10 ms·

White House launches “U.S. Digital Service,” with HealthCare.gov fixer at helm

276 points by dctoedt 12y ago

dang 12y ago
There is also http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480. Which article is better?
- dctoedt 12y ago
  I posted the NY Times link. The WaPo article to which 'dang links (which I hadn't seen) goes into more depth and seems to do a better job. The respective headlines undoubtedly made a difference in upvotes here -- the NYT headline, which referenced an ex-Googler, is now near the top of the HN front page, while the (better) WaPo article, posted a few minutes earlier but which didn't mention the SV connection, is languishing with just 1 point. [EDIT: I just upvoted it; it still has just 2 points.]
  - dang 12y ago
    Ok, we've changed the url from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-engineer-to-lead-fix-it-team-for-government-websites.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-engi....
  - rootbear 12y ago
    The WaPo article may be better in terms of the depth of coverage but the writing is awful. Really awful. Misspellings, bad grammar, clumsy phrasing. I suppose the Post thinks that's okay because it's just a blog post and not a "real" news article. Or something. To the point, this new USDS sounds interesting and as a DC area resident, I should probably look into it. I will definitely watch the Youtube video linked to above.
ondrae 12y ago
The Playbook http://playbook.cio.gov/ http://playbook.cio.gov/ and TechFAR http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/ http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/ Both also available on GitHub
incision 12y ago
Great move. In my experience it can be very hard spur change from within Government, but he's coming in at a point high enough that he should be able to simply set the example. Shame I don't know the guy, I'd love to work for him.
- jonathanwallace 12y ago
  This was my first thought as well. Is he hiring? As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.
  - incision 12y ago
    >'Is he hiring?' No idea. I'm thinking 'small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent' suggests something that people would be recruited for and appointed to moreso than traditional positions to be filled. There's of the sort posted for OMB today at least. >'As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.' Your conception is pretty accurate. I think the best shot most of us have at 'making a difference' would be to develop solutions to specific, self-contained (if possible) problems. To look not at what central Government is doing, but at the community-level agencies/programs and what they need. Clinics, libraries, rec centers, public schools and whatnot all have problems which can helped with technology, but you'll need to spend a lot of time, effort and a degree of sneakiness to get anything done.
    - gohrt 12y ago
      Note that the original healthcare.gov-fixers were "Friends of Obama" -- volunteers on Obama's presidential campaign. They have technical chops, but this is still largely patronage.
      - 12y ago
nostrademons 12y ago
I saw MikeyD's tech talk on fixing healthcare.gov on my second-to-last day at Google; it made me very glad that I'd pushed out my end date until mid-week. The key idea in it was just the idea of "show up and try" - that we have all these broken systems because the people with the skills to fix them won't even show up and try. Very inspiring - I thought that it very much demonstrated the entrepreneurial mindset, even if it was the federal government we were talking about. I think this may also be evidence of a trend I've pointed out before, that the press is reliably 2 years late in pointing out where people are leaving Google to go to. I used to periodically glance at the list of departures back when I was at Google. Around late 2012 or mid 2013 I saw a lot more folks start to go into public-sector work: non-profits, academia, or government service. Overall a positive trend, I think.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  Your comment rings sympathetic, and your motivations are unquestionably honorable, but there's still no way I'd even consider "just showing up and trying". I'd show up and try for a $200k salary and some staff to take care of the paperwork and drudgery associated with these government/non-profit jobs. But not for a shit job with shit pay. After all, Google (and the like) pay market rate (well, now that the cartel has been busted), and treat their employees with courtesy and respect. It's well known that the federal government simply DOES NOT pay market rate for talent. Now it is able to get away with that behavior in sectors (cough, banking) where there's consistent regulatory capture: so you're incentivized to spend some years at the government to learn how the system works, and then parlay that into a higher pay job subverting those systems. So the government still gets some rotating talent despite paying absolute shit. But there's no such regulatory capture possible in tech, nor am I interested in going down that path even if it existed (I consider it moderately evil, and am still naively idealist at least in that respect). Look, I'm not solely money grubbing. Money is nice. I grew up without it and now that I have relatively larger quantities of it, my life has unquestionably improved (with luxuries like consistent access to good dentists). I'd eventually like more of it. I'm not short-term greedy. I'm willing to defer compensation for years, if not decades, if I feel that there's potential monetary reward at the end of the line. But from what I see, Mikey Dickerson made a pile of money at first, and thus was free to pursue his political goals of bailing out an incompetent administration that he nevertheless believed in and wanted their signature achievement to succeed. And maybe I'll feel the same once my stock options vest and the mortgage, college tuition, and retirement stockings are stuffed. But don't forget that 99% of the time it's a solid dead end. Mikey was part of a high profile rescue of a high profile failure. But anyone else going in with naive ideals is probably going to get their souls crushed by the sheer drudgery of it, with no Time magazine cover to boost their profiles at the end of it.
dekhn 12y ago
Mikey was my manager for a while. Great guy. I advised him to figure out how to make an impact while his brand was hot, and this is what he ended up deciding on. I hear he doesn't even have to wear a suit all the time, either.
thoreauway 12y ago
Anyone have information on how to contact them/be a part of this group?
- brandonb 12y ago
  Feel free to send me a resume, and I'll make sure Mikey and friends get it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com (I worked on healthcare.gov with Mikey, Todd, Ryan, and the other people starting this effort.)
thrownaway2424 12y ago
I know Code for America operates on the local level, but I wonder if there's anything to be gained by the federal government turning to CfA for an existing group of self-identified coders interested in assisting on government problems.
- seanherron 12y ago
