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Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

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Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#181

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

skissane wrote: post #105
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…

> There will be inept people, waste, corruption, people stealing, etc. but there will also be the vast majority trying to do a good job and feel satisfaction in their work. It doesn't matter if its the federal government or a private corporation, its simply a trade-off of the organization structure. Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people, and because there is a str…

> Private sector entities can have less “dead wood” because it is easier to get rid of people.

Its not though, its the same layers of documentation, paperwork, upper management approvals, legal and HR approvals. The only exception being blatant policy violations like drug use, etc. where immediate dismissal can be done.

If you are talking about mass layoffs, for large corporations they still have to file paperwork for the WARN act, look at laws in various states around employment, get legal, HR, etc. involved.

I've seen both mass layoff and single individual layoff first hand and the only thing that might be different with Federal employees is a union. And in that case a union operates mostly the same if its serving a large corp or a government entity.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#182

Post by encomiast »

modeless wrote: post #68
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…

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…

Private companies don't always just fail and get replaced. They find other ways of making profits, like selling user data, externalizing risk, or your run-of-the-mill enshitification.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#183

Post by blactuary »

trentnix wrote: post #122
blactuary wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this exactly. Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda. Govt is just people, and people are flawed and have competing incentives. I've worked in massive companies that have incredibly dumb inefficiencies.

> Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda. You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people…

And so have I. Government is not bad or inefficient by definition, and your anecdotal experience with government does not change that. To believe that government is automatically bad because it is the government is an article of faith, whether or not every single individual has been influenced by propaganda.

Government is what we make it. A snapshot in time of your own experience does not define government and its capabilities.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#184

Post by IgorPartola »

esafak wrote: post #140
IgorPartola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company that makes birthday party banners that fails can be replaced. If your electric company runs itself into the ground, there is no replacement without government assistance. So why add the overhead of a for profit company?

The last mile might be monopolized, but you are oversimplifying it. When implemented well, there are markets for generation, transmission, distribution, and retail, implying alternatives and resiliency. Every system has bottlenecks. This does not mean they are all equally resilient. To give a familiar example, your having one brain does not negate the benefit of having limbs in pairs.

I live in CT where most of the power is supplied by Eversource. Whenever there is a big storm that knocks out power (happens every few years) to most of the state they are never prepared even though they are mandated every time to prepare more than the last time. And after they restore the power the delivery charge goes up. At this point the delivery charge is more than half the cost and our electricity is north of $0.30 per kWh and keeps going up. Even if you switch generation companies your cost doesn’t actually go down significantly overall due to the delivery charges.

Moreover, Eversource has their hands in any solar projects. They drag out the process to approve any installations and fight you tooth and nail to make sure you can’t install a big enough system because they are mandated to buy electricity at the same rate as they sell it. They fully captured the market and are essential to the state’s functioning so whenever there is an issue the government backs them. When there isn’t, they post billions in profits.

What part of that sounds correct to you?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#185

Post by plagiarist »

microtonal wrote: post #163
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…

The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. Even if that is true, in some areas companies' interests strongly misalign with that of citizens. An insurance company earns more by rejecting customer declarations. An ISP earns more by giving customers less bandwidth for a higher price. A toll road company earns more by doing as little maintenance they ca…

The theory of capitalism leading to efficient markets makes a great deal of assumptions that are simply not true in the real world. Even for elastic goods that nobody needs to participate in at all, let alone an inelastic good like healthcare where people will pay pretty much anything for themselves or their family members to continue living.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#186

Post by t3rabytes »

specialp wrote: post #158
kingstoned wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is exceedingly rare to make over 200k in govt. Most heads of agencies and other high level roles are GS-15 which tops out around 195k What you USED to get in exchange for less salary was stability as government jobs were viewed as less vulnerable to economic cycles and uncertainty. Now that value prop is gone

Agency heads can be SES and can make more than GS-15, but the max is still far lower than private sector equivalent.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#187

Post by moogly »

jisnsm wrote: post #114
thrance wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who will buy the newly privatized 18f's products? The government. It's back to square one except now there are shareholders in the middle and the government (you) doesn't own its code anymore. A strictly worse state of affairs.

Not necessarily. The government will have several providers to choose from, which will have to compete in price. If the prices are still inflated, we are talking government corruption, which is yet another reason to make the government smaller, not bigger.

> compete in price

Which equals worse service.

I've yet to across a privatization project that improved anything for the end user, and I lived through a bunch in the 90s. Interregional rail, public transport, postal, telecom... They were all failures.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#188

Post by notahacker »

robomartin wrote: post #144

Reading every thread related to something DOGE is doing reveals the same pattern. Commenters instantly seem to reach two conclusions (or bring them to the table from preconceived notions): 1- Republican = bad, evil 2- You cannot/should not touch anything in government I won't get into the first because it is objectively stupid. This is just as stupid as people on the right concluding "Democrat = bad, evil". Both pola…

Reading every thread related to DOGE reveals the same pattern. Defenders of DOGE, being unable to amount any defence for actual actions the thread is highlighting, have to construct the straw man of arguing that anybody suggesting those actions are spectacularly inept and counterproductive it is thinks that government is unimprovable.

P.S. Have plenty of experience selling to inefficient public and private sector entities. Many of them could have used some better decision makers empowered to remove unnecessary barriers. None of them could have benefited from those decisions being made by script kiddies with no professional experience that lack the ability to tell the difference between a million or a billion never mind understand how budgeting works, what a nuclear safety operative does or whether "recently promoted" maybe shouldn't be a firing criteria...

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#189

Post by davepeck »

dcow wrote: post #162
davepeck wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are effective approaches to curbing fraud waste and abuse and ineffective or even damaging approaches. Which do you believe the current administration is engaged in?

I believe they will prove effective. I believe the government is in need of disruptive change. I welcome the effort.

For what it’s worth: I believe they will prove ineffective at best, damaging at worst.

I believe disruptive change should be undertaken with a deep understanding of the history of an organization and a clear-eyed accounting of its successes and failures.

I see no evidence of this. I believe the current effort is, well, a bit more like a recklessly wielded chainsaw.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#190

Post by afro88 »

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?

According to wikipedia[1] they incubated it, and it has since been run and maintained elsewhere. Same deal with cloud.gov (though that was an 18f prototype)

In fact it looks like most of their projects were prototypes, incubations or partnerships with other agencies and departments. Seems like a modern digital agency / consultancy within the govt. I'm not sticking up for the decision to cut them (I think it's a great agency that clearly bore fruit), but this is HN and we should have our facts straight.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F#:~:text=Login.gov%2C%20w...

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