzwatermellow 11y ago
They even run a kissmetrics-style real-time analytics page: https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ Between immigration and weather one can cover 70% of queries right there ;) And thanks to sama for the write up.
- vippy 11y ago
  The Digital Analytics Program (DAP) rocks!
- liyanchang 11y ago
  Yup. I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. This project is really important for two reasons. 1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users. 2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.
  - konklone 11y ago
    > I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. Thanks! We loved the opportunity to assist the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) with the dashboard. They've been around since ~2012 and have been doing the legwork to get agencies to participate in the program for years: https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/ https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/
    - liyanchang 11y ago
      Oh! Thanks for letting me know. Had no idea about that particular team. Will happily give you both credit next time!
sigmunddali 11y ago
If they want to call it a tour of duty, here's an idea to attract talent: offer student loan repayment like the military does. I have no interest in leaving my current position, but if I was offered equal pay, plus having the majority of my $80k in student loan debt chipped away after a few years, I'd be the first application on the stack.
mtgx 11y ago
I'm not against it, but my worry is that the US government will use this "attracting of top tech talent" to help with government services as a "backdoor" (pun intended) to recruiting some of them into the NSA later on, especially now that they seem to have a problem with recruiting hackers post-Snowden revelations. First they get them to "feel patriotic about helping the government" and then getting them to spy on everyone seems like just another next step. Hopefully, though, it will work the other way around and this top tech talent will manage to convince the old people in the government to do less of that.
notsony 11y ago
> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty serving our country at some point in their careers. We need better technology in government. STOP. WAIT. THINK. As an entrepreneur, you don't want to lose opportunities down the road, or have doors close on you. Look how Huawei gets blasted because the founder served in the Chinese army. Or they may be some open-source projects you want to help out on and people don't want to trust you.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  1) If everyone serves, it's not weird. See Israel. 2) Are we really so selfish as to say "I would like to, but working for my country would look bad on my resume, so sorry"?
- deleted 11y ago
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- kctess5 11y ago
  "We want to hire you, but we see here that you improved the digital systems affecting the lives of millions, so I'm afraid we won't be moving your application forward at this time" Right...
neves 11y ago
Will this scale? For me it looks like a kind of organizational anti-pattern. Imagine you are working in your project, then comes the "Know it all" guys trying to redo everything you know about. After rebuilding everything they will leave, take all the credits and leave the bomb with you.
- dnesting 11y ago
  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.
stefantalpalaru 11y ago
Yeah, go ahead and join the global Stasi. Maybe you'll improve it from the inside. /s
- dnesting 11y ago
  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?
rdl 11y ago
I've met a lot of the U.S. Digital Service people and it is an amazing organization. I had a list of concerns (how they work with contractors already in place, how things would evolve with a new administration, whether they would get sucked into long term staffing at agencies, etc) and they had addressed all of them. There are a few negative things as overhang from the rest of government (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose), but those are the reality, and don't diminish the value of the program in any way. I would strongly recommend looking into USDS to anyone who who wants to make a difference in tech. It is a great place to go in the middle of a longer career at a post IPO company like Google/FB, or are between projects.
- liyanchang 11y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. Yes, we have made progress. Yes, there are still quirks. Yes, there is more to do. Come help! As a YC alum, while I find some strong similarities between Digital Service and a small growing startup, there are indeed some additional hoops that we go through as a part of the US government and that's part of the tradeoff you get for being able to help government agencies that have huge impact!
- konklone 11y ago
  > (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose) As an 18F employee, I can't speak for USDS, but I know 18F can (and does, I think) employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor). I've also never taken a drug test.
  - rdl 11y ago
    Ah! It probably depends a lot on role. Good to know.
    - dnesting 11y ago
      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.
ritchiea 11y ago
I really wanted to work for the digital service and my experience applying was horrendous. The recruiter scheduled an appointment to call me and didn't at the scheduled time. She followed up weeks later and I finally got my phone screen. Phone interview went well, she said we would schedule another interview. The followup from her didn't happen until another month later. Then I had a technical interview where the interviewer talked over me and asked whether I would use a list or an array for a particular data structure, to which I replied I use Ruby & Python so I don't know what you're asking because it would be a question of semantics, to which he finally clarified he meant a linked list and chided me for not "knowing the difference between the properties of a linked list and an array." How can you expect me to know the difference between two data structures if you're using unclear shorthand to refer to one of them? And the interviewer was an ex-Google engineer so I imagine he had some familiarity with Python (where a "List" is what many languages refer to as an array) since it's an official Google language. And then of course I didn't get the job (and no feedback on why). The whole thing was maddening, took 3 months total just to get railroaded by an aggressive and imprecise technical interviewer. It sounds like great work though, wish them the best of luck. Wish I could work on their projects.