  Have you seen the Presidential Innovation Fellows (http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows) program? We're a group (about 60 alumns so far) focused on doing CfA-esq projects within the Federal government. Jen Pahlka just finished up spending a year with the program helping scale it up and do even more awesome things. Ping me if you're interested.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Hopefully it will be focused on securing those services, too, since the government seems to care so much about "cyberthreats" anyway.
dflock 12y ago
The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard setting', for the ones that they've got around to so far: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ Hopefully, this success will be repeated in the US.
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Agreed - just wrote pretty much the same thing. I find it professionally embarrassing that my government does better work than 95% of the private sector. It should also be a minimum standard for the work any client should expect. Fucking scary :-)
  - tim333 12y ago
    I watched Mike Bracken, who I think runs that, talk at Wikimania a couple of days back. Quite inspiring in some ways. He figures they have saved about £14bn in government costs by spending about £58m on developers. Quite a contrast from the NHS fiasco with private developers blowing £12bn before their thing was scrapped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health) You can see Bracken's talk at http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/58615661 http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156... from about 2:14:50
  - ownagefool 12y ago
    Whoever runs these departments is letting bright technical people make the technical decisions. This does result in some CV-Driven-Development, but for the most part it's a hell of a lot better than trying to explain VCS or DR to your pointy haired manager. These .GOV dept don't really need to worry about finances and they seem to be willing to hire contract workers and let them get heavily involved in the project. In the UK contractors will happily earn double your perm staff and that's before counting the fact they can bypass the 40% tax bracket. Compare that to the private sector, they tend to prefer that all decisions are made by perm staff who are often outdated and are happy to sit there at half the contractors salary, paying double the tax and costing the company over 1.5x their headline salary. Doesn't really make sense to me, you're not gonna find the best and brightest by paying them in a terrible way when they have an easy, more lucrative, alternative.
natural219 12y ago
For the last ~5 years, I have disengaged from almost all political conversation because it's mostly tabloid nonsense. This is the first thing I've seen in 5 years that actually excites me about politics again. I just started reading about this, so I don't know if it's any good. However: Mikey Dickerson and his team are making all of the correct noises, and I'm very excited to see what comes of this. This is a good (policy paper?) describing the initiative and some of the ways Mikey et al are thinking about the problem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digit...
brandonb 12y ago
I worked with Mikey on healthcare.gov and he's the real deal--wicked smart, but also humble, patient, respectful, grounded, and keenly insightful into how organizations work and how to fix broken ones. The day healthcare.gov launched, six people total got through. Six. Nobody even knew when the site was down, except by checking CNN. Two months later, Mikey had rallied the 20-something contractors into punching through dozens of problems, and had recruited a team of (now-) 30-something engineers from Google, Facebook, YC startups, and other fine places to come in on rotations to keep the momentum going. As a result, 8 million people got health insurance. If you haven't already seen it, I recommend this talk and Time article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be&t=3m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be... http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf And those of you thinking about joining: do it please! You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way our government works. (If you're interested in joining, feel free to email me a resume and I'll make sure the right people see it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com)
- larrys 12y ago
  "You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way our government works." Can you connect the dots for me as far as why, if the government needs help, they can't pay market price for the help? Or is the drawback to working for the government something other than that?
  - jbooth 12y ago
    If the government pays its employees at market prices for tech, it'd be another sign of the bloated, inefficient federal government and, uh, socialism or something. If they pay a big federal contractor at twice that rate, who then pockets half and pays its people market rate, then that's private sector efficiency at work.
    - 12y ago
blutoot 12y ago
Typo in the WaPo article - site reliabilty manager. Perhaps off-topic but are (Google) SREs the Ops-equivalent of Data Scientists in terms of expectation of cross-domain skills? Mikey Dickerson's LinkedIn profile [0] shows he's a champ in S/W Engg + Distributed Systems + Sys-Admin + what-not. I know calling each of them a "domain" is a bit of a stretch but I couldn't come up with a better term. [0] www.linkedin.com/in/mikeydickerson
- dekhn 12y ago
  The typical SRE is a PhD in physics who realized they enjoyed hacking on the departmental cluster more than they enjoyed writing papers. Well, OK, that's a stretch but: To a one, SREs are the smartest group of people I've met, with a ton of practical knowledge about distributed systems, a strong quantitative bent, and a desire to fix problems on live systems. If you want to call that the Ops equivalent of data scientists, fine, but I prefer think of them of scientists who study the failure of distributed systems in a live environment.
  - blutoot 12y ago
    Thanks for that perspective. Do they ever find time to do side-projects? It sounds like these people work 24/7.
    - dekhn 12y ago
      Absolutely. They're busy but work on side projects. Depends on the person.
      - blutoot 12y ago
        Do they usually pursue side projects that help them get better at their troubleshooting/automation skills or do they tend to keep them complementary to avoid burn-out?
        dekhn 12y ago
eglover 12y ago
Even the best lose their talent with too much time in government. It's been shown too many times to count. Fixer? Doubt it.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
I would like to fly the flag for the UK Government Digital Service (and I doubt the name is a big coincidence). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service I am truly amazed that in the heart of the UK Cabinet Offi e sits 25 flagship projects each one dedicated to building mostly Open software with Agile practises, of defining and requiring sane and intelligent management if government projects, who are trying to break down decades of huge supplier Lockhold and seemingly succeeding. The quality of the work is impressive, the philosophy behind it strong and the pragmatism is solid. For example one of the core team was asked to write up the first service design manual (oh go read these !). He put in "we prefer Open Source Software over proprietary". After a couple of high level meetings the minister said "OK". Now "prefer" is not a strong word ... But I recently pitched my wares at the Home Office for a tiny deal, about a month after hearing our hero tell this story. And the civil servants did not say "prefer" - all that the UK gov has heard is "we must go open source". It is a deep cultural change that has me more excited about our governments future than anything for years. If the US model can do half as well, China might need to take a back seat for a decade or two.
