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Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

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Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#111

Post by 8note »

stupidcar wrote: post #92
the_watcher wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every single issue that comes up results in a new rule. This sentence is the simplest explanation for government (and bureaucratic) incompetence. Think about writing software. Is the optimal solution to every single bug to write more code to deal with that specific situation? Of course not. In many cases, sorting out the underlying cause and fixing that (which may involve new code, rewriting old code, or even delet…

You demonstrate intellectual fallacies common amongst software developers: 1. Believing that your experience in one particular field makes you qualified to make pronouncements regarding others about which you know nothing. 2. Believing that problems in other fields are inherently simple to understand and solve, and that the reason they aren't must therefore be due to the malice or incompetence of people working in th…

while i frequently agree with you, i disagree here.

both code and travel regulations are lists of rules written in a terse language, and both are subject to bloat all of the time, abd parts become deprecated as times and priorities change.

these are very comparable things, e cept that code can change quickly at a low cost, while regulations are costly to change.

Because of the cheapness, software folks have put a lot of effort and study into optimizing how you make rule changes, which makes it very applicable to some other problem spaces

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#112

Post by [deleted] »

DannyBee wrote: post #33
liyanchang wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. So in my admittedly short time in the government [0], I've witnessed how all of these problems are due to good intentions. That's what makes this all really tough because everything you think is bonkers actually has a reason. The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rul…

"The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rule." This seems like a serious inability to understand that no process designed to prevent future things you can't forsee is 100% effective (by definition). At some point, you have to declare "good enough", and live with it until the error rate becomes unacceptable overall again, then modify…

[deleted]

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#113

Post by vonmoltke »

zacharycohn wrote: post #108
sailfast wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love your second sentence, but really wish they would stop calling it a "tour of duty". It's still a pretty solid amount of money (nevermind Federal benefits) but to really transform we need people willing to work over the long haul not just parachute in for short terms. Also (slightly biased of course) I bet you get a bit addicted to the mission and that provides a non-monetary incentive to stick around a bit longer…

[Disclaimer: I work at 18F.] It's referred to as a tour of duty because most of us are on 2 year appointments. At the end of that 2 years, there's an optional 2 year extension. These orgs haven't been around long enough for anyone to run out their second two years yet. Personally, I love this format. It never would have even dawned on me to consider applying for a career position in the federal government, but when t…

Honestly, that format is one of the things that attracts me to the USDS (yes, I applied earlier today). I'd like to help some of the obvious inefficiency in government, but I don't want to commit my career to it.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#114

Post by bsaul »

liyanchang wrote: post #13
cs702 wrote: post #7

The federal government hires a team of young, talented, motivated engineers and managers, puts them in charge of failed software projects, gives them the resources and authority they require to turns things around, and -- surprise! -- it turns out they do a GREAT job. In hindsight, this shouldn't be too surprising. What might be surprising is that the same logic should apply to ALL government functions, not just soft…

Disclosure: I'm an engineer at USDS and these are my own opinions. So in my admittedly short time in the government [0], I've witnessed how all of these problems are due to good intentions. That's what makes this all really tough because everything you think is bonkers actually has a reason. The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rul…

Very informative comment, but then, did that change once the usds were in charge ? Because my intuition is that taking over an openly failed project makes it easy for the new team to tell everyone to try and keep things simple.

Then wouldn't the succes not be a matter of technical abilities or process, but rather goodwill by the client side to remain reasonable ?

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#115

Post by vonmoltke »

spacecowboy_lon wrote: post #32
impostervt wrote: post #22

"U.S. Digital Service salaries are set in accordance with the General Schedule Pay Scale, which is capped at $160,300." That's not bad, but not great for really high talent employees. I wonder how many people get that rate though. https://www.usds.gov/join#compensation

Presumably you get the pension that goes with that

Depends. My wife only has the $9000 in her Thrift Savings Plan after four years at the White House. She was a "political appointee", though, so she didn't get normal GS benefits.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#116

Post by dkrich »

jessriedel wrote: post #94
dkrich wrote: post #86

Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of misinformation in this article. The author makes it sound as simple as hiring fresh hackers from Silicon Valley to take over failed projects from stodgy software developers from the large D.C. contracting firms. Having worked on government projects like those cited in this article for several years, I can tell you that it is the government agencies themselves, and not so much the…

So it's an accident that this involved fresh hackers from Silicon Valley?