- bliti 11y ago
  Sounds like the typical technical interview.
  - ritchiea 11y ago
    Yes I would say it's typical. But they also say their challenge is getting good technologists into government. So if they believe they have difficulty hiring (which is their public stance) why not adopt a more candidate friendly process? And I'm not saying I necessarily would have gotten the job otherwise, who knows, but I do feel like they wasted a lot of time, strung things out over months and then didn't give me a good opportunity to show them my abilities.
    - bliti 11y ago
      Agree with you. Government work has not been very popular with programmers. Working for "the man" is not something that is generally sought after. Ideals are strong in this young industry. Dunno if they should try and work as a startup. They are a not a business, nor can they operate like one.
navahq 11y ago
If this resonated with you, check out: Mikey Dickerson (head of USDS) at SXSW: Why we need you in government https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw-why-we-need-you-in-government-f31dab3263a0 https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw... Previous HN discussion on USDS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819
binoyxj 11y ago
Here's Todd Park's (White House Technology Advisor) talk during the recently concluded Twilio Signal devcon. He's then followed by the co-founder of Twilio, newest avenger in the USDS team https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s
paulsmith 11y ago
At the risk of being self-promotional, there's another part of the rebel alliance of which USDS and 18F are the main players, and that is better technology contractors. ("Better" meaning, engineering practices and outcomes that the audience of this site would recognize.) There's Nava, and the company I co-founded, Ad Hoc. Greg and I were on the original HealthCare.gov rescue squad with Mikey et. al. We're still working on HealthCare.gov, but instead of helping to prop up the bad old code (which was necessary work to save the site and help actual people), we're rebuilding parts of the site from scratch, using things like Go, AWS, Angular. During the last open enrollment period over the winter, our code (healthcare.gov/see-plans/) had 100% uptime, served ~ half a billion page views, and had a mean response time of well under 100ms. (And _no_ garbage hiding in the 99th percentile.) One thing I'll say about government work -- you're not really breaking new ground, from a technology perspective. (Unless you're at DARPA I suppose.) Don't come into thinking you're going to innovate in some bleeding-edge area. But government was left so far behind the consumer technology curve that basic, competently-executed, well-designed software that's fast is an _enormous_ leap forward. 2008-era web tech is sorely needed across government. In a way, that is the innovation: dependable software that reliably delivers services to people for whose user-experience has never been put on the same playing field as consumer online services. If you're interested in being part of the rebel alliance, and for whatever reason USDS or 18F aren't right for you, consider contracting. There's enormous opportunity to make real change and see your code help others. Believe me, small teams can have a big impact on government, even from outside government. If you want to know more about Ad Hoc, get in touch (http://adhocteam.us/ http://adhocteam.us/). We also have projects with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and state Medicaid programs. I never thought I'd be a government contractor. I did the startup thing, and just happened to get roped into the HealthCare.gov rescue. I can tell you it's sometimes frustrating, but always satisfying work. And there are several avenues in.
- brandonb 11y ago
  Ad Hoc and Nava are both awesome groups of people!
- kalvin 11y ago
  Agreed! Thank you for a much improved plan compare :) I do think there's room for innovation-- we just have to implement reliable software first. Piling on: If you're interested in being an early employee at a growth startup working with the government, check out Nava! (I work for Nava) Our hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189
hippich 11y ago
I agree that you should stop complain about anything IT-related in government and instead try to make a change (and complain about, let's say, bogus process of winning government contract) That been said, I don't believe USDS/18F/GSA in big need for engineers from my own experience. So don't afraid to apply :)
ilaksh 11y ago
Technology makes government and other traditional institutions irrelevant. Focus you efforts on decentralizing technologies that replace giant outdated systems entirely. The US government, like all traditional states, is just a really official type of organized crime. The DNA of the state is past its expiration.
u14408885 11y ago
I wonder if there is an equivalent in Australia (or other countries).
- robin_reala 11y ago
  The DTO in Aus has hired a few ex-GDS employees and seems to be doing good work: https://www.dto.gov.au https://www.dto.gov.au
finkin1 11y ago
According to this talk, the work hours were pretty insane to fix healthcare.gov. From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City, Mikey Dickerson's keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov: Where Are We Now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4
