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Why I’m staying at 18F

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Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#51

Post by monknomo »

jdavis703 wrote: post #34
wyldfire wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the distinction between a "line office" and HQ?

HQ is a building with highly paid bureaucrats sitting in Washington, DC or its suburbs. A line office would be say a branch of US Immigration and Customs that you deal with at your local airport.

I'm not going to lie; we're all bureaucrats with greater or lesser degrees of pay, although I think we top out at 160k, so by Silicon Valley standards, highly paid is debatable...

Line offices are at the pointy end of the stick where you actually deal with citizens. In my particular case we do a lot of permit issuance and resource management, but yeah think local branch office where you go when you want something.

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#52

Post by wslack »

ethernetsalad wrote: post #50
noahkunin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

<3

Re: Why I’m staying at 18F

#53

Post by wslack »

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…

I think you might be interested in this news from last year: https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/119166
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