7 ms·

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 organ

• 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.
    • nostrademons 12y ago
      More generally - there is no market when there is only one purchaser. Right now, the market for "tech talent working in government" is separate from the market for "tech talent working in private-sector tech companies", and the former sector has only one customer, which can set salaries basically arbitrarily. If you watch the YouTube video provided, it seems like the subtext of this appointment is that Obama wants to merge these markets, so that the federal government competes for tech talent out of the same pool as Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, NYC, etc. tech companies. There will probably be many subtle culture changes there - programmers may stop wearing suits in government contractors, market rates may adjust, etc. I can't predict exactly how things will change, but wouldn't count on the status quo remaining for long.
  • ProAm 12y ago
    Government often pays more than market price for most jobs. I think his issue was no one wanted to leave Google to go help the government full time, that is why they had the rotations, people were not giving up their interesting jobs to help fix the governments mess.
    • watwut 12y ago
      Working on a big project where people come in and out too often is a problem in its own right. The simple reality of code being written by too many people who are there only for short time tends to create special kind of mess. It also means that project will tend to repeat the same mistakes again and again. This kind of integration projects tend to be discounted by some as boring and stupid and indeed there is a lot of boring and annoying work to do on them. The thing is, this kind of project also have non-trivial learning curve until you become effective and the more organizational mess there is to overcome the steeper it becomes. There are more red flags then just salary cap on this one.
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • brandonb 12y ago
    The law caps federal salaries at $155,500. Congress could change it, but given that they seem to have trouble passing a budget, that doesn't seem likely very soon. :) That said, I think there are enough people that a) find $155k enough to meet their needs and b) believe in the mission that we'll be able to make a big impact. (One thing that's important to remember—"the government" doesn't really act like a unified, coordinated entity. Different branches and agencies have different incentives and behave in different ways. It's often better to think of the government as a marketplace rather than an organization.)
    • eropple 12y ago
      $155K is a good to very good salary in Boston. DC proper isn't much more expensive. I'd take $155K in DC for two years.
      • sailfast 12y ago
        155K is the cap for federal salaries, not the typical salary. The 155K number (which is not quite right) is for the highest ranking execs short of SES (CIO / CTO level for many organizations. 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-...
        • kngspook 12y ago
          Plus, there isn't any stock/equity/etc. And less perks (for example, free food can easily be effectively raise your salary by a couple grand).
          • nerfhammer 12y ago
            the lifetime value of a pension will ultimately totally dwarf the value of free lunch and snacks
            • kngspook 12y ago
  • incision 12y ago
    >'Or is the drawback to working for the government something other than that?' I would say yes. Getting paid is not the big challenge in Government work. It's the lack of urgency, political infighting and general stigma. The rotations described here and the leadership position / division described in the article both skirt those issues. * Urgency: Healthcare.gov had it. It was a firestorm visible from a continent away. Most Government IT failures don't work that way, they're smoldering trash fires that generate a meeting to figure out who's going to fill a bucket with a follow-up meeting to decide who's actually going to carry it. * Infighting: As described, the Digital Service 'will be focused on providing consultation' not 'a group that we parachute in to write code'. They're coming in from a position of authority - above the level of typical jockeying. * Stigma: None. Finish your rotation and go back to Google. Finish your stint as a head of an elite Federal service and name your title.
  • Shivetya 12y ago
    some rules specify you cannot charge the government more than you charged someone else. Not sure if that would apply here, may just be on large contracts for products and services.