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clebio 11y ago
Honest question, because I can't find it in the copy on the USDS page, but have seen comments here about this: Do you treat this as a job with a certain known tenure, or rather as a sabbatical? It seems like they want specific periods of work, but how does that fit with a regular job where you're vaguely working for a company indefinitely? How does relocating to the DC-metro area fit in with that? Relocation is expensive and a hassle, after all.
TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
We definitely do need better government. But I don't think this digital service thing is going to work out. Early reports from similar programs like the Presidential Fellows program, shows that government bureaucracy is pretty calcified, and the private contractors that provide the current dated technology aren't going to go quietly either. A bunch of young guns parachuting in isn't going to have much effect unless someone with a lot of political capital, spends that capital forcing change. Otherwise, the young guns will just get sidelined. I've talked to people in the Presidential Fellows program, and they get sidelined a lot. Nothing actually changes. And forget about bringing in new, better vendors for government contracts. There is an entire skillset required to bid on and get government contracts, and the people that know how to build good technology, have no idea how to get the contracts. And the people that know how to get the contracts, specialize in that, and have no idea how to build good technology. How do you think that garbage-ass company from Canada (that isn't even allowed to build tech for the Canadian government) gets recruited to build Healthcare.gov at some huge inflated expense. And BTW, you can't even get people in the know to talk about this stuff, because anyone that does is shitting on their own career prospects if they tattle on the system. The Healthcare.gov fix worked because the President supported that intervention. Can every place that Digital Service serves get that kind of support? If it does, then that will be amazing. But I sort of doubt the President can micromanage and give support to a thousand interventions in a thousand different departments, all with their own little fiefdoms.
ekianjo 11y ago
> serving your country Erm. Serving your country does not equal to serving the government. Often the government in place actually has an active role in destroying the country or making it worse. Look at the NSA - are the NSA folks really serving their country or their goverment first ?
- forloop 11y ago
  Saying, "Help the monied interests who control governments." doesn't sound as convincing. Serving your country/honour/helping the group are rhetorical tools used convince people to sacrifice themselves (their human capital, and sometimes their bodies) for this group. Governments are extremely powerful (obviously), and part of that power comes from co-opting people. A metaphor can be seen in the Matrix. To quote Morpheus: > The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. The hacker culture is being co-opted wholesale. Technology is powerful—both as an economic driver and a competitive advantage against other groups—, so it's not unexpected that the human capital which are tech savvy are targeted. People can't be forced to do anything—unless they break the law at which point they will have the full force of law brought down upon them, with no mercy applied (if members of the gov choose!). As such, people with skills need to be convinced to work with government, and that's where the rhetorical tools are implemented. When you read comments about how governments help the people they preside over, you're reading the grass-roots propaganda from those which Morpheus talks of. The businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, coders! Do as you like, but it's important to know the message conveyed in the blog post is from a member of the business-class who has been fully co-opted, and doesn't follow the very advice he gives! And why would he? It's much more profitable (in the board sense of the word) to use his platform as a tool of marketing and persuasion for said establishment—I.e. getting others to make sacrifices, so those with control can live with impunity and in-group-largess (with the cost borne by society).
- superuser2 11y ago
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
I attended one of the UKs GDS road shows this week. I have been trying on and off for a while to get better OSS into local government (http://www.oss4gov.org http://www.oss4gov.org) and am impressed still by the focus there is in government in doing the right thing. The big wins they are having is enforcing OSS licenses for bespoke development, pooling purchasing into rolling 6-9 month call-off frameworks and generally waving the agile and cheaper flags. I am not convinced that the idea of a sort of Peace Corps couple of years will be the solution - if we get government software based on an infrastructure of OSS then it's likely both private and public developers will be familiar with those Eco systems anyway.
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javadocmd 11y ago
Is anyone aware of any similar programs in the charity space? I would imagine there are charitable organizations out there in need of some solid tech but lacking the infrastructure to build it.
worldadventurer 11y ago
Sam wrote "I often get asked about what people can do for a year or two to make a big impact between projects." If the US government isn't the right fit (especially if you're not an American), consider doing a Fellowship with a non-profit which may also have a big impact. MovingWorlds.org is one place to find those opportunities. We (engageSPARK, a not-for-profit business building the "Twilio for non-techies" for NGOs & Governments) also have a Fellowship program: https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join . :)