forgotAgain 12y ago
I want to believe, but I don't. I've seen too many instances in recent history where administrations have sold a perceived solution to one problem as a secret sauce to be slathered over everything else. This administration has been absolutely abysmal at operations. I'd have been much more impressed if this new group had launched quietly and we heard about it after it had been functioning with positive results. I'm not doubting the people named in this announcement. What I'm saying is that they can only succeed if there is ongoing support from the top. This feels much more like after the launch they will be left to fend for themselves in fighting to change a monstrous bureaucracy. Well at least they didn't use the word "surge" to sell it. I guess that's a positive thing.
- brandonb 12y ago
  I understand your cynicism, and it's not entirely misplaced, but this team is both formidable and comes with strong support from the administration—in particular, from US CTO Todd Park. For whatever reason, the tech press hasn't picked up on Todd yet, but he's as good as it gets. Prior to working for the government, he was a two-time founder: he started both Athena Health (now a public company) and Castlight (recent IPO). When healthcare.gov went down, Todd was the one Obama asked to assemble the "tech surge," including Mikey, and he pitched in around the clock to get things working--literally, at multiple points, sleeping in the office overnight when things went awry. I promise you that the people in charge don't consider this a typical, 9-to-5 job and don't leave teams to fend for themselves. They are there in the trenches. You can get a sense of who we're working with in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E
  - forgotAgain 12y ago
    I don't see it as a technical problem so I don't see technical chops, as impressive as they are, as a solution. The problem is one of governance. Unless this new group can cancel contracts and ban organizations from participating in future projects I see very little reason to think they will succeed. They can suggest all they want but if they can't cold stone stop an agency from entering an agreement then they can't change existing behaviors.
Clanan 12y ago
While I appreciate the brainpower the USDS is bringing to bear, I'd like to hear more about how they'll actually handle the politics and reality of what they're doing - disrupting bureaucracy and federal processes. Specifically, how can a service like this be effective when going up against entrenched bureaucrats, massive big corps, etc.? Healthcare.gov was an exception, due to the media spotlight and the political reputations at stake. (Disclaimer: I'm investigating federal contract opportunities, so I would LOVE to see the process overhauled.)
- chiph 12y ago
  I expect they won't be doing much disrupting - but a lot of saving and guiding. The political aspect cannot be overlooked. The turf wars in government are unbelievable. What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful time after time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up and invite them in. Sort of like the A-Team, but without the outstanding warrants: Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find them... maybe you can hire... The A-Team.
  - incision 12y ago
    >'What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful time after time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up and invite them in.' Right. I think that possibly the greatest value in something of this sort is to be able to point to the team, the playbooks and the free guidance as a unassailable proven formula. Offering a safe, defensible choice of this sort for the people at the top of these agencies is very important. Everyone knows the saying 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'. A legitimate source of excellence within the Government could supplant 'IBM' in that notion as the as a 'go to', safe source for solutions that actually has the best interests of Government in mind alongside technical excellence.
zmanian 12y ago
I saw the "Saving Healthcare.gov" talk at Uber.The speakers were excellent and their observations were terrifying. If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure of the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that. The "Saving Healthcare.gov" presentation portrayed the Federal Government as brittle, dysfuctional and broken. I came away believing that insider's in the federal government are largely aware of ongoing failure of the federal government. I suspect the expansion of security state agencies like NSA and Homeland Security is in many ways driving by the need to protect a failing system from any plausible external threat.
- esbranson 12y ago
  Just the federal government? At least the federal government has an official journal/government gazette where federal regulations etc. are published (online, in XML, for free). Compare that to the states of Massachusetts, which charges money for online access, and Georgia, which doesn't even have one. If you think the federal government is broken, you haven't seen nothin' yet.
- cge 12y ago
  >If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure of the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that. It's increasingly become my view that fundamental political ideologies as a whole have less impact on success or failure (societal, economic, or otherwise) than governmental efficiency and policy implementation. I'm not sure it matters too much whether the goals are progressive, conservative or even anything non-delusional, if they're implemented effectively, and even the most brilliant goals are pointless if the implementation is dysfunctional. Viewing government as software, it's as though politicians are spending their time arguing about what sort of programming paradigm should be used, and not particularly caring whether the software actually works.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    I think it's fairly widely recognized in politics that whether government is perceived to "work well" has a large impact on what people trust the government to do. So politicians sort of agree and are acting on it. Enough that it's become a fairly common debate whether politicians are acting in good faith, or are rather trying to manipulate the efficiency / perceived efficiency of policies in order to achieve ideological goals. For example, left-leaning Americans frequently allege that the current GOP policy is precisely based on that. Rather than (only) trying to convince people ideologically that small government is good, Norquist-style, the allegation is that their policy is to actively try to sabotage the government's ability to deliver social services, so people see it as inefficient/broken and therefore stop supporting it. Also occasionally a debate in Europe, especially around infrastructure projects (local/provincial politicians from the opposite party are sometimes accused of trying to actively cause a big infrastructure project of the ruling party to turn into a boondoggle, so the party can seem incompetent). In the other direction, officials are sometimes accused of cooking the books to make something that isn't running efficiently seem like it is. I think a lot of this kind of terrain is where modern politics is fought once you get beyond the first layer.
