Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#91

Post by blactuary » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #60

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…

My experience as a consultant with both (local) administrations (in Germany) and much larger corporations is that the corporations weren't even close to being as dysfunctional. I'm certain there are great parts of government, but I've never experienced it, and all I'm hearing from friends who work at the federal level is that it's no different there.

Has Germany had one of two major parties spending decades trying to undermine government to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy that government is bad by definition? We are 45 years into an intentional effort to sabotage public services to convince people they don't work, to cut taxes for the wealthiest people who don't want to fund them

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#92

Post by kjksf » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #25

Put Mark Cuban to the side for a bit, I think the general idea of 18f going private is a good one and was my first reaction when I heard they were getting dissolved. EDIT: I think it's a good idea in the context of them getting dissolved. I would much prefer if they continued to exist within the govt, but if the choice is between going private and ceasing to exist, I would prefer they go private and I think it's a go…

18F was created by Obama because the way government was contracting private companies wasn't working.

Before 18F the government would pay $5 million to a private company for a basic website and they wouldn't even get it on time.

And it was ignored until Obama's most important legislation, health care, was threatened by a website, written by a private company for a lot of money, didn't work.

So Obama created 18F to fix it and then they expanded 18F mandate to do more fixing.

Clearly, the model of contracting private companies didn't work.

DOGE is literally the same thing. 18F was part of government agency that got renamed with executive order and had their mandate expanded to looking for wasteful government spending.

They just fired a small number of programmers aligned with previous democratic admin (18F) and hired small number of programmers aligned with current republican admin.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#93

Post by unclebucknasty » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

kingstoned wrote: post #32

dzonga wrote: post #15

18f has(d) really smart people. who gave up higher wages in the private sector to serve the public. then idiots like musk come along. damage from musk n co will be monumental in the years to come.

It's generally a myth that government employees are somehow receiving low total compensation and they could do better in the real economy. Here's one government employees providing stats and experiences about what it is like to work for the government: https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-joy-of-government-employment

The linked article reads more like a hit piece with a narrative and omits significant context. Features gems like these:

government employment is a blight upon the economy

government employment is terrible for society as a whole

A more balanced review from the Congressional Budget Office. [0]

TLDR;

1. Wages tend to be lower for government employees, but benefits are better, making total compensation more competitive

2. Even with this effect, the higher you go in education, the more likely wages and total comp are lower for government employees

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#94

Post by 1970-01-01 » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

D+ grade headline. His full offer and message:

“If you worked for 18F and got fired, Group together to start a consulting company,” wrote Cuban. “It’s just a matter of time before DOGE needs you to fix the mess they inevitably created. They will have to hire your company as a contractor to fix it. But on your terms. I’m happy to invest and/or help.”

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#95

Post by hk1337 » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…

I key difference and qualifier is a private company CAN have the same amount of waste but not necessarily and like modeless mentioned, private companies can fail and we can move the services to another.

It's guaranteed the federal government is going to have waste and be very difficult to change because you cannot let it fail.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#96

Post by airstrike » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #70

modeless wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The exception is companies propped up by government regulation. The problem with modern big companies is that the exception has become the rule. Regulation is so pervasive it's become a "what the hell is water" situation. People don't even recognize that the dysfunctional companies are protected from failur…

Delusion belief in market forces that completely ignores the reality when companies reach monopoly status.

Even if that were true, by definition not every company reaches monopoly status, so all others can fail too, unlike the government, so this argument against the GP's claim does not hold.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#97

Post by ThinkBeat » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #34

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…

Having worked at large organisations and governments, they are literally the same. This is so obvious if you've ever had first hand experience of them. I think this is a great example of how a lot of people, even supposed "intellectuals" think with thought-terminating cliches and ideology, because the narrative of gov'ts being inefficient has been a talking point and narrative since Reagan whilst all the time any lar…

Having spent many years at government at different levels and in large companies as a consultant I disagree with a lot of that.

Some government entities are great, really efficient, some seem nearly like startups.

Some are nearly all deadweight. A majority of the senior older folks working for in one of the state governments, would eat breakfast, read the newspaper, have lunch, and then try to do something for a couple of hours before going home. I was rather shocked.

I was less so when I encountered it in other places.

The government is an enormous group of entities. Some work well, most I think work ok, and some are horrors. (from a taxpayer perspective, not from the people who work there s perspective)

There is a lot of dead weight in the private sector. The worst examples I have encountered are places where nepotism is king. Older companies seem to accrue dead weight over time. Especially with strong unions¹,

But at some point some new CEO or some such makes attempts to clean house, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I am a huge supporter of unions and I think they are one of the only ways to try to get the US back on track again if enough people are unionized. BUt that is not a silver bullet either.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#98

Post by alephnerd » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #82

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…

I agree that large organizations work similarly in government and business. The difference is that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses. This either keeps them effective enough to compete, or they get replaced with more functional ones. The accumulated dysfunction in a 20-50 year old company is large, but on a whole different scale than a 250 year old government.

> that large businesses constantly competed by other businesses and either

Not exactly. Ideally, you want to use market and persona segmentation to develop a partial oligopoly.

The nature of sales cycles and the fact that only a minority of organizations (F1000) represent the majority of spend, means that you essentially have 2-3 large players in an single segment, and maybe a couple smaller players that will eventually be acquired.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#99

Post by fragmede » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

gortok wrote: post #14

xivzgrev wrote: post #5

They built / manage login.gov? Oh boy. It’s one thing if Twitter has bugs. It’s another thing if people have bugs while trying to login or signup to government services. Or hackers finding vulnerabilities and no one to fix them?

login.gov is one of the few government services that as a private sector techie I'm in awe of. They really knocked it out of the park with login.gov, and I can only assume it was politics that had the IRS use ID.me instead of login.gov.

The unfortunate thing is that there isn't this large imposing physical monument that you stand before and are just overwhelmed by its grandeur because of it. Imagine standing at the bottom of the Hoover Dam and looking up. That, but digital.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#100

Post by jonhohle » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #34

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Privatization is what a lot of people believe is the answer, thinking that there is so much waste and useless things the Federal government does. These people must have never worked at a large corporation. I have a relative in the federal government and we would share stories because the dysfunctions are basically the same. Any large organization of humans working uses a pyramid organization since like the middle age…

Having worked at large organisations and governments, they are literally the same. This is so obvious if you've ever had first hand experience of them. I think this is a great example of how a lot of people, even supposed "intellectuals" think with thought-terminating cliches and ideology, because the narrative of gov'ts being inefficient has been a talking point and narrative since Reagan whilst all the time any lar…

Just one data point: I’ve done government contracts (state level), worked for a private company, a public company, and a private company that went public. There was nothing more inefficient than state level government.

They were paying $300/hr for a fresh out of college grad working on their first project. The money was allocated, so they didn’t care how much it cost. Anyone with any motivation left employment by the state and became a contractor for 5-10x what their salary was when working for the state. It was disgusting.

Meanwhile in the private sector, companies or deoartments that don’t make money cease to exist after a while. The government can bankroll a failed department with negative outcomes to their purpose indefinitely (and then get more money for to fix their own broken outcomes).

I’m not proposing solutions, and I have recently worked with entrenched utility monopolies with the same segment capture behave the same way. There are, however, significantly more efficient private companies operating at larger scale than some governments.