326 points by S4M 11y ago

yes government needs good tech but we as a global community also need good leaders that understand implications of new tech , policy and innovation.

untog 11y ago
Not disagreeing with you, but I don't see any programs that would actually help people do that on a global basis. The US Digital Service idea is great - I wouldn't want anyone to be under the impression that it isn't "big enough".
jasonshen 11y ago
Absolutely - and a lot of what USDS, 18f and PIF do is bring technical people into gov't not only to design and code software, but to make sure the right solution gets implemented, and help policy makers understand how effective technology gets built.
- nphyte 11y ago
  implementing the right solutions is very subjective. There are many approaches to solving a single problem.Lets take the energy example where we have different solutions in renewables, hyro and nuclear amongst others . Now it seems that the people working on renewables dont talk to people from hydro nor with those working on nuclear. IMHO might be better for the global community where people working on a single problem communicated amongst themselves and policy makers to self select what works best.

twright 11y ago

The USDS Playbook[1] reminded me a lot of the GDS Design Principles[2] and even shares a few points. I think they also set a feeling for each of the Governments they're related to. [1] https://playbook.cio.gov/ https://playbook.cio.gov/ [2] https://www.gov.uk/design-principles https://www.gov.uk/design-principles

gm3dmo 11y ago
Unfortunately, we just lost the person who put together the team who put all that in place in the UK. I hope his replacement is going to be able to take the baton and run with it.
liyanchang 11y ago
Sharp eye! We are indeed indebted to the work that the UK has done! They are a couple years more senior (USDS just had it's 1st birthday this Tuesday; GDS is coming up on 3) and while there is much tailoring for each country's unique circumstances, we've certainly benefited from their experience.
- robin_reala 11y ago
  We’re over 4 years old now, officially formed in April 2011.

tunesmith 11y ago

I would have been all over this a few years ago, but being married to someone who can't also move to DC for a multi-month period makes it unworkable. For my career, I work 100% remotely - I would love to do some work for the digital service if they had opportunity for remote working.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
18F is structured to support remote workers. You'd need to be on site in DC to work at the USDS though.
- nacin 11y ago
  Yep. 18F is great, and the teams work together on a lot. Here's more on why it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888.

brandonb 11y ago

As Sam alludes to, many YC alums have joined the government in some capacity—healthcare.gov, US Digital Service, Nava, Presidential Innovation Fellows—and are on HN. Jason Shen from YC S11 recently wrote about the concept of a "Tour of Duty": http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-duty/ http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-d... If anybody has questions, feel free to ask and I'm sure one of the alumni will reply!

notsony 11y ago
Sounds like a revolving door...
- bernardom 11y ago
  OK. Is that bad, in this case?
  - zacharycohn 11y ago
    No. A revolving door refers to government leaders who leave government service and go work for lobbyists. We just go back to the private sector.
    - reagency 11y ago
      He revolving door absolutely refers to working for contractors, like is common in the militsry industrial complex.
navahq 11y ago
Thanks for the shoutout :) glad USDS and 18F are getting the attention they deserve!
roymurdock 11y ago
Why doesn't the government allocate more funding to pay skilled technical workers at least close-to-market wages for the crucial work they are doing in bringing government organizations and systems into the 21st century?

nightski 11y ago

Did he take his own advice? Also regarding the rewrite of HealthCare.gov - I don't know the specifics but aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation? Is it really a fair comparison?

eli 11y ago
> aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation No, definitely not "always." There are many examples of big enterprise systems being rewritten that take forever and ultimately fail -- to the point where the old system is put back in place.
- peteretep 11y ago
  I suspect there's a fair amount of survivor bias there too; initial implementations that aren't cheap and relatively easy don't tend to survive long enough to get rewritten!
brandonb 11y ago
The conventional wisdom is that rewrites usually fail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html This article has some specifics on the rewrite of healthcare.gov: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/meet-nava-a-startup-that-wants-to-fix-the-governments-crappy-design http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/mee...
eonw 11y ago
I too am curious if Sam will take his own advice and do a tour.
- sama 11y ago
  I would like to someday. Very busy with YC for the foreseeable future.
  - 11y ago

rasmi 11y ago

Also check out 18F [1], which focuses on pushing forward how tech and the government work together. They run a 12-month Presidential Innovation Fellows program [2] which works more intensely on innovating with specific groups within the federal government. USDS is more focused on modernizing and ensuring some basic technical functionality of a lot of the core aspects of the government (which is incredibly important and impactful, but is less about innovation -- see a comparison here [3]). [1] https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows [3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...

mbseid 11y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Know a few people who work there and they are doing some cool things. I love how they work in the public and really advocate open source. One cool project is their analytics reporter: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter
nacin 11y ago
18F uses the same hiring pipeline -- applying through https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... will get you considered for both!
- konklone 11y ago
  Yep, and we have some extra 18F-specific information here: https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/
- mattdeboard 11y ago
  Make sure you have got a plan for 4 months as you work your way through this hiring pipeline. In other words, if you want to change jobs in December, and start working at 18F, you should be applying right now. It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.

brandonmenc 11y ago

> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty I really can't stand this language. "Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay. Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty." [1] http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hiring.aspx http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hir...

vippy 11y ago
One of my team members is a former Army Captain and Iraq veteran. He doesn't seem to mind. And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Your pay is determined by your paystub from your previous/current employer by the Office of Management and Budget (edit: they do not take into account equity grants nor intangibles). You're also required to pass a drug test, as well as a background check and security clearance. I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.
  - vippy 11y ago
    Right, my friend said he needed to provide two years of salary information, and even then he was offered GS-13 step one. My point is that the USDS, 18F, etc, don't just offer $130k+ to anyone who walks in the door.
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  - walshemj 11y ago
    Exactly you could argue that civil servants should get more pay to make up for the lack of share options (adjusted for pension of course) I bet at Cheltenham the BT staff on secondment are told don't mention sharesave to the Civil Servants :-)

vippy 11y ago

I'm a contractor under the GSA's OCSIT, sharing a floor with 18F, the PIFs, and occasionally members of the USDS that come to hang out. It's great to see the feds hiring awesome technologists and doing great things, including some of the technologies that are currently only available to teams with, as the developers of them say, "a reasonable pain tolerance". My only advice to 18F is that they should figure out pathways to provide the services they intend to provide, create a management plan, and stick with it. I would recommend them to check out the business models of Peter Corbett's iStrategyLabs, who is right here in Washington D.C. and doing great work for some really big brands, and VICE's Carrot Creative, from Brooklyn, if they want to see the agency model in action.