eddievb 12y ago
So, uh, where do I sign up?
sylvinus 12y ago
There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went bad on a technical level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-kBRdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-kBRdo
encoderer 12y ago
I was into warfare history recently and read, among others, The Guns of August, The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich, and biographies of FDR and Truman. A thought that emerged from that reading was... should we ever again have an all-encompassing war effort, if that should come to pass, what would be the role of the San Francisco Bay Area and of the tech community nationwide? There will certainly be an insatiable need for applied engineering skills as Machinists, CNC fabricators, and process engineers of all sorts. So certainly many software engineers could gravitate towards that sort of work. But in what ways would and could software systems contribute, how would that happen, and how could it be organized and scaled-up. What, for example, would 10,000 engineers at Google be working on? Because in a WWII-mobilization-style event, it wouldn't be business as usual. These are hypothetical issues and there isn't an answer, but I think answering the question "what can we do today" is a great start and I'm cautiously optimistic.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  At the beginning of WWII, the U.S. did not have a large standing army or significant defense contracting industry. That's why the full-nation effort was needed. Today we have the most well-funded and technologically advanced standing military in the world. We would not need a full-nation mobilization.
  - encoderer 12y ago
    The first part of what you said is entirely correct. But a look at the production numbers from WWII provides some elucidation on the second point. We produced 100k aircraft in just one year. Over 60k tanks. Certainly the changing face of warfare alters the math here -- we have many force multipliers to our advantage -- but I think without question in a WWII style, fully mobilized engagement, the US is by no means fully equipped. I mean, even if we were, how could we be? That's actually a great lesson in The Guns of August: Every general is fighting the last war.
siculars 12y ago
Max salary aside (which is obviously reserved for the bosses - what can the rank and file expect to pull down their first 2,3,5 years on the job?), the problem with working for the government is that you're working for the government. I don't think you can fathom the level of bureaucracy and pointy headedness that exists in the government. For most it is a burden too great to bear.
- sailfast 12y ago
  If you're a developer with some experience, I'd expect you'd be brought in around a GS-12. There may be some more clever hiring practices that get you more. http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2014/DCB.pdf http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-... That said, perhaps there are some folks attempting a slightly different tack within government: http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-bureaucracy-improving-hiring-and-software http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-bureaucra... Not sure what their rate structures look like.
  - bostonvaulter2 12y ago
    If I'm reading this correctly, a GS-12 is between 75k and 98k.
rdxm 12y ago
holy crap...before everyone spooges all over themselves and this guy mike. might it not be a good idea to step back and understand what it means to turn the ship at the federal level!?!?!?! it's embarrassing enough that someone in the HHS thought they had even a remote clue about delivering technology at scale, but seriously, does anyone really think that much has changed!?!? it's super cool that a few more than 10 or 15 folks can sign up for a federal service at one time, but does that have any relevance at all to real change? short answer: no. as in hell no....as in fuck no.... if you vote for someone with an R or a D after their name you are a part of the problem not a part of the solution...in particular, if you bail out an empty suit like obama or bush, you are also a part of the problem, not a part of the solution...
- djur 12y ago
  Your mistake is in identifying the government with the people who represent it (Obama, Bush) rather than the people it represents (us). If the work Dickerson and the USDS does helps improve the ways government serves the people, then they are performing a good work, regardless of whether the president is Obama or Bush or Ron Paul or the floating, disembodied head of Eugene Debs.
mindcrime 12y ago
Oh boy, another white elephant government agency that we don't need. I feel SO much better now, knowing that the US government is done wasting taxpayer dollars of failed IT initiatives. Here's an alternative idea: radically (and I mean Radically) downsize the federal government, cut its scope and size by about 90%, and eliminate the need for almost all of its IT projects altogether.
- webXL 12y ago
  You are being downvoted by the big government fans who believe that one size fits all health care policy is going to solve all our problems just like the one size fits all education policies have. They proclaim to treat science with the utmost reverence, but rather than conduct and analyze not even just a few experiments at the state level, they decide to slam together massive programs in a few short years and experiment on 310 million Americans all at once. As if they have all the information and the wisest and most experienced people running things. Things evolve kinda funny in the public sector when you get a new boss every few years with new campaign backers to repay. I'm not sure if there's a single government program that if cut or changed, wouldn't cause some politician to lose an election. In the private sector, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Millions of concurrent experiments take place and thousands of people get fired and get hired everyday, satisfying some need that a government bureaucrat could never predict. Sounds inefficient, but so was the absolute miracle of Evolution. There's always a better way, but to think that your better way is right for everyone? Well that's just plain ol' hubris. I don't know how many more healthcare.gov's or NSA scandals or failed foreign interventions we need before we say you know what, perhaps we should abandon the "go big or go home" strategy or false dichotomy that our politicians present to us. That mindset is far too rampant in big government without any kind of scientific underpinning.
Fede_V 12y ago
Fantastic video, thanks. Is there a link somewhere to the checklist he passed around to the audience, or is that private?

