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As well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lo
by deong 10y ago
As well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lobbying firm.
It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, because well, it's been 20 years, but in my 10 minutes of Googling, here's the first former OTA project lead I managed to find today (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/ http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/).
The OTA was (and should still be) a group of people with the expertise to sythesize a large body of research in a topic. You don't learn those skills making Facebook's "like" button load 20% faster. You learn them by spending a good chunk of your 20s reading thousands of pages of research for your PhD.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoAt the same time, I'd prefer people with practical tech experience, not academics who have rarely experienced solving real world problems (as opposed to theory).
- _-__--- 10y agoI doubt that PhDs from Boeing or FFRDCs are going to real strangers to "real-world research problems."
- toomuchtodo 10y agoAt the same time, are they experienced in CRUD apps? Probably not. Solve the right problem with the right people.
- cududa 10y agoWhat in the world difference would it make if they're familiar with CRUD apps? They're not writing code for government infrastructure
- capote 10y agoThe OTA doesn't need devs and Facebook engineers, they're not developing CRUD apps, and they don't need to know what CRUD is. They need to be well educated, qualified professionals who are capable of advising the government on technology issues that affect the whole population. They need to be well-rounded and capable of seeing things both from many perspectives, including those of tech company engineering departments, federal law, and scientific pursuits.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoThank you! I appreciate the correction!
- jbpetersen 10y agoSounds like sci-fi writers might best fit the bill.
- hga 10y agoA concept used to great effect in the novel Footfall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall
- FussyZeus 10y agoI'm struggling to think of something more irrelevant to the technical needs of legislators than some fad storage technology.
- EdHominem 10y agoIt's not a tech, and that's sort of the point. An analogy might be 'designed an actual building - even a warehouse' when talking about an architect.