Not an accident- selectivity bias. Ask those hackers to build an app for the USPS, FDA, the DOE or any other agency that imposes strict regulations and has to implement business logic to account for tens of thousands of rules (not an exaggeration) and see how agile and innovative they are. There's a reason that most of these contracts are worth between 7 and 8 figures. That's the kind of manpower required to engineer them.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#117

Post by azernik »

DannyBee wrote: post #78
temujin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, once the government chooses to not close a known loophole, the number of people who exploit it may increase by orders of magnitude. Without a willingness to add the other 1350 pages, you may end up with something like 70% fraud prevention, not 99.9%. What's needed is more refactoring. This would benefit from more capacity to try different sets of regulations in parallel.

This is a generally true statement about any process. The solution to that is to enforce well enough that people don't think that's a good idea. I also did say you do have to refactor over time as compliance rate decreases. Past that, i don't think we actually disagree :) If you have a speed limit sign, and it says "speed limit, 50 mph, enforced by satellite observation", most people will probably ignore it. Those th…

You cannot fix a loophole with better enforcement. By definition, the behaviors involved are allowed.

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#118

Post by stvswn »

leg wrote: post #103
PKop wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an argument for refactoring into smaller modules. Decentralization. Local and state government taking on more responsibilities, with the added benefit of forcing competition and choice among citizens vs. one-size-fits-all policy.

Except that state and local governments are mostly more corrupt, more poorly run, and less well supervised by the voters.

Care to provide evidence for such a claim?

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#119

Post by nickparker »

saosebastiao wrote: post #55
nickparker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone else find it extremely discomforting that the voting machines even have a full fledged OS? It's a throwback to this xkcd https://xkcd.com/463/ In my mind, the ideal electronic voting machine: - Has mechanical buttons which simultaneously punch a paper ballot in a manner observable to the voter - Runs on a small (open source) microcontroller that's been audited for backdoors. - Runs (open source) crypto di…

In terms of security, that is probably exactly correct (I'm a complete security novice FWIW). Way too high of an attack surface area. That being said, as soon as you get into microcontroller territory, you turn it into a niche thing that makes it inaccessible to most. What are the chances of finding talent that can write user-facing code that runs bug free on microcontrollers while simultaneously writing/proving the…

Microcontroller stuff isn't necessarily inaccessible. You can target extremely barebones platforms with Rust, and it goes without saying that C runs almost anywhere.

The point is to have absolute bare-minimum technology. There's no user-facing code to write, it should really be as simple as: - A function that encrypts an int between 0 and N, perhaps in homomorphic fashion - N-1 buttons (as in, mechanical contacts) that each trigger a subroutine "Encrypt the number X and broadcast it to whoever is tabulating and/or auditing the vote"

Re: Inside the Obama Tech Surge as It Hacks the Pentagon and VA

#120

Post by my_first_acct »

joeyo wrote: post #59
DannyBee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The 1400 page travel regulations is a result of trying to prevent fraud - every single issue that comes up results in a new rule." This seems like a serious inability to understand that no process designed to prevent future things you can't forsee is 100% effective (by definition). At some point, you have to declare "good enough", and live with it until the error rate becomes unacceptable overall again, then modify…

Some of it comes down to agencies needing to protect themselves from congressional witch-hunts. Consider a congressman or political party that has ideological objections to an agency even existing and wishes to neuter or eliminate it. A stellar way of achieving this is by making the target seem wasteful and fraudulent [1]. If there is actual fraud, no matter how small or how much of a corner case, this task becomes e…

A Democrat, the late Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, was well known for mocking frivolous-sounding research projects. From the Wikipedia article[0]:

"In 1987, Stewart Brand accused Proxmire of recklessly attacking legitimate research for the crass purpose of furthering his own political career, with gross indifference as to whether his assertions were true or false as well as the long-term effects on American science and technology policy."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Proxmire#Golden_Fleece...

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