276 points by dctoedt 12y ago

dang 12y ago

There is also http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480. Which article is better?

dctoedt 12y ago
I posted the NY Times link. The WaPo article to which 'dang links (which I hadn't seen) goes into more depth and seems to do a better job. The respective headlines undoubtedly made a difference in upvotes here -- the NYT headline, which referenced an ex-Googler, is now near the top of the HN front page, while the (better) WaPo article, posted a few minutes earlier but which didn't mention the SV connection, is languishing with just 1 point. [EDIT: I just upvoted it; it still has just 2 points.]
- dang 12y ago
  Ok, we've changed the url from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-engineer-to-lead-fix-it-team-for-government-websites.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-engi....
- rootbear 12y ago
  The WaPo article may be better in terms of the depth of coverage but the writing is awful. Really awful. Misspellings, bad grammar, clumsy phrasing. I suppose the Post thinks that's okay because it's just a blog post and not a "real" news article. Or something. To the point, this new USDS sounds interesting and as a DC area resident, I should probably look into it. I will definitely watch the Youtube video linked to above.

ondrae 12y ago

The Playbook http://playbook.cio.gov/ http://playbook.cio.gov/ and TechFAR http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/ http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/ Both also available on GitHub

incision 12y ago

Great move. In my experience it can be very hard spur change from within Government, but he's coming in at a point high enough that he should be able to simply set the example. Shame I don't know the guy, I'd love to work for him.

jonathanwallace 12y ago
This was my first thought as well. Is he hiring? As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.
- incision 12y ago
  >'Is he hiring?' No idea. I'm thinking 'small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent' suggests something that people would be recruited for and appointed to moreso than traditional positions to be filled. There's of the sort posted for OMB today at least. >'As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a difference.' Your conception is pretty accurate. I think the best shot most of us have at 'making a difference' would be to develop solutions to specific, self-contained (if possible) problems. To look not at what central Government is doing, but at the community-level agencies/programs and what they need. Clinics, libraries, rec centers, public schools and whatnot all have problems which can helped with technology, but you'll need to spend a lot of time, effort and a degree of sneakiness to get anything done.
  - gohrt 12y ago
    Note that the original healthcare.gov-fixers were "Friends of Obama" -- volunteers on Obama's presidential campaign. They have technical chops, but this is still largely patronage.
    - 12y ago

nostrademons 12y ago

I saw MikeyD's tech talk on fixing healthcare.gov on my second-to-last day at Google; it made me very glad that I'd pushed out my end date until mid-week. The key idea in it was just the idea of "show up and try" - that we have all these broken systems because the people with the skills to fix them won't even show up and try. Very inspiring - I thought that it very much demonstrated the entrepreneurial mindset, even if it was the federal government we were talking about. I think this may also be evidence of a trend I've pointed out before, that the press is reliably 2 years late in pointing out where people are leaving Google to go to. I used to periodically glance at the list of departures back when I was at Google. Around late 2012 or mid 2013 I saw a lot more folks start to go into public-sector work: non-profits, academia, or government service. Overall a positive trend, I think.

deleted 12y ago
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arjunnarayan 12y ago
Your comment rings sympathetic, and your motivations are unquestionably honorable, but there's still no way I'd even consider "just showing up and trying". I'd show up and try for a $200k salary and some staff to take care of the paperwork and drudgery associated with these government/non-profit jobs. But not for a shit job with shit pay. After all, Google (and the like) pay market rate (well, now that the cartel has been busted), and treat their employees with courtesy and respect. It's well known that the federal government simply DOES NOT pay market rate for talent. Now it is able to get away with that behavior in sectors (cough, banking) where there's consistent regulatory capture: so you're incentivized to spend some years at the government to learn how the system works, and then parlay that into a higher pay job subverting those systems. So the government still gets some rotating talent despite paying absolute shit. But there's no such regulatory capture possible in tech, nor am I interested in going down that path even if it existed (I consider it moderately evil, and am still naively idealist at least in that respect). Look, I'm not solely money grubbing. Money is nice. I grew up without it and now that I have relatively larger quantities of it, my life has unquestionably improved (with luxuries like consistent access to good dentists). I'd eventually like more of it. I'm not short-term greedy. I'm willing to defer compensation for years, if not decades, if I feel that there's potential monetary reward at the end of the line. But from what I see, Mikey Dickerson made a pile of money at first, and thus was free to pursue his political goals of bailing out an incompetent administration that he nevertheless believed in and wanted their signature achievement to succeed. And maybe I'll feel the same once my stock options vest and the mortgage, college tuition, and retirement stockings are stuffed. But don't forget that 99% of the time it's a solid dead end. Mikey was part of a high profile rescue of a high profile failure. But anyone else going in with naive ideals is probably going to get their souls crushed by the sheer drudgery of it, with no Time magazine cover to boost their profiles at the end of it.

dekhn 12y ago

Mikey was my manager for a while. Great guy. I advised him to figure out how to make an impact while his brand was hot, and this is what he ended up deciding on. I hear he doesn't even have to wear a suit all the time, either.

thoreauway 12y ago

Anyone have information on how to contact them/be a part of this group?

brandonb 12y ago
Feel free to send me a resume, and I'll make sure Mikey and friends get it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com (I worked on healthcare.gov with Mikey, Todd, Ryan, and the other people starting this effort.)

