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Hi! We don't have a jobs page up yet, so I'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (Nava) Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-st

by navahq 11y ago

Hi! We don't have a jobs page up yet, so I'll leave this here in case anyone's interested in working with us (Nava) Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full Time We're a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix. And it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, and the willingness to work closely with dedicated civil servants in government. Our revamped Healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate. We’re just getting started, and we’ve started Nava to help fix everything else. [0] People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures [1]. That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that. Our team is 10 people (Stanford, Google, YC alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015. We’re looking for: - experienced full-stack engineers - experienced devops engineers - a product manager with a technical background - a hyper-resourceful operations person We have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation (PBC) this week), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity (above market). If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com. *Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t.. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t....

spangry 11y ago
I think what you're doing is admirable and just wanted to wish you good luck! I've been fighting similar battles within government (non-US) and it can be both very frustrating and very rewarding. Frustrating because 'being right' is almost never the way to win the argument. Although I'm terrible at this myself, I've observed that opposition to change is best overcome by persistence. The best change agent I've worked with used a particular (and highly effective) technique that I've since termed 'objection exhaustion'. He'd hold a meeting of all the 'major stakeholders' (read: people who's stuff we were messing with, but who's co-operation we needed) once a week/fortnight to update them on our progress (read: grind them down into submission). When someone raised an objection to our ideas, he'd listen carefully, take their concerns seriously and commit to examining the issue and bringing findings back to the next meeting. We'd then do that, and most of the time present evidence at the next meeting that showed the objection was baseless (in a nice, 'give them an out', kind of way). Tedious as it was, by doing this over and over we'd exhaust all their objections and they'd be forced to agree with us (or continue to object for no apparent reason and look like a mindless fool in front of their senior colleagues). Depressingly, the true but hidden objection is usually "don't touch my stuff" or "don't reduce my budget". Objection exhaustion works great here: few public servants are shameless enough to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that these are the reasons for their opposition.

by navahq 11y ago

spangry 11y ago

I think what you're doing is admirable and just wanted to wish you good luck! I've been fighting similar battles within government (non-US) and it can be both very frustrating and very rewarding. Frustrating because 'being right' is almost never the way to win the argument. Although I'm terrible at this myself, I've observed that opposition to change is best overcome by persistence. The best change agent I've worked with used a particular (and highly effective) technique that I've since termed 'objection exhaustion'. He'd hold a meeting of all the 'major stakeholders' (read: people who's stuff we were messing with, but who's co-operation we needed) once a week/fortnight to update them on our progress (read: grind them down into submission). When someone raised an objection to our ideas, he'd listen carefully, take their concerns seriously and commit to examining the issue and bringing findings back to the next meeting. We'd then do that, and most of the time present evidence at the next meeting that showed the objection was baseless (in a nice, 'give them an out', kind of way). Tedious as it was, by doing this over and over we'd exhaust all their objections and they'd be forced to agree with us (or continue to object for no apparent reason and look like a mindless fool in front of their senior colleagues). Depressingly, the true but hidden objection is usually "don't touch my stuff" or "don't reduce my budget". Objection exhaustion works great here: few public servants are shameless enough to admit, perhaps even to themselves, that these are the reasons for their opposition.