3 ms·

>There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to y

by asdff 3y ago

>There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation. This is exactly why the private option is just as bad as the apathetic public one: in the end they are the same end result of a less than optimal ui/ux because they come from the same underlying issue of an administration that prefers to either not deal with it appropriately or toss the hot potato to someone else to take the blame of not dealing with it appropriately. I still stand behind my stance that its not impossible to make a good website in house, and that bringing in outside profiteers is always a mistake compared to hiring those same exact project managers with those same exact visions for the website on an internal basis.

solardev 3y ago
But in the end they are not the same result. Recreation.gov is way better than what the agencies tried to do individually, in-house, before. This isn't a hypothetical, it's the actual historical pathway we went through to arrive at this point. Our shitty public option, where it existed at all, was thankfully replaced by a much superior centralized public-private partnership. Those exact same project managers probably would never have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with, dealing with government clearances and pay scales and bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump through their hoops, and that's for someone who's purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded PM even bother? Good web development isn't just about code, but largely culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these issues, much less try to put out good requirements for them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I actually think would be a great idea, like what the United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at private resorts or whatever. If and when our government improves, then yes, we should in-house essential and basic services like web development. But our government doesn't seem to be improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current administration did manage to push through a lot of infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a while without having to think about how shitty the government is!

by asdff 3y ago

solardev 3y ago

But in the end they are not the same result. Recreation.gov is way better than what the agencies tried to do individually, in-house, before. This isn't a hypothetical, it's the actual historical pathway we went through to arrive at this point. Our shitty public option, where it existed at all, was thankfully replaced by a much superior centralized public-private partnership. Those exact same project managers probably would never have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with, dealing with government clearances and pay scales and bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump through their hoops, and that's for someone who's purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded PM even bother? Good web development isn't just about code, but largely culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these issues, much less try to put out good requirements for them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I actually think would be a great idea, like what the United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at private resorts or whatever. If and when our government improves, then yes, we should in-house essential and basic services like web development. But our government doesn't seem to be improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current administration did manage to push through a lot of infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a while without having to think about how shitty the government is!