Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser • Hacker News Board

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#61

Post by johansch » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:21 AM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #53

guessmyname wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me a time when I used to work closely with a design team in a web agency, it was very frustrating to work with them because every little modification to things like colors, sizes, buttons and the like would be accompanied with several hours of "design strategy" , time that the designers would waste thinking and prototyping new ideas for the corporate image of any of our clients, I say "waste" because mos…

It took a couple of experiences dealing with serious, fancy pants designers to convince me that most of them are charlatans. Even something as simple as widening a button was stonewalled by "explorations", "design strategy meetings", "pattern library meetings", etc. The end result was getting even a single component mocked up took at least a week and was no better than what I could have come up with in 30 minutes.

Quite a few UX/design people who have actually gone through education/training (as opposed to learning by doing) seem to suffer by an extreme form of process overload.

It makes sense I guess. It's really easy to teach processes and it probably makes the them feel "professional".

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#62

Post by brownbat » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:22 AM UTC

lsmarigo wrote: post #10

Activities that can’t be billed to other agencies are another drain. One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good. for anyone else curious: (new) Black Logo: https://18f.gsa.gov/assets/img/logos/18f-logo.svg (old)…

Reminds me of the million dollar Pepsi logo change, which basically tilted the old design a few degrees.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign...

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#63

Post by kbenson » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:23 AM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #49

jacobsenscott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on google doodles. There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites. Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet seat!"

What business does a government agency have spending nearly 800 hours (plus inevitable expenses on stationery, biz cards, signage, etc) on a logo? How does this benefit the taxpayer? Why do they need this logo? This logo changes nothing for anybody except the people who worked on it. This is not good stewardship of our tax dollars and you can bet your lunch that this won't be the only FW&A problem found at 18F.

> What business does a government agency have spending nearly 800 hours (plus inevitable expenses on stationery, biz cards, signage, etc) on a logo?

Presumably because they are trying to be a "startup", they are copying the business style of startups. It's easy to look back afterwards and say "that was a complete waste", but it's possible that at the time it was seen as justified. It's easy to say we'll just take the good aspects of startups and the good aspects of government agencies and reject the bad", but it's not always apparent what is the good and bad in each, as they are both fundamentally systems whose ultimate behavior is emergent from all their aspects. It's very easy to accidentally break something useful by tweaking or removing something that appears completely unrelated in systems like that.

That said, I think the more interesting question is should we be trying to emulate a startup in government, given that the vast majority of startups fail? In that light, it should be absolutely no surprise that 18F is failing. It was the likely outcome.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#64

Post by mmanfrin » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:24 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #40

tyre wrote: post #25

I don't care if 18F makes money, and in some cases it may make sense for them not to. In a perfect market, they would be able to sell their services at the same price as the value of those services. So if they build a system for the Veterans Administration (VA) that saves $1 million, they should get $1 million for it. Their EOY revenue would reflect their value created. But they are actually selling to themselves. Th…

$32m is not nothing, it would pay for a big chunk of a lot of programs. The federal government could actually pay the amount of educational money promised in the original legislation to the tribal colleges for many years. It would pay our tribal college's general fund for well over a decade.

$32mil is 10 cents a person for a year to fund. It's worth it.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#65

Post by JauntyHatAngle » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:25 AM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #53

guessmyname wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me a time when I used to work closely with a design team in a web agency, it was very frustrating to work with them because every little modification to things like colors, sizes, buttons and the like would be accompanied with several hours of "design strategy" , time that the designers would waste thinking and prototyping new ideas for the corporate image of any of our clients, I say "waste" because mos…

It took a couple of experiences dealing with serious, fancy pants designers to convince me that most of them are charlatans. Even something as simple as widening a button was stonewalled by "explorations", "design strategy meetings", "pattern library meetings", etc. The end result was getting even a single component mocked up took at least a week and was no better than what I could have come up with in 30 minutes.

I don't think that's limited to designers.

That sounds a lot like dealing with B2B consultancy companies too.