jordigg 11y ago

Really happy seeing these initiatives and the way the White House is thinking about bringing technology to the government. I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible. Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.

jasonshen 11y ago
You bring up a great point and a big challenge is the way government purchases things. There have been a lot of laws passed to ensure that the gov't buys things in a fair way (as not to just give the contract to a friend) but over time those laws and policies have resulted in an extremely complex and time consuming process that only huge companies can devote the resources to "apply" for a job and win it. Once a law is passed and a policy is in place, it can be very hard to unwind (power of inertia) which is why it can take a crisis like Healthcare.gov to make sweeping changes. Teams like 18f are designed to help the gov't build the right tech in house, skipping the procurement process, and using agile methods and modern tech to build faster and cheaper.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Additionally, there are people that believe that the private sector spurred by competition can provide a better, cheaper product. Personally, I think that's more a feature of new and small companies without entrenched interests and inertia. As you noted the requirements for government contracts have made their entry into bids harder than larger companies that can afford the large upfront bidding cost in time, effort, lobbying, etc. In my eyes, it's entirely possible the USDS is and ca be successful because it's new. I think it's (unfortunately) entirely possible that in 10-20 years they will suffer from the same bloat and inertia problems large companies and existing government agencies do. I'm not sure how to combat that, but having a way to revitalize large companies or government agencies without losing too much of the existing internal knowledge and expertise would go a long way towards helping combat this, but I'm not sure what that is. There are probably numerous successful companies that have done this that I'm entirely unaware of, so maybe there is a good amount of information on how to combat this...

aerovistae 11y ago

Can we vote on what they work on? I just want to be as sure as possible that they never get around to fixing the traffic ticketing system. God forbid the state cops ever realize how many times the local cops have pulled me over, or vice versa, and that's before we even get out-of-state violations involved. Good lord, keep them away from the traffic tickets. COBOL is just fine for that.

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batbomb 11y ago
I've had a lovely problem of having a Dutch last name and the officer writing my middle name as "Van", then trying to inquire about said ticket in a system which apparently you can only search by name or ticket number (which I lost), only to be told "no record found" and later getting a notice that my license was suspended from the DMV.
kathypham 11y ago
Request noted. :)

tomjen3 11y ago

The government spends millions on shitty contracts and programs that goes billions over budget. Don't work for them unless you are getting at least market price.

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adamkochanowicz 11y ago

Is it me or does $4M annually still seem like a high cost?

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javajosh 11y ago
Not just you.
giaour 11y ago
That sounds like the salary of 20 engineers (+ some managers, office managers, and cleaning staff time).
dec0dedab0de 11y ago
Not really if it includes salaries, datacenter space, and support contracts for hardware
tikhonj 11y ago
It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly. By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses. The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
- walshemj 11y ago
  Your forgetting the costs of the FS pension
Kluny 11y ago
It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?

sarciszewski 11y ago

If I were to dedicate any time to helping anyone, I feel like my time would be better spent helping the Tor Project than helping the US Government. I know I'm not alone here, either.

allworknoplay 11y ago
I share the philosophy, but a) this isn't volunteering, it's a job, and b) massively streamlining service delivery helps a LOT of people. They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.
- nacin 11y ago
  There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    Have you replaced any terrible ones? ;) On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?
  - allworknoplay 11y ago
    That's totally fair; I've done minimal work around government, and I don't claim to be an expert on this at all. I just know that successful contractors are rewarded disproportionately for their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Also, that was especially the case with healthcare.gov.
niels_olson 11y ago
Tor was started at the Naval Research Laboratory. There are smart, hard-working people in government service. The politicians, however, often have monied interests involved in preventing efficiency (pork barrel politics). Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics: "woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork." Ok, how long will that take? "I can probably have it done in a week." It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week? "Yeah, maybe two." But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.

jcnnghm 11y ago

Did the people that charged $200 million to build healthcare.gov get to keep the money after the project failed? What about the people that allocated that money, do they still have their jobs? It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.

kingkilr 11y ago
Small note: the $200 million dollar figure wasn't for all of healthcare.gov, it was for the _authentication system_.
s73v3r 11y ago
If you do something and the client doesn't like it, do they get their money back? Of course not.
- jcnnghm 11y ago
  There's a big difference between not liking something, and it not functioning.

jchendy 11y ago

Any idea what the compensation is like? Would the "tour of duty" be considered a sacrifice or is it a viable way to make a living for a talented engineer?

