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Governments can never provide value like this, government is not a business! Sometimes this trade off is worthwhile. I'd like to have my housefire put out in a

Governments can never provide value like this, government is not a business! Sometimes this trade off is worthwhile. I'd like to have my housefire put out in a timely fashion. I will sacrifice some of my income for this. However, the idea that the government can become some kind of silicon valley startup is just absurd. I can't believe as taxpayers we are forced at gunpoint to fund these ridiculous ideas. And people wonder why we are 20 trillion in debt and our currency is being devalued every year.

wpietri 10y ago
This is actually intended as a cost-saving measure. Government IT is enormously snarled. Quite a lot of money is spent on outdated systems and giant contracts with enormous overruns. Very few people with serious technical chops actually want to work for the government as a lifetime career choice. The theory of 18F is that you bring in high-grade technical talent for 2-4 year stints. You have them jump in to help unsnarl knotty problems, using approaches that are obvious to we Silicon Valley types but not widely adopted in government IT circles. I know all this because a couple of years back I interviewed with them. I decided to stay in private industry, as I didn't want to leave SF. But they have a lot of really smart and dedicated people who want to change the way the US government does technology, making it faster, cheaper, and more effective. So I think the real question is not, "How much was spent?" but "How much did they save?" That's a harder question to answer, but I think it's the only real way to evaluate 18F as an initiative.
will_hughes 10y ago
I believe the idea is less that "the government can become some kind of silicon valley startup" and more that "the government can get tech projects done without involving outside contractors who deliver shit product and charge absurdly high consulting fees" The big consulting firms have zero interest in encouraging good quality development. They will happily sell you another SAP/whatever system that has a few features that match whatever some set of inexperienced managers say they want, and then spend the next five years customising it for every request. They get paid on the number of hours, and the number of hours goes up the more complicated something is, so they have zero problem with the number of stakeholders and meetings and revisions going up, because they bill all of that back. A department like 18F can potentially have a leadership role and say that things should be developed in certain ways (like API standards) and using modern tooling that works across a wider range of devices/browsers/etc.

wpietri 10y ago

This is actually intended as a cost-saving measure. Government IT is enormously snarled. Quite a lot of money is spent on outdated systems and giant contracts with enormous overruns. Very few people with serious technical chops actually want to work for the government as a lifetime career choice. The theory of 18F is that you bring in high-grade technical talent for 2-4 year stints. You have them jump in to help unsnarl knotty problems, using approaches that are obvious to we Silicon Valley types but not widely adopted in government IT circles. I know all this because a couple of years back I interviewed with them. I decided to stay in private industry, as I didn't want to leave SF. But they have a lot of really smart and dedicated people who want to change the way the US government does technology, making it faster, cheaper, and more effective. So I think the real question is not, "How much was spent?" but "How much did they save?" That's a harder question to answer, but I think it's the only real way to evaluate 18F as an initiative.

will_hughes 10y ago

I believe the idea is less that "the government can become some kind of silicon valley startup" and more that "the government can get tech projects done without involving outside contractors who deliver shit product and charge absurdly high consulting fees" The big consulting firms have zero interest in encouraging good quality development. They will happily sell you another SAP/whatever system that has a few features that match whatever some set of inexperienced managers say they want, and then spend the next five years customising it for every request. They get paid on the number of hours, and the number of hours goes up the more complicated something is, so they have zero problem with the number of stakeholders and meetings and revisions going up, because they bill all of that back. A department like 18F can potentially have a leadership role and say that things should be developed in certain ways (like API standards) and using modern tooling that works across a wider range of devices/browsers/etc.