IBM eat your heart out.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#66

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:26 AM UTC

johansch wrote: post #61

cloakandswagger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a couple of experiences dealing with serious, fancy pants designers to convince me that most of them are charlatans. Even something as simple as widening a button was stonewalled by "explorations", "design strategy meetings", "pattern library meetings", etc. The end result was getting even a single component mocked up took at least a week and was no better than what I could have come up with in 30 minutes.

Quite a few UX/design people who have actually gone through education/training (as opposed to learning by doing) seem to suffer by an extreme form of process overload. It makes sense I guess. It's really easy to teach processes and it probably makes the them feel "professional".

In many cases this applies to software engineering as well.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#67

Post by wpietri » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:28 AM UTC

guessmyname wrote: post #42

JBReefer wrote: post #12

18F gives me the creeps because of https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz... Something about government robots and goodspeak speech correction feels Orwellian, even if it's really tiny.

Ha ha ha this Americans and their political correctness. I cringe every time I see things like this and the HN community doesn't escapes from it, in fact, I have seen more "political correctness" towards sexism here more than in other communities on the Internet (at least the ones I visit) . I still do not understand why people pay so much attention to these things. I can only imagine how people would react in countr…

> I still do not understand why people pay so much attention to these things.

Quite a lot of people who respond as you do actively don't want to understand. But in case you're one of the ones who is actually curious:

Historically, sexism has been a problem. For millennia, women were basically property. The last couple hundred years, we've been unwinding that. E.g. less than 100 years ago, women finally got to vote. They didn't have equal access to credit cards until 1974. In the 1990s, US states finally all made marital rape illegal. In the early aughts, women reached parity in the proportion of people getting medical and legal degrees. (The proportion of actual doctors and lawyers hasn't caught up yet; it's around 33% now, and I'd guess it will hit 50% about 2040.)

One place that sexism still resides is in language. That language at least sometimes shapes thinking. Many women in professional contexts reasonably object to gendered language that excludes them. So to be polite, many workplaces are shifting to use more inclusive language.

So, TL;DR: we're in the middle of overturning millennia of pervasive sexism, a language shift is part of that, and if we're lucky we'll be done with the project in only decades.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#68

Post by jonathankoren » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

personjerry wrote: post #22

ajju wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many fast growing startups have accurate financial projections?

But most [investors|employees] disapprove of bad projections.

That's typically a hindsight position.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#69

Post by cloudjacker » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:31 AM UTC

trendia wrote: post #28

ajju wrote: post #3

Did I misunderstand or is the story also - A government department was started with the ambitious goal of "zero budget" and this year with a 183 person team will have recovered 68.75% of its costs. And did we forget that fast growing startups don't usually break even either?

But fast growing startups are funded by private investors, not taxpayers.

Such a loaded statement. Taxpayers are never ever ever going to get a good deal on their expropriated funds.

The Treasury and Fed were practically running a hedge fund and the military losses are magnitudes higher

In this case they're a two year old department mimicking silicon Valley and already making money

I wanted to be offended but this is pretty good

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#70

Post by kbenson » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

hbosch wrote: post #20

pryelluw wrote: post #7

One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good. How is that even possible?

Honestly that's a dumb one to cherry pick, because we only see the end result. If you figure a team of 6, for instance, working 30-40 hrs a week on branding for about a month, the time is easy to figure. What's harder to understand externally is that there may have been 10, 20, or 40 logo designs that get explored, scrapped, edited, changed, saved, reverted... and sure, sometimes you end up pretty close to where you…

> The value is in the middle, which is done internally.

Wait. Can you back up and explain that? From the way I think about it, design is about producing something in the end. If you can produce the same end product cheaper and or faster, then you are ahead. If I buy two manufactured items bikes that are physically identical, but one company found a way to reduce the work required by 10% to save themselves, money, that doesn't matter to be as the end recipient of that product. If it's identical, it's identical.

Now, if you're a design firm, sure, the knowledge gained from the work might yield benefits down the line. But 18F isn't a design firm. A new logo does not help them make better products for the agencies they serve. In what way are they better off by spending that time than if they were able to literally just slap the same end result together in five minutes?