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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 a

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.

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.