kingkilr 11y ago
Salary range is $116,021 to $158,700. (From va.gov/ds/, where I work, I believe this is the same for all the other Digital Service teams though)
- notsony 11y ago
  So basically it's more "mercenary" than performing a "tour of duty" to serve your country.
  - rdl 11y ago
    Market for the people USDS is hiring generally is higher than that in cash, plus better benefits, plus 50-100k/yr in equity. There is some sacrifice, but not an insurmountable one.
  - dnesting 11y ago
    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.
    - notsony 11y ago
      > appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements Which is why everybody loves getting a letter asking them to turn up for jury duty, right?!
      - jchendy 11y ago

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niels_olson 11y ago

Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive". Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service. How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.

fluidcruft 11y ago
> I'm trying to get REDACTED to "modernize" to REDACTED Loose lips sink ships, doc.
- crazypyro 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on your point for others?
  - schoen 11y ago
    I think the notion is that knowing what software versions a government IT system is using internally will help attackers, for example because they'll know about likely vulnerabilities in those systems. There are definitely some attackers who are interested in, say, government and military healthcare IT systems, because they can use those to get personnel records (or maybe even more nefarious applications). "Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      In this case it gives an increased false sense of safety in having security by obscurity, which ends up being the worse path.
- niels_olson 11y ago

fitzwatermellow 11y ago

They even run a kissmetrics-style real-time analytics page: https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ Between immigration and weather one can cover 70% of queries right there ;) And thanks to sama for the write up.

vippy 11y ago
The Digital Analytics Program (DAP) rocks!
liyanchang 11y ago
Yup. I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. This project is really important for two reasons. 1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users. 2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.
- konklone 11y ago
  > I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. Thanks! We loved the opportunity to assist the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) with the dashboard. They've been around since ~2012 and have been doing the legwork to get agencies to participate in the program for years: https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/ https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/
  - liyanchang 11y ago
    Oh! Thanks for letting me know. Had no idea about that particular team. Will happily give you both credit next time!

sigmunddali 11y ago

If they want to call it a tour of duty, here's an idea to attract talent: offer student loan repayment like the military does. I have no interest in leaving my current position, but if I was offered equal pay, plus having the majority of my $80k in student loan debt chipped away after a few years, I'd be the first application on the stack.

mtgx 11y ago

I'm not against it, but my worry is that the US government will use this "attracting of top tech talent" to help with government services as a "backdoor" (pun intended) to recruiting some of them into the NSA later on, especially now that they seem to have a problem with recruiting hackers post-Snowden revelations. First they get them to "feel patriotic about helping the government" and then getting them to spy on everyone seems like just another next step. Hopefully, though, it will work the other way around and this top tech talent will manage to convince the old people in the government to do less of that.

notsony 11y ago

> I think it’d be great if it became a new tradition that people from the tech world do a tour of duty serving our country at some point in their careers. We need better technology in government. STOP. WAIT. THINK. As an entrepreneur, you don't want to lose opportunities down the road, or have doors close on you. Look how Huawei gets blasted because the founder served in the Chinese army. Or they may be some open-source projects you want to help out on and people don't want to trust you.

sliverstorm 11y ago
1) If everyone serves, it's not weird. See Israel. 2) Are we really so selfish as to say "I would like to, but working for my country would look bad on my resume, so sorry"?
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kctess5 11y ago
"We want to hire you, but we see here that you improved the digital systems affecting the lives of millions, so I'm afraid we won't be moving your application forward at this time" Right...

neves 11y ago

Will this scale? For me it looks like a kind of organizational anti-pattern. Imagine you are working in your project, then comes the "Know it all" guys trying to redo everything you know about. After rebuilding everything they will leave, take all the credits and leave the bomb with you.

dnesting 11y ago
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.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago

Yeah, go ahead and join the global Stasi. Maybe you'll improve it from the inside. /s

dnesting 11y ago
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?

rdl 11y ago

I've met a lot of the U.S. Digital Service people and it is an amazing organization. I had a list of concerns (how they work with contractors already in place, how things would evolve with a new administration, whether they would get sucked into long term staffing at agencies, etc) and they had addressed all of them. There are a few negative things as overhang from the rest of government (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose), but those are the reality, and don't diminish the value of the program in any way. I would strongly recommend looking into USDS to anyone who who wants to make a difference in tech. It is a great place to go in the middle of a longer career at a post IPO company like Google/FB, or are between projects.

liyanchang 11y ago
Thanks for the kind words. Yes, we have made progress. Yes, there are still quirks. Yes, there is more to do. Come help! As a YC alum, while I find some strong similarities between Digital Service and a small growing startup, there are indeed some additional hoops that we go through as a part of the US government and that's part of the tradeoff you get for being able to help government agencies that have huge impact!
konklone 11y ago
> (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose) As an 18F employee, I can't speak for USDS, but I know 18F can (and does, I think) employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor). I've also never taken a drug test.
- rdl 11y ago
  Ah! It probably depends a lot on role. Good to know.
  - dnesting 11y ago
    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.