  • pmorici 12y ago
    The government has two different kinds of workers. Actual employees they pay directly and contract employees they pay through a private company. Actual employees of the US government are generally paid a mediocre salary at best compared to what they could get in private industry. Government contract employees on the other hand are generally paid very very well. In excess of what a typical private sector non-government contract company would pay. It's common knowledge among government employees that you can double your salary by getting a job with a private government contracting company. The essential problem of the US government is there is no accountability. Poor performing employees are never fired and poor performing contractors are never penalized. If a project is a massive failure there are never any consequences for the people or companies involved. Over time anyone with any sort of skill whatsoever tends to leave and what's left are the poor and mediocre employees. I'd like to say creating the US digital service is a positive step but unless the basic problem of accountability is solved it too will be just as bad at IT as every existing organization in a few years time. In the real world this problem of organizational calcification would be solved when the incompetent company goes out of business because they are over taken by competitors. In the government since there is no competition there is no natural accountability mechanism.
    • Tloewald 12y ago
      Part of the problem is that the contracting rules seemingly force contracts to be split among a bunch of contractors none of whom is fully responsible for the project, so when something goes wrong, it's a circular firing squad. My experience is that contractors do get fired, but the same people end up working for the contractors that are still there (and since they are often the only people who remember what the hell is going on, this is sometimes not a bad thing).
      • Iftheshoefits 12y ago
        That's by design: it's built-in pass-the-blame with an extra helping of spreading the bacon around. Government contracting is little more than legal, officially sanctioned nepotism and graft. The whole point is to allow Congressmen and other connected government officials to enrich their friends and family. In turn, these officials get high-paying "jobs" at the same places they helped funnel lots of money to. The people in these comments here on HN claiming that somehow that's "liberal government" at work don't know what they're talking about, at all, and I mean downvote-worthy, comically so. If we must label these antics with comparisons to American political ideologies, the government contracting system is closer to big-business, republican-style politics than anything else. Small-c-conservative and any-l-liberal are the last things I think of when I think of government contracting.
• bane 12y ago
  If there's ever a story that deserves an amazing documentary (it literally is saving lives), it's the unfucking of healthcare.gov. I've long wanted to find out more about the behind the scenes. Thanks for pointing to the videos. edit Off topic, I'm also struck by a statement Umesh makes during his talk in the video you linked to. (paraphrasing): "there's this concept that people have different personas when they do different things, but I can assure you there is no difference in how they use sites and get information, no difference". If anybody ever wanted to know why Google boggled up Google+ and fundamentally doesn't understand identity management, this statement gives me lots of insight into how that might have happened. So tech companies screw up all the time also.
  • vinhboy 12y ago
    I say make it a documentary, but make it as layman as possible so that the rest of America can understand just how fucked up it was. Use it as an opportunity to shame the government into action.
    • dublinben 12y ago
      Don't overlook the fact that the system was actually built by private contractors. A small in-house team of developers (like they've got now) probably would have done a better job.
      • watwut 12y ago
        That is not sure. Overall management would not magically get better if the project would be done by small in-house team of developers. The same management that allowed contractor failure would allow in-house failure and the same management that hired incapable contractor would put together incapable in-house team. Basically, the same bad decision makers would made the same bad decisions. You can blame the team for bad code, but you can not blame them for such a huge failure of the whole project.
        • lifeisstillgood 12y ago
• lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Can I suggest that "service" might not be as sustainable as "SME" for breaking down the government / mega-corp lockstep. I have not followed the USDS but the UK version has gone from nothing to world class in four years and is trying to fix the badly broken procurement process as much as setting good project guidelines - for example all IT purchases are supposed to go through two gateway frameworks - the theory is to pre-quality as many SMEs as possible - then a department can buy a service (saas or development) from that SME with a single purchase order / credit card. It's not perfect, getting on the frameworks is crazy hard and there are still tenders like "run our back office services please" but there is at least light in the tunnel for fools like me. I even spoke to an agent today who bemoaned these frameworks - having to work trough small companies was painful - so it is having an effect.
• tzs 12y ago
  > 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. Out of curiosity, how much of the site's problems at the start were due to high load and how much would have been there even if it had seen much lower traffic? In particular, how would it have fared with the original design and code if only a handful of states had refused to implement their own exchanges, instead of 27 states refusing?
  • brandonb 12y ago
    Hard to know for sure, but most of the problems would have been exposed at even moderate amounts of load--there was no load testing or performance monitoring in place initially.