thrownaway2424 12y ago

I know Code for America operates on the local level, but I wonder if there's anything to be gained by the federal government turning to CfA for an existing group of self-identified coders interested in assisting on government problems.

seanherron 12y ago
Have you seen the Presidential Innovation Fellows (http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows) program? We're a group (about 60 alumns so far) focused on doing CfA-esq projects within the Federal government. Jen Pahlka just finished up spending a year with the program helping scale it up and do even more awesome things. Ping me if you're interested.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Hopefully it will be focused on securing those services, too, since the government seems to care so much about "cyberthreats" anyway.

dflock 12y ago

The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard setting', for the ones that they've got around to so far: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/ Hopefully, this success will be repeated in the US.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
Agreed - just wrote pretty much the same thing. I find it professionally embarrassing that my government does better work than 95% of the private sector. It should also be a minimum standard for the work any client should expect. Fucking scary :-)
- tim333 12y ago
  I watched Mike Bracken, who I think runs that, talk at Wikimania a couple of days back. Quite inspiring in some ways. He figures they have saved about £14bn in government costs by spending about £58m on developers. Quite a contrast from the NHS fiasco with private developers blowing £12bn before their thing was scrapped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health) You can see Bracken's talk at http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/58615661 http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156... from about 2:14:50
- ownagefool 12y ago
  Whoever runs these departments is letting bright technical people make the technical decisions. This does result in some CV-Driven-Development, but for the most part it's a hell of a lot better than trying to explain VCS or DR to your pointy haired manager. These .GOV dept don't really need to worry about finances and they seem to be willing to hire contract workers and let them get heavily involved in the project. In the UK contractors will happily earn double your perm staff and that's before counting the fact they can bypass the 40% tax bracket. Compare that to the private sector, they tend to prefer that all decisions are made by perm staff who are often outdated and are happy to sit there at half the contractors salary, paying double the tax and costing the company over 1.5x their headline salary. Doesn't really make sense to me, you're not gonna find the best and brightest by paying them in a terrible way when they have an easy, more lucrative, alternative.

natural219 12y ago

For the last ~5 years, I have disengaged from almost all political conversation because it's mostly tabloid nonsense. This is the first thing I've seen in 5 years that actually excites me about politics again. I just started reading about this, so I don't know if it's any good. However: Mikey Dickerson and his team are making all of the correct noises, and I'm very excited to see what comes of this. This is a good (policy paper?) describing the initiative and some of the ways Mikey et al are thinking about the problem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digit...

brandonb 12y ago

I worked with Mikey on healthcare.gov and he's the real deal--wicked smart, but also humble, patient, respectful, grounded, and keenly insightful into how organizations work and how to fix broken ones. The day healthcare.gov launched, six people total got through. Six. Nobody even knew when the site was down, except by checking CNN. Two months later, Mikey had rallied the 20-something contractors into punching through dozens of problems, and had recruited a team of (now-) 30-something engineers from Google, Facebook, YC startups, and other fine places to come in on rotations to keep the momentum going. As a result, 8 million people got health insurance. If you haven't already seen it, I recommend this talk and Time article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be&t=3m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be... http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf And those of you thinking about joining: do it please! You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way our government works. (If you're interested in joining, feel free to email me a resume and I'll make sure the right people see it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com)

larrys 12y ago
"You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way our government works." Can you connect the dots for me as far as why, if the government needs help, they can't pay market price for the help? Or is the drawback to working for the government something other than that?
- jbooth 12y ago
  If the government pays its employees at market prices for tech, it'd be another sign of the bloated, inefficient federal government and, uh, socialism or something. If they pay a big federal contractor at twice that rate, who then pockets half and pays its people market rate, then that's private sector efficiency at work.
  - 12y ago

blutoot 12y ago

Typo in the WaPo article - site reliabilty manager. Perhaps off-topic but are (Google) SREs the Ops-equivalent of Data Scientists in terms of expectation of cross-domain skills? Mikey Dickerson's LinkedIn profile [0] shows he's a champ in S/W Engg + Distributed Systems + Sys-Admin + what-not. I know calling each of them a "domain" is a bit of a stretch but I couldn't come up with a better term. [0] www.linkedin.com/in/mikeydickerson

dekhn 12y ago
The typical SRE is a PhD in physics who realized they enjoyed hacking on the departmental cluster more than they enjoyed writing papers. Well, OK, that's a stretch but: To a one, SREs are the smartest group of people I've met, with a ton of practical knowledge about distributed systems, a strong quantitative bent, and a desire to fix problems on live systems. If you want to call that the Ops equivalent of data scientists, fine, but I prefer think of them of scientists who study the failure of distributed systems in a live environment.
- blutoot 12y ago
  Thanks for that perspective. Do they ever find time to do side-projects? It sounds like these people work 24/7.
  - dekhn 12y ago
    Absolutely. They're busy but work on side projects. Depends on the person.
    - blutoot 12y ago
      Do they usually pursue side projects that help them get better at their troubleshooting/automation skills or do they tend to keep them complementary to avoid burn-out?
      - dekhn 12y ago

eglover 12y ago

Even the best lose their talent with too much time in government. It's been shown too many times to count. Fixer? Doubt it.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

