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

washingtonpost.com

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

#131

Post by languagewars »

blowski wrote: post #125
mmanfrin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument. Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

> Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like.

You have changed the scale by 2 orders of magnitude to make it something.

$100 is a 5th of someone people's yearly salary, so how dare you waste it on entertainment every month?

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

#133

Post by dom0 »

blowski wrote: post #125
mmanfrin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument. Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

Let's define "nothing" in US federal spending as the amount below the standard deviation of the US military budget over the last five year period.

Hmmm. Perhaps that's a bit of large number, isn't it?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Inflatio...

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

#134

Post by al2o3cr »

"The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good."

LOL now WaPo writers are also design critics. There's no citation for this statement, it's literally just the author talking shit in an ostensibly "news" article.

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

#135

Post by codingdave »

Why is this a problem?

IT is a cost center in most organizations, not a profit center. 18F serves a similar function - it streamlines other organizations, with the hope being that at the end, the cost savings in those other orgs is more than the cost to run 18F. As long as we are saving money overall, then less taxpayer money has to be shelled out to keep the country running, and it is a win. Or am I missing something?

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

#136

Post by witty_username »

dom0 wrote: post #133
blowski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument. Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

Let's define "nothing" in US federal spending as the amount below the standard deviation of the US military budget over the last five year period. Hmmm. Perhaps that's a bit of large number, isn't it? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Inflatio...

If one wastes a lot of money does not mean wasting a small amount of money is justified.

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

#137

Post by user5994461 »

Two questions: How much do they pay? Where are they located?

That should be enough to determine if they have any chance at success.

---

I worked for government projects in a small European country. It was actually a decent job in a decent company. I could recommend to people to work there. Salary and perks were average for the area, shit for the world (not much room to do better in the area, no great companies).

IMO: In the major USA locations, this has absolutely no chance to work. There are numerous tech companies who will offer better pay, better work conditions and better perks. Anyone will a brain cell would just go to a tech company and avoid government like the plague.

And if someone wanna try anyway, he'll quickly realize that all his peers are elsewhere, and he's gotta leave to join them.

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

#138

Post by blowski »

languagewars wrote: post #131
blowski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument. Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

> Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. You have changed the scale by 2 orders of magnitude to make it something. $100 is a 5th of someone people's yearly salary, so how dare you waste it on entertainment every month?

Compare:

    $100 is nothing so it doesn't matter what I spend it on.
to

    I spend $100 on entertainment every month because I like watching TV.
To clarify, the $32 million spent by 18F sounds like fantastic value for money, and we should emphasise that value.

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

#139

Post by acdha »

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…

This brings back so many memories from working at a design-heavy web consulting shop during the first bubble. We had some of the best designers I've ever worked with, who could meet with the client once and produce multiple great concepts the next day.

None of that mattered with some clients: get a room full of VPs, an indecisive founder, etc. and before you know it the endless tweaks and revisions blue well into six figures and start delaying work on everything downstream.

Some of that was indecision, poor management, etc. but much of it was simply many stakeholders with different priorities. Get a dozen Sony executives in a room – which was the average meeting – and unsurprisingly it turns out that you have a dozen opinions about what the most important elements of the project are. Someone visiting that website or using a product has absolutely no way to know any of that and sees a design they could do quickly – if they'd only been presented with the end vision of what the project was about…

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

#140

Post by MichaelBurge »

languagewars wrote: post #131
blowski wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "it's an acceptable cost because the $32 million loss is balanced by gains in other areas" is potentially winning argument. Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. We should focus on the value bought by that money, not on waving it away as "nothing".

> Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like. You have changed the scale by 2 orders of magnitude to make it something. $100 is a 5th of someone people's yearly salary, so how dare you waste it on entertainment every month?

If you don't pay even $100 in taxes, the government will seize your assets with a levy or - if you continue to resist - send goons to threaten you at gunpoint to turn the money over. Snapchat gets a free pass, because they don't force their investors to pay using a police force. The IRS maintains its own SWAT team dedicated to enforcement of the tax code.

I'm not saying the FBI shouldn't get a TV in the breakroom, but there's no level of money that shouldn't have a good justification.

18F seems easy to justify.

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