10 ms·

The federal government hires a team of young, talented, motivated engineers and managers, puts them in charge of failed software projects, gives them the resour

by cs702 10y ago

The federal government hires a team of young, talented, motivated engineers and managers, puts them in charge of failed software projects, gives them the resources and authority they require to turns things around, and -- surprise! -- it turns out they do a GREAT job. In hindsight, this shouldn't be too surprising. What might be surprising is that the same logic should apply to ALL government functions, not just software development. Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? Who says we can't devise better systems and/or mechanisms (e.g., market-based mechanisms) for attracting and retaining great people in government? Throughout history, there are examples of government bureaucracies that have been reasonably well run, in some cases for centuries. The Habsburg empire, in particular, comes to mind: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/habsburg-empire-territories-europe-have-higher-trust-in-justice-systems-a6893946.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/habsburg-empi...

vonmoltke 10y ago
> Why do government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? Because lots of people, inside and outside of government, derive significant money, power, or both from government dysfunction. A classic case of goal misalignment.
- mtbcoder 10y ago
  To provide a quote from the article: ..two lobbyists who managed to find their way onto the five-person panel testifying. They represented the interests of traditional IT contractors, who seem to believe it is their right to overcharge taxpayers for complex computer systems that don’t work. Even though, as one congressperson at the hearing put it, those special interests are likely to view the USDS and 18F “with a jaundiced eye,” they were given the opportunity to seize on the authority issue as a way to cast doubts on the Obama tech surge.
- GVIrish 10y ago
  That's part of it. Back in the mid-nineties the idea that the private sector could do government functions cheaper/better really took hold and the result is that whole core sets of responsibilities are almost completed outsourced to contractors. That in turn has made lobbyists and recently retired senior government and military employees wealthy when they join those same contractors. However, a problem that has been around a long time is that it is difficult to fire government people for under performance so you have some people in positions of power crippling a whole host of IT efforts through their incompetence. That's not so much about money, it's just that the dead wood is hard to get rid of.
- dmreedy 10y ago
  I think that's part of it, but there's also the facet that a lot of people just...don't care. Families, hobbies, etc are all valid reasons to live for outside of your employment. If the majority do just enough to get by and not get fired (which, as pointed out in other comments, is a pretty low bar in the government, as it is in many large large companies), then the system eventually converges into a sort of homeostasis of mediocrity, which is viciously self-preserving [1]. --- [1] these together are pieces of Yudkowsy's revision of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to an enormous complicated System full of conflicting incentives getting stuck in a weird equilibrium. When that weird equilibrium is crushing people in its gears... We see a broken watch and infer a Watchbreaker."
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  This is the default for large human organizations. The differences are merely shades of the same color. Also, the purpose of any bureaucracy is self preservation. The government is a complex adaptive system with almost no external signaling from it's environment. It's an extreme example of how large companies behave when they have no external pressures (competition). Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it produces. I know gov't waste is appalling but you should expect it until selection pressures are applied from the outside. Contrast NASA 1969 vs. 1986 and you'll get what I mean.
jbooth 10y ago
If you're comparing to the paper bureaucracies of yore, our bureaucracy isn't even that bad. I mean, look at the size of the country and the number of functions, they ran that on PAPER until the 70s-80s? The problem with the software transition is that they're sticking with the "hire a HIGH TECH contractor" approach rather than the "hire some coders to work inside the business" approach. Compare SAP/Oracle products to internally developed line-of-business software.
liyanchang 10y ago
Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. So in my admittedly short time in the government [0], I've witnessed how all of these problems are due to good intentions. That's what makes this all really tough because everything you think is bonkers actually has a reason. The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rule. The fact that it takes some projects years to deploy is that we would like to plan and make sure that every resource is well-spent, that it's in a number of languages and accessible to the blind. It makes it hard for everyone - I've met lots of smart talented civil servants and government contractors who want to do things differently but have their hands tied behind their back. [0] 2 years feels like forever to me but flash in the pan to many of the dedicated civil servants I've met.
- cs702 10y ago
  Thank you for posting here. The same logic applies to all those regulations that seem bonkers. If you think of all those regulations as a type of source code (which dictates what government employees and citizens can and cannot do, when, and under what conditions), it's clear that a lot of regulatory code needs major refactoring. To use your example with travel regulations, those 1400 pages designed to prevent fraud likely consist primarily of thousands upon thousands of assertions and if-then statements. I wonder if it would be possible to reduce them to, say, a few dozen pages -- by refactoring all that 'regulatory code' to use different, higher-level abstractions.
  - tonysdg 10y ago
    My guess is that most of those 1400 pages consist of the corner cases - things that will 95% of the time never pop up, but when they do will wreak havoc unless properly dealt with. Granted, I'm not sure travel fraud can wreak that much havoc, but I'm sure someone somewhere gets annoyed over it. My (admittedly limited) experience in coding/engineering has taught me that it's unwise to look at technical problems and people problems in the same light; the former can be solved much easier than the latter. The trick is to figure out where you can solve the former to avoid the latter!
whybroke 10y ago
>...young... This the first and presumably most important requirement in you opinion? Interesting. May I ask, how did you extrpolate it was a property of the team at all let alone responsible for its success let alone the first component of that success?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Young people are mobile, few obligations, and can easily live 4-6 in a rental townhouse in DC for two years while making below market rates.
- jdeibele 10y ago
  As an old guy, I have other committments besides work. Family, non-profits, etc. It's helpful not to have to worry about those things as well as moving across the country for a lot less pay in a job that might not succeed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - whybroke 10y ago