I would like to fly the flag for the UK Government Digital Service (and I doubt the name is a big coincidence). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service I am truly amazed that in the heart of the UK Cabinet Offi e sits 25 flagship projects each one dedicated to building mostly Open software with Agile practises, of defining and requiring sane and intelligent management if government projects, who are trying to break down decades of huge supplier Lockhold and seemingly succeeding. The quality of the work is impressive, the philosophy behind it strong and the pragmatism is solid. For example one of the core team was asked to write up the first service design manual (oh go read these !). He put in "we prefer Open Source Software over proprietary". After a couple of high level meetings the minister said "OK". Now "prefer" is not a strong word ... But I recently pitched my wares at the Home Office for a tiny deal, about a month after hearing our hero tell this story. And the civil servants did not say "prefer" - all that the UK gov has heard is "we must go open source". It is a deep cultural change that has me more excited about our governments future than anything for years. If the US model can do half as well, China might need to take a back seat for a decade or two.

forgotAgain 12y ago

I want to believe, but I don't. I've seen too many instances in recent history where administrations have sold a perceived solution to one problem as a secret sauce to be slathered over everything else. This administration has been absolutely abysmal at operations. I'd have been much more impressed if this new group had launched quietly and we heard about it after it had been functioning with positive results. I'm not doubting the people named in this announcement. What I'm saying is that they can only succeed if there is ongoing support from the top. This feels much more like after the launch they will be left to fend for themselves in fighting to change a monstrous bureaucracy. Well at least they didn't use the word "surge" to sell it. I guess that's a positive thing.

brandonb 12y ago
I understand your cynicism, and it's not entirely misplaced, but this team is both formidable and comes with strong support from the administration—in particular, from US CTO Todd Park. For whatever reason, the tech press hasn't picked up on Todd yet, but he's as good as it gets. Prior to working for the government, he was a two-time founder: he started both Athena Health (now a public company) and Castlight (recent IPO). When healthcare.gov went down, Todd was the one Obama asked to assemble the "tech surge," including Mikey, and he pitched in around the clock to get things working--literally, at multiple points, sleeping in the office overnight when things went awry. I promise you that the people in charge don't consider this a typical, 9-to-5 job and don't leave teams to fend for themselves. They are there in the trenches. You can get a sense of who we're working with in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E
- forgotAgain 12y ago
  I don't see it as a technical problem so I don't see technical chops, as impressive as they are, as a solution. The problem is one of governance. Unless this new group can cancel contracts and ban organizations from participating in future projects I see very little reason to think they will succeed. They can suggest all they want but if they can't cold stone stop an agency from entering an agreement then they can't change existing behaviors.

Clanan 12y ago

While I appreciate the brainpower the USDS is bringing to bear, I'd like to hear more about how they'll actually handle the politics and reality of what they're doing - disrupting bureaucracy and federal processes. Specifically, how can a service like this be effective when going up against entrenched bureaucrats, massive big corps, etc.? Healthcare.gov was an exception, due to the media spotlight and the political reputations at stake. (Disclaimer: I'm investigating federal contract opportunities, so I would LOVE to see the process overhauled.)

chiph 12y ago
I expect they won't be doing much disrupting - but a lot of saving and guiding. The political aspect cannot be overlooked. The turf wars in government are unbelievable. What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful time after time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up and invite them in. Sort of like the A-Team, but without the outstanding warrants: Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find them... maybe you can hire... The A-Team.
- incision 12y ago
  >'What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful time after time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up and invite them in.' Right. I think that possibly the greatest value in something of this sort is to be able to point to the team, the playbooks and the free guidance as a unassailable proven formula. Offering a safe, defensible choice of this sort for the people at the top of these agencies is very important. Everyone knows the saying 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'. A legitimate source of excellence within the Government could supplant 'IBM' in that notion as the as a 'go to', safe source for solutions that actually has the best interests of Government in mind alongside technical excellence.

zmanian 12y ago

I saw the "Saving Healthcare.gov" talk at Uber.The speakers were excellent and their observations were terrifying. If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure of the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that. The "Saving Healthcare.gov" presentation portrayed the Federal Government as brittle, dysfuctional and broken. I came away believing that insider's in the federal government are largely aware of ongoing failure of the federal government. I suspect the expansion of security state agencies like NSA and Homeland Security is in many ways driving by the need to protect a failing system from any plausible external threat.

esbranson 12y ago
Just the federal government? At least the federal government has an official journal/government gazette where federal regulations etc. are published (online, in XML, for free). Compare that to the states of Massachusetts, which charges money for online access, and Georgia, which doesn't even have one. If you think the federal government is broken, you haven't seen nothin' yet.
cge 12y ago
>If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure of the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that. It's increasingly become my view that fundamental political ideologies as a whole have less impact on success or failure (societal, economic, or otherwise) than governmental efficiency and policy implementation. I'm not sure it matters too much whether the goals are progressive, conservative or even anything non-delusional, if they're implemented effectively, and even the most brilliant goals are pointless if the implementation is dysfunctional. Viewing government as software, it's as though politicians are spending their time arguing about what sort of programming paradigm should be used, and not particularly caring whether the software actually works.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I think it's fairly widely recognized in politics that whether government is perceived to "work well" has a large impact on what people trust the government to do. So politicians sort of agree and are acting on it. Enough that it's become a fairly common debate whether politicians are acting in good faith, or are rather trying to manipulate the efficiency / perceived efficiency of policies in order to achieve ideological goals. For example, left-leaning Americans frequently allege that the current GOP policy is precisely based on that. Rather than (only) trying to convince people ideologically that small government is good, Norquist-style, the allegation is that their policy is to actively try to sabotage the government's ability to deliver social services, so people see it as inefficient/broken and therefore stop supporting it. Also occasionally a debate in Europe, especially around infrastructure projects (local/provincial politicians from the opposite party are sometimes accused of trying to actively cause a big infrastructure project of the ruling party to turn into a boondoggle, so the party can seem incompetent). In the other direction, officials are sometimes accused of cooking the books to make something that isn't running efficiently seem like it is. I think a lot of this kind of terrain is where modern politics is fought once you get beyond the first layer.