    • dschiptsov 12y ago
      Java in production, especially with heavy "frameworks" use and "waterfall to subcontracted coders-for-paycheck" process (how else there could be a billion lines of code for a site) can't handle even a moderate load and runs out of memory on handling persistent connections (long sessions) and the fixes were mostly by adding tons of hardware (unlimited government money) and to redesign many components to share nothing (decoupling) and to work in asynchronous way with a short requests (service-oriented architecture + Erlang's process-based model) by Google, FB, etc. guys? That's the story? btw, these are very legitimate questions. The original project was a epic failure which perfectly illustrated all the flaws of past-century practices (waterfall process with tons of specs created by idiots, outsourcing to the cheapest or favorite incompetent, blind faith in big names, etc.) and the fix, it seems, was to bring it close to the state-of-the-art tech which was evolved to use-at-home in [more-or-less] independent-thinking shops, like Google or FB.
• kngspook 12y ago
  Part of the problem is the hiring process. I'm very interested, but knowing where to start on something like this is difficult. When I applied to the Presidential Innovation Fellowship a year and a half ago, and there was no communication from them for 3 months -- far longer than they said they'd respond on the site -- and no way for me to get in touch. (Just out of curiosity, have you seen a lot of interest?)
• mattmcknight 12y ago
  Of course, the truth is this system never needed to be built at all. There were already sites available to purchase insurance, and marketplaces like esurance. The government could have deployed a static link page to the insurance sites. It's ludicrous to claim 8m people have insurance because of this site, when they could have had it without the site. What they could have focused on was a calculator for the subsidies and Medicaid qualifacation, with the subsidies being delivered as part of tax filing. As it stands, we now have an overly complex process for buying an insurance like product, and very little actually targeted at our big problem forcing providers to compete on price for non emergency services.
  • brandonb 12y ago
    It's just slightly more complicated than that. :) The main thing healthcare.gov does, which esurance and others don't, is to tell the user which government programs they're eligible for and what their subsidy will be. The law makes that calculation is actually surprisingly complex, for example: * there are at least eight different state- and federal-level healthcare programs (advanced premium tax credit, medicare, medicaid, children's health program, children's rehabilitative service, Tricare, VHA, IHS) * which programs you're qualified for depend on your state * the subsidy is based on which plans are available in your specific area and their cost, your household size, the ages of each person in your household, whether each person smokes, and whether you want a dental plan * for calculating subsidies, different sources of income are treated differently. E.g., tribal income for Native Americans is subject to different tax treatment, earned income is treated differently than capital gains in some cases, etc. * insurance is usually bought for a household, and there are precedence rules among different state/federal programs, so if any member of a household qualifies for a non-APTC assistance program, it affects the subsidy received for the whole household * to get the tax credit, your immigration status needs to be verified with the Department of Homeland Security and your income needs to be verified with the IRS. This is the work done by the "Data Services Hub." * by law, open enrollment starts in November but taxes are due the following April, so you can't compute the subsidy as part of the tax filing. So you can see how something that seems like simple e-commerce task--buying health insurance--would turn out to be much more complex than a static site. You could argue that the law should be simplified, and I agree, but that would require an act of Congress and the cooperation of all 50 states. :) So, realistically, the software has to be complex to capture the complexity of the law. (You could also argue that this complicated eligibility calculation should be exposed as an API, which would unlock innovation in the private sector. We want to do that, but need more help. :) )
• diafygi 12y ago
  From the talk: > If you technology people can either build a working website that actually serves the needs for a billion dollars, or build one that doesn't work and totally fails for merely 100 million or 200 million or so. If you can do either of those things, then the government is coming out way ahead. hahaha
• legohead 12y ago
  at first it sounded like a team of problem solvers (fun), but ended up sounding like more techno bureaucracy (boring). setting standards across federal agencies? single sign-on? may god have mercy on their souls.