    But flexibility, adventurousness, low pay were not listed in the parent post, just age. Indeed, you can easily insert any idea not actually mentioned post hoc. It's especially easy to insert unsupported but widely believed justifications. For that matter, you could extrapolate that dietary habits or music taste somehow result in less time eating and more team unity if you're absolutely set on justifying a weak assumption or policy. But particularly one would think the fact they they are not all actually young would be somehow taken into account before justifying they claim that it's the premier attribute to enumerate.
- liyanchang 10y ago
  Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. We hire for experience, which comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Based on my personal observations, the team is actually the most diverse team I've ever worked on by a number of dimensions. We've pulled folks from retirement, others who are chronologically younger but have been contributing to Python and Debian for years, those who have uprooted their family. The job is an incredible mix - it requires being able to debug a slow performing database index one moment, briefing a deputy secretary the next, all while empowering the other federal employees and contractors to do great things. I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to link to our hiring page. https://www.usds.gov/join https://www.usds.gov/join I do recognize that there are lots of talented folks that aren't able to move to DC or can't make it work for a variety of reasons. That's okay. There are many other ways to contribute to our country [0] - working for state/local government, volunteering in your community, being a good parent, inventing the next breakthrough, actually using your turn signals, and many more. [0] Yes I recognize that not everyone here is US based. Though the point actually is probably true for all countries.
pc86 10y ago
What does youth have to do with anything?
chatmasta 10y ago
Some government functions are intentionally poorly run. See the recent FOIA debacle, for instance.
- travmatt 10y ago
  On the flip side, republicans try to sabotage the functioning of many agencies so that they can then complain that the private sector would be a better fit. This has been their MO towards the Post Office for longer than I've been alive, and have been diligently working to undermine social security in the hopes that may be privatized as well. It's the 'starve the beast' strategy on a larger scale.
glup 10y ago
> Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? I'm not sure how to test this empirically, but it's always seemed to me that these are the inefficiencies that emerge with scale and incredibly broad objectives—and that the federal gov't actually does a decent job considering. Remind which company has 320m consumers, annual revenue of 6.7 trillion, and 2.8m (non-uniformed) employees? The federal government is 10x the size of IBM—it can't be agile. That said, tech is in general not a strong suit for gov't agencies—and it needs to be both 1) for planning, analysis, logistics and 2) for dissemination of information to citizens about what the agency does.
- PKop 10y ago
  This is an argument for refactoring into smaller modules. Decentralization. Local and state government taking on more responsibilities, with the added benefit of forcing competition and choice among citizens vs. one-size-fits-all policy.
  - leg 10y ago
    Except that state and local governments are mostly more corrupt, more poorly run, and less well supervised by the voters.
    - stvswn 10y ago
      Care to provide evidence for such a claim?
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        Well, I'll do a bit of it. Voting rates for local/state elections are awful, and only rise when they share a ballot with national elections. 'Special districts' are a legal fiction helpful for organizing things like sensible fire department jurisdictions, but they've become a way to ensure that there are few or even no voters for a specific issue, and to minimize state oversight of a given budget. Lobbying groups and special interests may influence national bills, but they write state and local bills, often getting their "sample texts" passed completely unchanged. John Oliver has covered all three of those topics, but I could dig up real sources if you actually doubt them. I wouldn't care to speak to the fraud claim, but surely it isn't controversial that voter engagement is lower - and N dollars of corporate spending buy more influence - when the stakes are lower?
maxxxxx 10y ago
"gives them the resources and authority they require to turns things around" They probably could have given the same resources and authority to the existing staff and they might have turned things around too. It really annoys me that in so many cases the existing guys know what's wrong but are not allowed by management to do anything about it. Then management hires new people, gives them authority, and suddenly these guys are heroes and the existing people look like idiots. There seems to be this tendency to think that existent workers are all idiots and the only way to do better is to hire new people (preferably young and from ivy league schools). In reality it's a leadership problem because they have set up dysfunctional environments that don't allow people to perform.
- liyanchang 10y ago
  Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. We are very proud to be working along side the existing agency and contracting staff. You are right that many times, they do know how to fix it and need some help from us getting management to let them do it. Some times they are skeptical, sometimes there is friction - that's all completely understandable. Ultimately, my time in government has opened my eyes to the talented folks inside government right now and I'm proud to be working along side them. I hope you didn't get a poor impression of us and the work that is happening.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    I didn't mean to offend you at all. USDS is great. I just see this dismissive attitude of existing staff by management. But in reality it's management that messed things up, not staff.
    - liyanchang 10y ago
      Thanks. I appreciate that. I think you actually have a keen eye for the issues. Since my time in government, I've become more sympathetic to agency employees, contractors, management - pretty much everyone. The entire environment is really challenging to do the right thing. As an executive, the typical tools you have at your disposal, budget and HR, are circumscribed by congressional appropriations and federal hiring guidelines. Your ability to promote and demote and reorganize are limited by laws and unions and you definitely can't grant stock options. The metrics that you typically use to measure success are much fuzzier because there isn't a PNL but it's really easy for the press to find a single case where your org does a poor job. I still maintain hope that good things can be done - I have seen it - and good management makes a huge difference. Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions.
BurningFrog 10y ago
> Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? They don't have to, and some are run quite well. The actual problem is that they don't have to be well run to thrive, since they operate in a monopoly environment.

