Not to take anything away from the "young people" -- who are ages 28+ -- but this article over-sensationalizes their accomplishments. "The MPL team had three

Not to take anything away from the "young people" -- who are ages 28+ -- but this article over-sensationalizes their accomplishments. "The MPL team had three great technical accomplishments over its 16- month-long life. First, it served as a crack team which understood the infrastructure of the site and could resolve small issues as they arose. Second, it built an insurance application, called App2, which signed up new users in less than half the time of the original app. Finally, it replaced the website’s crashy login system with a functional (and much less expensive) one of its own design." I know the author wants a "startup" narrative, but these aren't groundbreaking accomplishments, let alone the fact #1's silly. "It did most of this while living together in an unremarkable McMansion in suburban Maryland." I don't understand why this matters. "So the team that started by performing bug fixes on a sprawling, struggling mass of code ended by writing critical, efficient infrastructure for the government. Yet what the MPL team accomplished philosophically may be even more important: It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites in 2015." The author tried too hard to overlay a ScrappyStartup™ narrative. This argument is absurd. edit: stephengillie called it in his "submarine" comment below (see: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)