Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#2The original article is at: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-co...
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#3An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#4No one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#5"The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias."
That's cute.
No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#6No one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.
Nonsense. I would think a government would be perfectly capable of hiring experts. I would fully expect them to have different motivations than industry and academic experts, but I would think they could easily - and fairly cheaply - minimize some of Congress's stupidest misunderstandings.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#7An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
They wouldn't hire anyone who thought that "seeing eye-to-eye" was a prerequisite for academic rigor. They released reports that were highly regarded for their rigor (the article even mentions that). So if they were given the responsibility of researching the effect patents has on the tech sector, that's exactly what they'd do.
I find it disturbing that you'd actually want an OTA that only hires people that agree with you. That's not their purpose.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#8It's much easier to ignore the facts when you remove them from the environment.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#9An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress.
Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#10An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress. Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
The USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of what the US has ever done with tech.