by cs702 10y ago

vonmoltke 10y ago

> Why do government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? Because lots of people, inside and outside of government, derive significant money, power, or both from government dysfunction. A classic case of goal misalignment.

mtbcoder 10y ago
To provide a quote from the article: ..two lobbyists who managed to find their way onto the five-person panel testifying. They represented the interests of traditional IT contractors, who seem to believe it is their right to overcharge taxpayers for complex computer systems that don’t work. Even though, as one congressperson at the hearing put it, those special interests are likely to view the USDS and 18F “with a jaundiced eye,” they were given the opportunity to seize on the authority issue as a way to cast doubts on the Obama tech surge.
GVIrish 10y ago
That's part of it. Back in the mid-nineties the idea that the private sector could do government functions cheaper/better really took hold and the result is that whole core sets of responsibilities are almost completed outsourced to contractors. That in turn has made lobbyists and recently retired senior government and military employees wealthy when they join those same contractors. However, a problem that has been around a long time is that it is difficult to fire government people for under performance so you have some people in positions of power crippling a whole host of IT efforts through their incompetence. That's not so much about money, it's just that the dead wood is hard to get rid of.
dmreedy 10y ago
I think that's part of it, but there's also the facet that a lot of people just...don't care. Families, hobbies, etc are all valid reasons to live for outside of your employment. If the majority do just enough to get by and not get fired (which, as pointed out in other comments, is a pretty low bar in the government, as it is in many large large companies), then the system eventually converges into a sort of homeostasis of mediocrity, which is viciously self-preserving [1]. --- [1] these together are pieces of Yudkowsy's revision of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to an enormous complicated System full of conflicting incentives getting stuck in a weird equilibrium. When that weird equilibrium is crushing people in its gears... We see a broken watch and infer a Watchbreaker."
ryanmarsh 10y ago
This is the default for large human organizations. The differences are merely shades of the same color. Also, the purpose of any bureaucracy is self preservation. The government is a complex adaptive system with almost no external signaling from it's environment. It's an extreme example of how large companies behave when they have no external pressures (competition). Every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it produces. I know gov't waste is appalling but you should expect it until selection pressures are applied from the outside. Contrast NASA 1969 vs. 1986 and you'll get what I mean.

