201–210 of 246 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to the comments say the same thing. I’ve hired and worked with many engineers and the overwhelming majority did not attend MIT or Stanford. Some of the best didn’t attend college at all!
In your experience how do you filter candidates without a degree? Portfolio? Do you review their code?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While these issues exist, we should look to the countries that have successfully overcome them and shamelessly copy their successful strategies. The US government already does really well at training people for the military, both leaders and fresh high school grads. Personally, I think we need to stop passing 2000+ bills into law and instead give our technocrats some high level requirements that they can figure out t…
Perhaps. So what countries overcame these issues by training new people and not addressing the internal systemic issues that lead to the drain or burnout of skilled workers? How does training of new people address the established culture that encourages hitting milestones (internal) but not achieving the overall mission? How does training of new people address the fundamental problem of developing and testing using 3…
When I said we should look at successful country strategies, I expect those strategies will include things like "don't let legislators and lobbyists be apart of contract details -- only high level requirements" and "outlaw the bribery that you call donating to a legislator's political campaign". Perhaps even change the government worker model to encourage small enterprises within existing government (like USDS, 18F, etc) and empower them to help earlier in the design process -- like during requirements gathering.
A more straightforward solution would be to just create a new payscale (say, the Executive Technical Service) for IT professionals and other technical domains where federal compensation lags the private sector. The Senior Executive Service (the payscale for senior leadership like department and agency executives, including most political appointees) has about 8000 members- if you gave this system twice as many people and paid them all $100k more than the GS system would, you'd increase the federal budget by about $1.6 billion a year, or 0.04% of the 2019 budget, almost all of which you'd recover anyway by replacing IT contractors who generally cost the government between $250k and $350k each a year. Unfortunately, this solution would really piss off the big federal contractors, who would heavily lobby against it, which is why it doesn't happen even though more reasonable payscales have been found for federal doctors and lawyers.
We don't allow governments to fail (easily) but startups fail frequently and we acknowledge that both bankruptcy and team failure leads to knowledge that is rare to gather without actually experiencing the failure.
I'm not advocating for anything in particular except to acknowledge this fact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear you, and appreciate your caveat ("highly anecdotally"). But consider a couple of data points: -- KH-11 satellite, and presumed successors -- Stuxnet -- Utah data center ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center ) -- The rather enormous intelligence budget that allows all kinds of creativity The above indicates that there must be some corners of these agencies that are extremely technically skilled, and…
KH-11 is Lockheed. Stuxnet was probably mainly Mossad. The Utah data center was a pretty run of the mill data center, but apparently plagued by technical issues. And yeah, they have a huge budget which allows them to buy a lot of toys for a bit above normal price. Their mathematicians are top notch though from what I've heard.
You're right on the money for math though, crazy smart mathematicians.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll reiterate my point from another post: It is not a lack of talent, it is a lack of good governance/administration that causes most software/IT failures for the government. USDS is actually pretty cool, and they seem to be doing really great work. But they're a small part of the system. In order to actually improve software/IT within the government we need to fix a lot of small problems. Here are some more: Just t…
This sort of thing is exactly what USDS works against. However, it won't be solved until federal agencies hire on people with the skillset to effectively manage technology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classic modern HN comment. The hard working person with a history of success who is trying a risky ambitious project will fail, because they didn't consider the few things a commentor instantly spotted as problems.
Classic modern HN comment response. You act like these criticisms are somehow inherently negative... Just because people love to point out the HN discussion where Drew Houston got scrutiny for Dropbox, doesn't mean that discussion isn't valuable. I'm sure as hell Drew learned a ton from the criticisms. This is the point of HN - it's OK.
If we discourage people from trying 1/100 or even 1/1000 chances because it's overwhelmingly likely they fail, we miss out on the massive upside offered by these risks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the point of school prestige, at least in tech, is to assess skill. If the available pool of raw talent is larger than can be funneled through prestigious schools, then there is a need for more schools.
Again, just substitute the words. But the point of Olympic medals is to assess skill. If the available pool of talented athletes is larger than the number of gold medals, then there is a need for more gold medals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the DC area computer science programs feed right into the NSA and defense. Which is funny because Silicon Valley companies won't think candidates from those schools are that interesting, while simultaneously thinking that the intelligence and defense has better programmers. People are people.
Who in Silicon Valley thinks that? I've never heard anyone say it in my 30+ years here (until now).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allow me to rephrase, people believe the NSA has superior technology with mystical capabilities. Who do you think that develops that stuff, where do those people come from?
contractors