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Why I’m staying at 18F

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Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#41

Post by andrefrancisco »

ep103 wrote: post #16
petercooper wrote: post #9

Sounds reasonable. I don't know about US politics, but in the UK the civil service is (meant to be) independent of party politics and civil servants are meant to impartial and work with whoever the government happens to be (indeed, it's even a half-joke that the civil service actually controls the politicians who are merely public figureheads).

I was taught in high school, that its basically the same here. Though with every election, the incoming politicians make a big deal of replacing various department heads. Its the main reason that government jobs are intended to be unioned and tenured, ie, to protect them from political whimsy. But expect that to come under fire in the next 6 months, unfortunately.

It’s less about unions and more about classifications of employees. Most federal employees are either “career” or “political” positions. Political positions are typically replaced by each new administration, while career employees stay, regardless of union status.

*I’m a federal employee.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#42

Post by dragonwriter »

andrefrancisco wrote: post #6
untog wrote: post #3

This is the optimistic view. But it isn't difficult to imagine a Republican congress drastically cutting the funding available to teams like 18F. Of course, time will tell, and I agree that it's too early to judge yet.

Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.

> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress.

Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money on 18F. Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA.

Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If you work for the Federal government other than in an office with special Constitutional protection, no matter what the notional funding structure of your particular unit, your job, pay, and benefits are not protected against Congressional action, and you should not be misled to think that they are.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#43

Post by bsilvereagle »

andrefrancisco wrote: post #6
untog wrote: post #3

This is the optimistic view. But it isn't difficult to imagine a Republican congress drastically cutting the funding available to teams like 18F. Of course, time will tell, and I agree that it's too early to judge yet.

Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.

> Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets

I think you should also have a leg of funding direct from Congress to create "universal" applications across the fed. Does NASA need a separate timecard program from the DoD from the NPS? Does OPM need a different training system than the GAO? I would argue that in 99% of the cases, no. I think 18F and the USDS are uniquely setup to standardize and reduce a lot of waste across the fed, but as long as agencies are paying for individual projects I don't see any standardization happening.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#44

Post by brianwawok »

dragonwriter wrote: post #42
andrefrancisco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.

> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money on 18F. Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA. Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If…

I don't think they could go under minimum wage.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#45

Post by brianwawok »

dragonwriter wrote: post #42
andrefrancisco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.

> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money on 18F. Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA. Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If…

I don't think they could go under minimum wage.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#46

Post by dwaltrip »

tmaly wrote: post #22
tmaly wrote: post #2

the title threw me off. I thought it was going to be about someone saying they would not change their a/s/l on chat.

why the down vote for use of humor?

These days, the only jokes that I've noticed not being downvoted are those that are a certain brand of witty and intellectual. Or they at least give the appearance of contributing to the discussion, even it doesn't survive detailed scrutiny.

This cultural dynamic seems to work out alright, given the other characteristics of HN. It would be hard to do better I think. Overall, I'm personally pretty happy with the level of discourse on HN.

I'm surprised that you are surprised, being a member for 6+ years. Was it different before?

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#47

Post by andrefrancisco »

bsilvereagle wrote: post #43
andrefrancisco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets. As long as we keep delivering good work, our funding is secure. *I'm an 18F employee.

> Agencies pay us for our services out of their own budgets I think you should also have a leg of funding direct from Congress to create "universal" applications across the fed. Does NASA need a separate timecard program from the DoD from the NPS? Does OPM need a different training system than the GAO? I would argue that in 99% of the cases, no. I think 18F and the USDS are uniquely setup to standardize and reduce a…

That's why all of our work is open source. Agencies are free to reuse work we perform for other partners. Often, agencies will still need help implementing it for their specific needs, but we don't charge for the work we've already done. For instance, we've helped a couple agencies get regulations on the eRegulations platform https://eregs.github.io/ and many are using the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards to speed up development https://standards.usa.gov/.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

brianwawok wrote: post #44
dragonwriter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fortunately, 18F isn't funded by Congress. Even if 18F is paid out if other agencies budgets, Congress could as easily prohibit those agencies (or GSA itself) from spending any money on 18F. Heck, Congress could directly restructure, break up, or abolish the GSA. Or, they could exercise the recently-revived Holman Rule and simply cut the pay of every individual (or select individuals) working in 18F to $1/annum. If…

I don't think they could go under minimum wage.

Yes, they can. Minimum wage doesn't apply to the federal government to start with, and even if it did Congress could include an exception as part of any legislation that would otherwise violate it.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

huac wrote: post #21
petercooper wrote: post #9

Sounds reasonable. I don't know about US politics, but in the UK the civil service is (meant to be) independent of party politics and civil servants are meant to impartial and work with whoever the government happens to be (indeed, it's even a half-joke that the civil service actually controls the politicians who are merely public figureheads).

The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any particular party to seize total control of power. Hence, the work that civil servants perform is unlikely to change between Prime Ministers. In America, well, Jeff Sessions is about to be the Attorney General.

> The UK parliamentary system makes alliances necessary and difficult for any particular party to seize total control of power.

The Parliamentary system means that there is no separation of powers, so "total control of power" just means a parliamentary majority, and most governments have been one-party majority governments (there have been a few coalition governments, such as the LibDem-Tory coalition that Cameron started with, but they are the exception, not the rule.)

Now, if the UK had proportional representation, even with a parliamentary system, that might make one party acheiving total control more difficult than in the US, and enough parliamentary systems are also PR that people sometimes conflate the effects of the two features.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#50

Post by ethernetsalad »

noahkunin wrote: post #35
rrdharan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that in theory you are losing money right now? https://fcw.com/articles/2016/10/24/18f-oig-financial.aspx https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/02/... "Instead of securing enough cost reimbursements from its federal clients, 18F is losing millions."

OP here. "In theory" - most of the stories don't realize we're funded by a fund with billions in revenue, and was net positive in 2016. https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/152462#ASF Congress designed the revolving fund with the purpose of spending any funds in excess of costs to help the rest of government be more efficient and effective, as those funds don't naturally return to the US Treasury as they would in other…

As someone who worked on an open data toolkit here in New Zealand, you also wouldn't have any clarity on "shadow users" either when it comes to non-economic returns.

For our initial prototype, we originally forked your docs repo and heavily modified it which got us up and running quicker than if we had started from scratch!

That said, we ended up switching to another setup later on but still, it would've been painful without your open sourced works!

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