jbooth 10y ago

If you're comparing to the paper bureaucracies of yore, our bureaucracy isn't even that bad. I mean, look at the size of the country and the number of functions, they ran that on PAPER until the 70s-80s? The problem with the software transition is that they're sticking with the "hire a HIGH TECH contractor" approach rather than the "hire some coders to work inside the business" approach. Compare SAP/Oracle products to internally developed line-of-business software.

liyanchang 10y ago

Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. So in my admittedly short time in the government [0], I've witnessed how all of these problems are due to good intentions. That's what makes this all really tough because everything you think is bonkers actually has a reason. The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rule. The fact that it takes some projects years to deploy is that we would like to plan and make sure that every resource is well-spent, that it's in a number of languages and accessible to the blind. It makes it hard for everyone - I've met lots of smart talented civil servants and government contractors who want to do things differently but have their hands tied behind their back. [0] 2 years feels like forever to me but flash in the pan to many of the dedicated civil servants I've met.

cs702 10y ago
Thank you for posting here. The same logic applies to all those regulations that seem bonkers. If you think of all those regulations as a type of source code (which dictates what government employees and citizens can and cannot do, when, and under what conditions), it's clear that a lot of regulatory code needs major refactoring. To use your example with travel regulations, those 1400 pages designed to prevent fraud likely consist primarily of thousands upon thousands of assertions and if-then statements. I wonder if it would be possible to reduce them to, say, a few dozen pages -- by refactoring all that 'regulatory code' to use different, higher-level abstractions.
- tonysdg 10y ago
  My guess is that most of those 1400 pages consist of the corner cases - things that will 95% of the time never pop up, but when they do will wreak havoc unless properly dealt with. Granted, I'm not sure travel fraud can wreak that much havoc, but I'm sure someone somewhere gets annoyed over it. My (admittedly limited) experience in coding/engineering has taught me that it's unwise to look at technical problems and people problems in the same light; the former can be solved much easier than the latter. The trick is to figure out where you can solve the former to avoid the latter!

whybroke 10y ago

>...young... This the first and presumably most important requirement in you opinion? Interesting. May I ask, how did you extrpolate it was a property of the team at all let alone responsible for its success let alone the first component of that success?

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Young people are mobile, few obligations, and can easily live 4-6 in a rental townhouse in DC for two years while making below market rates.
jdeibele 10y ago
As an old guy, I have other committments besides work. Family, non-profits, etc. It's helpful not to have to worry about those things as well as moving across the country for a lot less pay in a job that might not succeed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- whybroke 10y ago
  But flexibility, adventurousness, low pay were not listed in the parent post, just age. Indeed, you can easily insert any idea not actually mentioned post hoc. It's especially easy to insert unsupported but widely believed justifications. For that matter, you could extrapolate that dietary habits or music taste somehow result in less time eating and more team unity if you're absolutely set on justifying a weak assumption or policy. But particularly one would think the fact they they are not all actually young would be somehow taken into account before justifying they claim that it's the premier attribute to enumerate.
liyanchang 10y ago
Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. We hire for experience, which comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Based on my personal observations, the team is actually the most diverse team I've ever worked on by a number of dimensions. We've pulled folks from retirement, others who are chronologically younger but have been contributing to Python and Debian for years, those who have uprooted their family. The job is an incredible mix - it requires being able to debug a slow performing database index one moment, briefing a deputy secretary the next, all while empowering the other federal employees and contractors to do great things. I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to link to our hiring page. https://www.usds.gov/join https://www.usds.gov/join I do recognize that there are lots of talented folks that aren't able to move to DC or can't make it work for a variety of reasons. That's okay. There are many other ways to contribute to our country [0] - working for state/local government, volunteering in your community, being a good parent, inventing the next breakthrough, actually using your turn signals, and many more. [0] Yes I recognize that not everyone here is US based. Though the point actually is probably true for all countries.

