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I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs. It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the

I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs. It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got. The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.

shizcakes 7y ago
Avoid ageist comments, please.
- joncrane 7y ago
  Well you pretty much have to be 50 to have had the same programming job for 25 years, it's not so much the age as the tenure. But I will take out the age.
  - jlangemeier 7y ago
    I would still say it's pretty shitty to assume that "SV culture" is the only thing that innovates, or innovates quickly, which is what you're implying. There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.
    - renewiltord 7y ago
      That's the culture. The SV innovation is that startups have gestalt views of things not a "management made it like this so I am unable to operate". The bureaucracy and the machinery that supports it is the government culture. People who don't understand this, often don't understand the natural offshoots that come from it: blameless post-mortems, prioritizing falsification, unlimited paid vacation, etc. These all work because the people participating have the culture. The SV startup culture is a full-spectrum ownership thing. If your executive team isn't aiming at the right direction, you tell them that, and if you lose faith in the future as a result you go elsewhere. The executive team always relinquishes its power over you in order to maximize your effectiveness because that's the only thing that matters. Government culture is different. It optimizes in a different constraint space. There has to be visibly equitable hiring, the needs of political expediency require things like "heads to roll", regression is more dangerous than lack of progression, etc. Because of this, government organizations operate differently. They're not inefficient. They're just optimizing to different constraints and they're incredible at doing so. I would hypothesize that you cannot retain SV startup culture at the government for any appreciable amount of time because of the constraint space - much of which is the result of natural law.
  - jlokier 7y ago
    The age probably gives a misleading impression anyway, giving the idea that dynamic, change-the-world things are not done by 50 year olds. But a widely cited statistic (don't know if it's true of course) is that the average age of a founder of a successful startup is 45. https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
- wpietri 7y ago
  Even as an old, I'm not seeing that as ageist. The problem is not somebody with 25 years of experience. It's that they have settled into something comfortable and haven't kept up with 20 years worth of change.
eshyong 7y ago
Or underestimating the bureaucracy of the system. I did some work for a startup that interfaced with the government, and basically the government insists on doing everything in triplicate, getting approval from multiple layers of hierarchy, and does things on a yearly cadence. I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.
- treis 7y ago
  Most large organizations are like this. At the megacorp I used to work for the running joke was that any change, no matter how small, to the legacy systems started at 1 year & 1 million dollars.
- spc476 7y ago
  At work, our customers are the Oligarchist Cell Phone Companies (about three at this time). As I was joking with a higher up about adapting agile programming, it doesn't matter if we're on a two-week sprint when our customer is on a two-year sprint. And yes, it took over two years to get them to adapt a change.
bobthepanda 7y ago
This is not a very charitable view. Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually - they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels - the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be. The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  There seems no way to win with government, unfortunately. If you de-fund it, you get cost cutting, reduced workforce, reduced capability, corruption, and disfunction. If you fully fund it, you get inflated costs, a bloated workforce, inefficiency, waste, grift, and more disfunction. No matter how you fund it, you get disfunction at the end of the day.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    You classify it as strategic readiness and have something like a Core of Engineers do the work. Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      As a minor nitpick, the word is "Corps".
      - mjevans 7y ago
        I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps. "In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps
lonelappde 7y ago
There's nothing about perl that makes it hard to change a mathematical formula for benefits. Not are any "new skills" needed. Just funding to do the work.
- focodev 7y ago
  Is it actually Perl though? I have my money on COBOL which is an entirely different story.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Perl? If only. We're talking COBOL here.

shizcakes 7y ago

Avoid ageist comments, please.

joncrane 7y ago
Well you pretty much have to be 50 to have had the same programming job for 25 years, it's not so much the age as the tenure. But I will take out the age.
- jlangemeier 7y ago
  I would still say it's pretty shitty to assume that "SV culture" is the only thing that innovates, or innovates quickly, which is what you're implying. There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    That's the culture. The SV innovation is that startups have gestalt views of things not a "management made it like this so I am unable to operate". The bureaucracy and the machinery that supports it is the government culture. People who don't understand this, often don't understand the natural offshoots that come from it: blameless post-mortems, prioritizing falsification, unlimited paid vacation, etc. These all work because the people participating have the culture. The SV startup culture is a full-spectrum ownership thing. If your executive team isn't aiming at the right direction, you tell them that, and if you lose faith in the future as a result you go elsewhere. The executive team always relinquishes its power over you in order to maximize your effectiveness because that's the only thing that matters. Government culture is different. It optimizes in a different constraint space. There has to be visibly equitable hiring, the needs of political expediency require things like "heads to roll", regression is more dangerous than lack of progression, etc. Because of this, government organizations operate differently. They're not inefficient. They're just optimizing to different constraints and they're incredible at doing so. I would hypothesize that you cannot retain SV startup culture at the government for any appreciable amount of time because of the constraint space - much of which is the result of natural law.
- jlokier 7y ago
  The age probably gives a misleading impression anyway, giving the idea that dynamic, change-the-world things are not done by 50 year olds. But a widely cited statistic (don't know if it's true of course) is that the average age of a founder of a successful startup is 45. https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
wpietri 7y ago
Even as an old, I'm not seeing that as ageist. The problem is not somebody with 25 years of experience. It's that they have settled into something comfortable and haven't kept up with 20 years worth of change.

eshyong 7y ago

Or underestimating the bureaucracy of the system. I did some work for a startup that interfaced with the government, and basically the government insists on doing everything in triplicate, getting approval from multiple layers of hierarchy, and does things on a yearly cadence. I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.

treis 7y ago
Most large organizations are like this. At the megacorp I used to work for the running joke was that any change, no matter how small, to the legacy systems started at 1 year & 1 million dollars.
spc476 7y ago
At work, our customers are the Oligarchist Cell Phone Companies (about three at this time). As I was joking with a higher up about adapting agile programming, it doesn't matter if we're on a two-week sprint when our customer is on a two-year sprint. And yes, it took over two years to get them to adapt a change.

bobthepanda 7y ago

This is not a very charitable view. Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually - they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels - the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be. The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.

ryandrake 7y ago
There seems no way to win with government, unfortunately. If you de-fund it, you get cost cutting, reduced workforce, reduced capability, corruption, and disfunction. If you fully fund it, you get inflated costs, a bloated workforce, inefficiency, waste, grift, and more disfunction. No matter how you fund it, you get disfunction at the end of the day.
- mjevans 7y ago
  You classify it as strategic readiness and have something like a Core of Engineers do the work. Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    As a minor nitpick, the word is "Corps".
    - mjevans 7y ago
      I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps. "In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps

lonelappde 7y ago

There's nothing about perl that makes it hard to change a mathematical formula for benefits. Not are any "new skills" needed. Just funding to do the work.

focodev 7y ago
Is it actually Perl though? I have my money on COBOL which is an entirely different story.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Perl? If only. We're talking COBOL here.