ritchiea 11y ago

I really wanted to work for the digital service and my experience applying was horrendous. The recruiter scheduled an appointment to call me and didn't at the scheduled time. She followed up weeks later and I finally got my phone screen. Phone interview went well, she said we would schedule another interview. The followup from her didn't happen until another month later. Then I had a technical interview where the interviewer talked over me and asked whether I would use a list or an array for a particular data structure, to which I replied I use Ruby & Python so I don't know what you're asking because it would be a question of semantics, to which he finally clarified he meant a linked list and chided me for not "knowing the difference between the properties of a linked list and an array." How can you expect me to know the difference between two data structures if you're using unclear shorthand to refer to one of them? And the interviewer was an ex-Google engineer so I imagine he had some familiarity with Python (where a "List" is what many languages refer to as an array) since it's an official Google language. And then of course I didn't get the job (and no feedback on why). The whole thing was maddening, took 3 months total just to get railroaded by an aggressive and imprecise technical interviewer. It sounds like great work though, wish them the best of luck. Wish I could work on their projects.

bliti 11y ago
Sounds like the typical technical interview.
- ritchiea 11y ago
  Yes I would say it's typical. But they also say their challenge is getting good technologists into government. So if they believe they have difficulty hiring (which is their public stance) why not adopt a more candidate friendly process? And I'm not saying I necessarily would have gotten the job otherwise, who knows, but I do feel like they wasted a lot of time, strung things out over months and then didn't give me a good opportunity to show them my abilities.
  - bliti 11y ago
    Agree with you. Government work has not been very popular with programmers. Working for "the man" is not something that is generally sought after. Ideals are strong in this young industry. Dunno if they should try and work as a startup. They are a not a business, nor can they operate like one.

navahq 11y ago

If this resonated with you, check out: Mikey Dickerson (head of USDS) at SXSW: Why we need you in government https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw-why-we-need-you-in-government-f31dab3263a0 https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw... Previous HN discussion on USDS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819

binoyxj 11y ago

Here's Todd Park's (White House Technology Advisor) talk during the recently concluded Twilio Signal devcon. He's then followed by the co-founder of Twilio, newest avenger in the USDS team https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s

paulsmith 11y ago

At the risk of being self-promotional, there's another part of the rebel alliance of which USDS and 18F are the main players, and that is better technology contractors. ("Better" meaning, engineering practices and outcomes that the audience of this site would recognize.) There's Nava, and the company I co-founded, Ad Hoc. Greg and I were on the original HealthCare.gov rescue squad with Mikey et. al. We're still working on HealthCare.gov, but instead of helping to prop up the bad old code (which was necessary work to save the site and help actual people), we're rebuilding parts of the site from scratch, using things like Go, AWS, Angular. During the last open enrollment period over the winter, our code (healthcare.gov/see-plans/) had 100% uptime, served ~ half a billion page views, and had a mean response time of well under 100ms. (And _no_ garbage hiding in the 99th percentile.) One thing I'll say about government work -- you're not really breaking new ground, from a technology perspective. (Unless you're at DARPA I suppose.) Don't come into thinking you're going to innovate in some bleeding-edge area. But government was left so far behind the consumer technology curve that basic, competently-executed, well-designed software that's fast is an _enormous_ leap forward. 2008-era web tech is sorely needed across government. In a way, that is the innovation: dependable software that reliably delivers services to people for whose user-experience has never been put on the same playing field as consumer online services. If you're interested in being part of the rebel alliance, and for whatever reason USDS or 18F aren't right for you, consider contracting. There's enormous opportunity to make real change and see your code help others. Believe me, small teams can have a big impact on government, even from outside government. If you want to know more about Ad Hoc, get in touch (http://adhocteam.us/ http://adhocteam.us/). We also have projects with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and state Medicaid programs. I never thought I'd be a government contractor. I did the startup thing, and just happened to get roped into the HealthCare.gov rescue. I can tell you it's sometimes frustrating, but always satisfying work. And there are several avenues in.

brandonb 11y ago
Ad Hoc and Nava are both awesome groups of people!
kalvin 11y ago
Agreed! Thank you for a much improved plan compare :) I do think there's room for innovation-- we just have to implement reliable software first. Piling on: If you're interested in being an early employee at a growth startup working with the government, check out Nava! (I work for Nava) Our hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189

hippich 11y ago

I agree that you should stop complain about anything IT-related in government and instead try to make a change (and complain about, let's say, bogus process of winning government contract) That been said, I don't believe USDS/18F/GSA in big need for engineers from my own experience. So don't afraid to apply :)

ilaksh 11y ago

Technology makes government and other traditional institutions irrelevant. Focus you efforts on decentralizing technologies that replace giant outdated systems entirely. The US government, like all traditional states, is just a really official type of organized crime. The DNA of the state is past its expiration.