pc86 10y ago

What does youth have to do with anything?

chatmasta 10y ago

Some government functions are intentionally poorly run. See the recent FOIA debacle, for instance.

travmatt 10y ago
On the flip side, republicans try to sabotage the functioning of many agencies so that they can then complain that the private sector would be a better fit. This has been their MO towards the Post Office for longer than I've been alive, and have been diligently working to undermine social security in the hopes that may be privatized as well. It's the 'starve the beast' strategy on a larger scale.

glup 10y ago

> Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? I'm not sure how to test this empirically, but it's always seemed to me that these are the inefficiencies that emerge with scale and incredibly broad objectives—and that the federal gov't actually does a decent job considering. Remind which company has 320m consumers, annual revenue of 6.7 trillion, and 2.8m (non-uniformed) employees? The federal government is 10x the size of IBM—it can't be agile. That said, tech is in general not a strong suit for gov't agencies—and it needs to be both 1) for planning, analysis, logistics and 2) for dissemination of information to citizens about what the agency does.

PKop 10y ago
This is an argument for refactoring into smaller modules. Decentralization. Local and state government taking on more responsibilities, with the added benefit of forcing competition and choice among citizens vs. one-size-fits-all policy.
- leg 10y ago
  Except that state and local governments are mostly more corrupt, more poorly run, and less well supervised by the voters.
  - stvswn 10y ago
    Care to provide evidence for such a claim?
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      Well, I'll do a bit of it. Voting rates for local/state elections are awful, and only rise when they share a ballot with national elections. 'Special districts' are a legal fiction helpful for organizing things like sensible fire department jurisdictions, but they've become a way to ensure that there are few or even no voters for a specific issue, and to minimize state oversight of a given budget. Lobbying groups and special interests may influence national bills, but they write state and local bills, often getting their "sample texts" passed completely unchanged. John Oliver has covered all three of those topics, but I could dig up real sources if you actually doubt them. I wouldn't care to speak to the fraud claim, but surely it isn't controversial that voter engagement is lower - and N dollars of corporate spending buy more influence - when the stakes are lower?

maxxxxx 10y ago

"gives them the resources and authority they require to turns things around" They probably could have given the same resources and authority to the existing staff and they might have turned things around too. It really annoys me that in so many cases the existing guys know what's wrong but are not allowed by management to do anything about it. Then management hires new people, gives them authority, and suddenly these guys are heroes and the existing people look like idiots. There seems to be this tendency to think that existent workers are all idiots and the only way to do better is to hire new people (preferably young and from ivy league schools). In reality it's a leadership problem because they have set up dysfunctional environments that don't allow people to perform.

liyanchang 10y ago
Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. We are very proud to be working along side the existing agency and contracting staff. You are right that many times, they do know how to fix it and need some help from us getting management to let them do it. Some times they are skeptical, sometimes there is friction - that's all completely understandable. Ultimately, my time in government has opened my eyes to the talented folks inside government right now and I'm proud to be working along side them. I hope you didn't get a poor impression of us and the work that is happening.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  I didn't mean to offend you at all. USDS is great. I just see this dismissive attitude of existing staff by management. But in reality it's management that messed things up, not staff.
  - liyanchang 10y ago
    Thanks. I appreciate that. I think you actually have a keen eye for the issues. Since my time in government, I've become more sympathetic to agency employees, contractors, management - pretty much everyone. The entire environment is really challenging to do the right thing. As an executive, the typical tools you have at your disposal, budget and HR, are circumscribed by congressional appropriations and federal hiring guidelines. Your ability to promote and demote and reorganize are limited by laws and unions and you definitely can't grant stock options. The metrics that you typically use to measure success are much fuzzier because there isn't a PNL but it's really easy for the press to find a single case where your org does a poor job. I still maintain hope that good things can be done - I have seen it - and good management makes a huge difference. Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions.

BurningFrog 10y ago

> Who says government projects and agencies have to be poorly run? They don't have to, and some are run quite well. The actual problem is that they don't have to be well run to thrive, since they operate in a monopoly environment.