eddievb 12y ago

So, uh, where do I sign up?

sylvinus 12y ago

There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went bad on a technical level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-kBRdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-kBRdo

encoderer 12y ago

I was into warfare history recently and read, among others, The Guns of August, The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich, and biographies of FDR and Truman. A thought that emerged from that reading was... should we ever again have an all-encompassing war effort, if that should come to pass, what would be the role of the San Francisco Bay Area and of the tech community nationwide? There will certainly be an insatiable need for applied engineering skills as Machinists, CNC fabricators, and process engineers of all sorts. So certainly many software engineers could gravitate towards that sort of work. But in what ways would and could software systems contribute, how would that happen, and how could it be organized and scaled-up. What, for example, would 10,000 engineers at Google be working on? Because in a WWII-mobilization-style event, it wouldn't be business as usual. These are hypothetical issues and there isn't an answer, but I think answering the question "what can we do today" is a great start and I'm cautiously optimistic.

snowwrestler 12y ago
At the beginning of WWII, the U.S. did not have a large standing army or significant defense contracting industry. That's why the full-nation effort was needed. Today we have the most well-funded and technologically advanced standing military in the world. We would not need a full-nation mobilization.
- encoderer 12y ago
  The first part of what you said is entirely correct. But a look at the production numbers from WWII provides some elucidation on the second point. We produced 100k aircraft in just one year. Over 60k tanks. Certainly the changing face of warfare alters the math here -- we have many force multipliers to our advantage -- but I think without question in a WWII style, fully mobilized engagement, the US is by no means fully equipped. I mean, even if we were, how could we be? That's actually a great lesson in The Guns of August: Every general is fighting the last war.

siculars 12y ago

Max salary aside (which is obviously reserved for the bosses - what can the rank and file expect to pull down their first 2,3,5 years on the job?), the problem with working for the government is that you're working for the government. I don't think you can fathom the level of bureaucracy and pointy headedness that exists in the government. For most it is a burden too great to bear.

sailfast 12y ago
If you're a developer with some experience, I'd expect you'd be brought in around a GS-12. There may be some more clever hiring practices that get you more. http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2014/DCB.pdf http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-... That said, perhaps there are some folks attempting a slightly different tack within government: http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-bureaucracy-improving-hiring-and-software http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-bureaucra... Not sure what their rate structures look like.
- bostonvaulter2 12y ago
  If I'm reading this correctly, a GS-12 is between 75k and 98k.

rdxm 12y ago

holy crap...before everyone spooges all over themselves and this guy mike. might it not be a good idea to step back and understand what it means to turn the ship at the federal level!?!?!?! it's embarrassing enough that someone in the HHS thought they had even a remote clue about delivering technology at scale, but seriously, does anyone really think that much has changed!?!? it's super cool that a few more than 10 or 15 folks can sign up for a federal service at one time, but does that have any relevance at all to real change? short answer: no. as in hell no....as in fuck no.... if you vote for someone with an R or a D after their name you are a part of the problem not a part of the solution...in particular, if you bail out an empty suit like obama or bush, you are also a part of the problem, not a part of the solution...

djur 12y ago
Your mistake is in identifying the government with the people who represent it (Obama, Bush) rather than the people it represents (us). If the work Dickerson and the USDS does helps improve the ways government serves the people, then they are performing a good work, regardless of whether the president is Obama or Bush or Ron Paul or the floating, disembodied head of Eugene Debs.

mindcrime 12y ago

Oh boy, another white elephant government agency that we don't need. I feel SO much better now, knowing that the US government is done wasting taxpayer dollars of failed IT initiatives. Here's an alternative idea: radically (and I mean Radically) downsize the federal government, cut its scope and size by about 90%, and eliminate the need for almost all of its IT projects altogether.

webXL 12y ago
You are being downvoted by the big government fans who believe that one size fits all health care policy is going to solve all our problems just like the one size fits all education policies have. They proclaim to treat science with the utmost reverence, but rather than conduct and analyze not even just a few experiments at the state level, they decide to slam together massive programs in a few short years and experiment on 310 million Americans all at once. As if they have all the information and the wisest and most experienced people running things. Things evolve kinda funny in the public sector when you get a new boss every few years with new campaign backers to repay. I'm not sure if there's a single government program that if cut or changed, wouldn't cause some politician to lose an election. In the private sector, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Millions of concurrent experiments take place and thousands of people get fired and get hired everyday, satisfying some need that a government bureaucrat could never predict. Sounds inefficient, but so was the absolute miracle of Evolution. There's always a better way, but to think that your better way is right for everyone? Well that's just plain ol' hubris. I don't know how many more healthcare.gov's or NSA scandals or failed foreign interventions we need before we say you know what, perhaps we should abandon the "go big or go home" strategy or false dichotomy that our politicians present to us. That mindset is far too rampant in big government without any kind of scientific underpinning.

Fede_V 12y ago

Fantastic video, thanks. Is there a link somewhere to the checklist he passed around to the audience, or is that private?