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This will fail not because it's a bad idea, but because the government will reject it. Contrary to popular belief, established universities do a very effective

• Upvoter33 6y ago
  "(1) the government, with few exceptions, is a TERRIBLE place to build effective tech skills. Slow, heavily outsourced, bureaucratic beyond belief, and low paid, there is very little creativity and variety in which to build unique technology, and no reward for the BS." Strong claim; links or citations to back it up? (Not necessarily doubting you, but it sounds a bit like a right-wing talking point, and hence I ask) You're right about pay problems, though. With public sector jobs, you have to do it for the calling, not the bottom-line cash (imho).
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    I think the null hypothesis is more useful here; assume that NOWHERE builds tech skills until otherwise demonstrated. What you see: a bunch of tech startups founded by ex-Google, ex-FB, ex-Amazon employees. What you never see: hot tech startups founded by ex-government bureaucrats At very best/worst, you get beltway contractors who have "skills" at extracting money from the government. Those contractor firms NEVER end up selling back to private industry, because they have nothing to offer. I think that this is one of those cases where "citation needed" is a way to avoid the blindingly obvious truth of the statement. No, we haven't done a controlled experiment on the government vs private enterprise in skill creation. Sometimes you have to use common sense and obvious experience.
    • antimeridian 6y ago
      i don't know that I would use "founded a tech startup" as a good proxy for skill creation. perhaps the type of people who acquire tech skills in government are aren't necessarily primed to found a startup
      • nitrogen 6y ago
        To elaborate on this, it's conceivable that startups come from tech giants not because of tech skill, but rather because of confidence and connections.
    • curiousllama 6y ago
      To be fair, most DO in fact sell back to private sector (Booz Allen, Mckinsey, Accenture), just not back to tech companies. I've found tech maturity is more a function of age and context than public/private.
    • bumby 6y ago
      Although I wouldn't be surprised if there's data to support what you stated, I also thin it's possible there are other confounding attributes. Many government employees are motivated by different factors. Somebody who is motivated by pay would likely gravitate towards the private sector and starting their own business. Somebody motivated by service may be more apt to apply to government jobs. For instance, I would seriously doubt mathematicians who work for intelligence agencies are lower-skilled; this is probably an occupation that selects for other traits. I am also aware of a LOT of former government employees who start their own companies but it's not clear how much of their success is due to skills vs. network effects.
    • wolco 6y ago
      In fairness getting vc money for government contracts is the problem not the employees who start companies. Long lead times don't go well with the pump and dump vc funding model.
• deleted 6y ago
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• 95_JL_OK 6y ago
  I'd tack onto the first point: obsolete technology everywhere. Worked in the public sector for a short while and the amount of outdated tech being used is astounding. Some of the solutions being discussed as "new" have been outdated for decades. Having to deal with overwhelming bureaucracy in exchange for working on what everywhere else would be legacy systems really killed any desire to stay.
  • nitrogen 6y ago
    The most important aspect of any technology is that it works. In that regard, functioning "legacy" systems are ideal systems. The legacy bureaucracies are the problem. Kind of like SpaceX popularizing rocket reuse, we should think of older code, languages, and frameworks as "battle tested", not "legacy". They should only be replaced if it's clear that essential maintenance is not possible, if a critical requirement isn't being met by the old system and will confidently be met by a new one, or if it can be demonstrated that a new system will save more money than improving the old one.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      But we should refactor it into a functional programming language with microservices running in containers because... resume-driven development. I do agree that many organizations accumulate so much cruft they have trouble getting out of their own way. But the flip side of rewriting things for reasons isn't necessarily better.
    • 95_JL_OK 6y ago
      Absolutely... in the situation where the systems are actually legacy systems and not new installations or adoptions of obsolete technology. What I was trying to get at, and realize I expressed poorly, was that they are sometimes looking at implementing (today) things which are obsolete. That's what I meant by 'would be legacy anywhere else'. This, I guess, would be a consequence of legacy bureaucracy, given that the people making the calls are not very aware of the new technologies and their advantages. A reluctance to adopt Python for example out of a distrust of FOSS comes to mind.
• jayparth 6y ago
  I mean... "The Department of Innovative Technology" is kind of what the USDS is. It's ran by very competent people, and do short "tours of duty" with competent SV engineers instead of long-term, safe, bureaucratic jobs. Here's a podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXN7fRTVds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXN7fRTVds I think you're misinformed on the topic, but that's OK. I assumed it was a typical government agency until I got further information, and then I changed my mind. Will you change your mind?