u14408885 11y ago

I wonder if there is an equivalent in Australia (or other countries).

robin_reala 11y ago
The DTO in Aus has hired a few ex-GDS employees and seems to be doing good work: https://www.dto.gov.au https://www.dto.gov.au

finkin1 11y ago

According to this talk, the work hours were pretty insane to fix healthcare.gov. From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City, Mikey Dickerson's keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov: Where Are We Now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4

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clebio 11y ago

Honest question, because I can't find it in the copy on the USDS page, but have seen comments here about this: Do you treat this as a job with a certain known tenure, or rather as a sabbatical? It seems like they want specific periods of work, but how does that fit with a regular job where you're vaguely working for a company indefinitely? How does relocating to the DC-metro area fit in with that? Relocation is expensive and a hassle, after all.

TheMagicHorsey 11y ago

We definitely do need better government. But I don't think this digital service thing is going to work out. Early reports from similar programs like the Presidential Fellows program, shows that government bureaucracy is pretty calcified, and the private contractors that provide the current dated technology aren't going to go quietly either. A bunch of young guns parachuting in isn't going to have much effect unless someone with a lot of political capital, spends that capital forcing change. Otherwise, the young guns will just get sidelined. I've talked to people in the Presidential Fellows program, and they get sidelined a lot. Nothing actually changes. And forget about bringing in new, better vendors for government contracts. There is an entire skillset required to bid on and get government contracts, and the people that know how to build good technology, have no idea how to get the contracts. And the people that know how to get the contracts, specialize in that, and have no idea how to build good technology. How do you think that garbage-ass company from Canada (that isn't even allowed to build tech for the Canadian government) gets recruited to build Healthcare.gov at some huge inflated expense. And BTW, you can't even get people in the know to talk about this stuff, because anyone that does is shitting on their own career prospects if they tattle on the system. The Healthcare.gov fix worked because the President supported that intervention. Can every place that Digital Service serves get that kind of support? If it does, then that will be amazing. But I sort of doubt the President can micromanage and give support to a thousand interventions in a thousand different departments, all with their own little fiefdoms.

ekianjo 11y ago

> serving your country Erm. Serving your country does not equal to serving the government. Often the government in place actually has an active role in destroying the country or making it worse. Look at the NSA - are the NSA folks really serving their country or their goverment first ?

forloop 11y ago
Saying, "Help the monied interests who control governments." doesn't sound as convincing. Serving your country/honour/helping the group are rhetorical tools used convince people to sacrifice themselves (their human capital, and sometimes their bodies) for this group. Governments are extremely powerful (obviously), and part of that power comes from co-opting people. A metaphor can be seen in the Matrix. To quote Morpheus: > The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it. The hacker culture is being co-opted wholesale. Technology is powerful—both as an economic driver and a competitive advantage against other groups—, so it's not unexpected that the human capital which are tech savvy are targeted. People can't be forced to do anything—unless they break the law at which point they will have the full force of law brought down upon them, with no mercy applied (if members of the gov choose!). As such, people with skills need to be convinced to work with government, and that's where the rhetorical tools are implemented. When you read comments about how governments help the people they preside over, you're reading the grass-roots propaganda from those which Morpheus talks of. The businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, coders! Do as you like, but it's important to know the message conveyed in the blog post is from a member of the business-class who has been fully co-opted, and doesn't follow the very advice he gives! And why would he? It's much more profitable (in the board sense of the word) to use his platform as a tool of marketing and persuasion for said establishment—I.e. getting others to make sacrifices, so those with control can live with impunity and in-group-largess (with the cost borne by society).
superuser2 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

I attended one of the UKs GDS road shows this week. I have been trying on and off for a while to get better OSS into local government (http://www.oss4gov.org http://www.oss4gov.org) and am impressed still by the focus there is in government in doing the right thing. The big wins they are having is enforcing OSS licenses for bespoke development, pooling purchasing into rolling 6-9 month call-off frameworks and generally waving the agile and cheaper flags. I am not convinced that the idea of a sort of Peace Corps couple of years will be the solution - if we get government software based on an infrastructure of OSS then it's likely both private and public developers will be familiar with those Eco systems anyway.

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javadocmd 11y ago

Is anyone aware of any similar programs in the charity space? I would imagine there are charitable organizations out there in need of some solid tech but lacking the infrastructure to build it.

worldadventurer 11y ago

Sam wrote "I often get asked about what people can do for a year or two to make a big impact between projects." If the US government isn't the right fit (especially if you're not an American), consider doing a Fellowship with a non-profit which may also have a big impact. MovingWorlds.org is one place to find those opportunities. We (engageSPARK, a not-for-profit business building the "Twilio for non-techies" for NGOs & Governments) also have a Fellowship program: https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join . :)