  • Jtsummers 6y ago
    I'll reiterate my point from another post: It is not a lack of talent, it is a lack of good governance/administration that causes most software/IT failures for the government. USDS is actually pretty cool, and they seem to be doing really great work. But they're a small part of the system. In order to actually improve software/IT within the government we need to fix a lot of small problems. Here are some more: Just the universal waste within the way government treats software acquisition. If you ran a private company and you had small teams (each less than 10) going out and individually buying a software system, say half of them end up buying small-team licenses for Visual Studio as an example, you'd want to murder someone. They could save 20-40% by combining all purchases under a common contract. Or instead of hiring an actual system administrator, the new guy gets tasked with managing in-house servers. Oh, but it's not one person for an office of 1k, it's every small team of 5-15 people dedicating one person to manage 1-5 servers. Servers that could, mostly, be shared across teams and so instead of 100 admins you could probably get by with 10-20 full-time and trained admins, along with a fraction of the servers and a fraction of the software cost. The US government does this all the time because there is little-to-no communication involved. What's hilarious(ly sad) is that I've seen this where the purchases went through the same purchasing officer. A bunch of teams all buying expensive (because of scale) licenses when they could've combined them into one joint contract. Millions wasted a year doing crap like this even in smaller branches. Fix the crap like that and then USDS's model can become effective and universal. Until then, there is so much waste abounding within the way US government does software/IT that it will always be a joke.
    • wslack 6y ago
• natalyarostova 6y ago
  Classic modern HN comment. The hard working person with a history of success who is trying a risky ambitious project will fail, because they didn't consider the few things a commentor instantly spotted as problems.
  • curiousllama 6y ago
    Yea, that's fair. I should - I do! - commend the effort. Some good things here: (1) It's good to try to solve problems. (2) There is a shortage of tech talent in the country (3) Eric Schmidt is very smart. Sure as heck smarter than me. Still - from my admittedly-limited vantage point, I can name a four people with degrees in public policy and CS (or similar) that tried and failed to get good jobs in government, so they took $150k+ tech jobs in the private sector instead. So seeing someone saying "the problem with government tech is one of pipeline" is jarring to say the least.
    • natalyarostova 6y ago
      :)
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    It is not a few things, but rather one of the core reasons governments cannot do technology well.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • zjaffee 6y ago
    Except in the world of education there's been a substantial amount of people without their own direct experience in the field who've put out claims that they can materially change things when they have been completely unable to do so time and time again. I do see value for an institution described as such in this post, but much more on the research side of things with a secondary focus on should a new branch of the military be established to focus specifically on cyber issues, such an institution could become valuable in the same vain as something like west point.
• bsanr2 6y ago
  I wonder if you may be discounting the value of a pipeline that's presumably going to be substantially less expensive than going to a private university. Perhaps one of the goals here is to flood the government tech sector with new personnel who have been indoctrinated to expect a certain culture, in such a way that the existing structure won't be able to resist changing. If you and your entire cohort have an n-year commitment, and all of you are saying, "No, this is too slow, don't outsource that we need to do it ourselves, that's not the right tech we need to use this," eventually something gives.
  • curiousllama 6y ago
    This is a very good point. A university to transition Business Analysts into junior data scientists or HR reps into HR analysts, train managers in tech fundamentals, and upskill SWEs in security or new tech would be SUPER valuable.
    • tootahe45 6y ago
      Its called the internet. This new tech even enables you to learn things as you need to, often for free, instead of packing in 4 years of stuff then trying to remember it later.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Slow, heavily outsourced, bureaucratic beyond belief, and low paid, there is very little creativity and variety in which to build unique technology, and no reward for the BS. Currently a public sector tech worker, although in Canada. We can recruit some great people as although the salaries are not FAANG, they are pretty good for people who don't live in cities with that. Problem is, they don't give raises or if they do, the raises are tiny. I earned 10,000 more choosing a government job over other offers where I am. I have been in the role 11 months. Recruiters are consistently offering 10,000 more than what I make now. Guess how long the average person stays? Just over one year. If I quit my current department and went to a different government, I could get that 10,000 dollar raise and if I quit after another 1-2 years there to another government department, I would probably hit near the maximum bracket for tech work in the government unless I took a lead position. Government also doesn't recruit people out of school for tech unless they have a full slate of internships. You need at least one year of experience to join. So there is this narrow 2-3 year in your career window where government work can make sense. So not only are you kind of forced out fairly early in your career, but they incentivize spreading your time among many different departments as that is the only time you can get a big salary jump. Plus all the other things you say are true. Decisions take months for anything.
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  I agree with you. And that's not even the only problem...