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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

#221

Post by alephnerd »

luckylion wrote: post #218
alephnerd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany ain't the US. Organizational culture in one might be different than the other.

I'm sure they are. Yet the arguments for why government is doing just fine and large corporations are at least as bad are very similar, so there seem to be some similarities as well.

> so there seem to be some similarities as well.

Any similarity is only at the surface level, because the entire corpora of case law, administrative procedure acts, and past rulings are going to cause entirely distinct dysfunctions.

Both Gonorrhea and the Plague create bubous, but their causes and cures are entirely different.

It's the same with reforming organizational culture.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#222

Post by LocalH »

hk1337 wrote: post #95
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.

Why do we need to stamp out "waste"? A bit of waste is inevitable, and is human. Excessive waste, sure. But I think Musk's DOGE goal is to stamp out all waste to 0, and that is simply impossible.

For example, the only way not to waste any food whatsoever, is not to eat. It is inevitable there will be some small portion of food wasted.

Chasing perfect efficiency is a fool's errand, since humans are not perfect.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#223

Post by plagiarist »

psychlops wrote: post #179
plagiarist wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private companies have economic incentives to charge as much as they can get away with and pass that excess to the owners of the company. This includes participating in collusion with peers and regulatory capture to artificially raise the rate in the market far beyond what efficiency would dictate. Private companies are inefficient by definition when individuals are able to extract millions to billions of dollars fro…

I agree, except with your last sentence. There are many examples of efficient organizations that extract billions from the market from willing participants.

What sort of definition of efficiency are you operating with? A system is not efficient if billions of dollars are "evaporating" out of the system.

Yes, the participants of those markets are various degrees of willingness. No, I do not agree that makes them efficient.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#224

Post by foldr »

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…

I wish that the private companies I’ve worked for were ruthlessly efficient amoral profit-optimizing machines. At least then one would be able to make some kind of sense of management decisions. Once companies reach a certain size, decision making tends to be extremely messy and political. I can’t count the number of decisions I’ve seen made that were obviously going to be bad for the bottom line. This is especially so in VC-backed companies, where a lot of what’s being worked on is pure nonsense that serves only to provide material for an elaborate story-telling exercise designed to separate rich fool from money in the next funding round.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#225

Post by mightybyte »

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's a spectrum of efficiency/redundancy choices an organization can make. On one (theoretical) end of the spectrum the organization maximally leverages each individual's unique skills/knowledge. This is the most efficient part of the spectrum. On the other end every person is an interchangeable cog. This is the most resilient but also least efficient part of the spectrum. Small organizations usually skew much more to the efficiency end of the spectrum because they typically have significant resource constraints. As an organization grows, more people depend on its existence, and my observation has been that resilience and self preservation typically become more important than efficiency. This phenomenon is not unique to governments, it happens in all kinds of organizations.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#226

Post by dcow »

blactuary wrote: post #192
trentnix wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Also, support for the DOGE mission is entirely orthogonal to DOGE's actual goals and what they are doing so far. Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve t…

I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#227

Post by skissane »

alephnerd wrote: post #217
skissane wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the American administrative structure is very different from Germany's, so it's an unfair comparison either direction. > The only countries remotely similar to the US might be Canada and Australia. Like the US, Canada and Australia are federations - but Germany is too. Unlike the US, Canada, Australia and Germany all have parliamentary rather than presidential systems So I’m not sure what you are suggesting tha…

All federations aren't equal, and administrative procedures and laws are very distinct country to country. > but I doubt either makes a big difference to government employment It does, because employment law (and any other form of law) is largely built on top of a mixture of administrative policy acts along with past rulings and cases. Fundamentally, Germany and the US are not comparable becuase there are very signif…

You suggested Australia and Canada have something in common with the US in this area that Germany doesn’t - but when challenged you can’t actually name anything specific, you just fall back on vague generalities

> IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably France and Italy.

Unlike Australia/Canada/Germany/US (among others), neither France nor Italy are federations, both are unitary states with some degree of devolution (significantly more for Italy)

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#228

Post by svantana »

Insanity wrote: post #126
whyenot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plurality (49.8%) of voters voted for Trump. More voted for something else.

Fair, but not on the same “something else” so Trump still had the majority share. I guess I’m more surprised by the low voter turnout. If you voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all, you are partly responsible for the mess being created lol. Choosing not to pick a side is a choice in itself - not the absence of choice.

No. Trump had the largest share, not the majority.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#229

Post by kierangill »

I’ve seen a lot of positivity surrounding login.gov on HackerNews. I’ve never used the service and am unfamiliar with the quality of its implementation. Many commenters here point to login.gov as an example of the US government shipping good software. [1]

1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?

2. From the technologist's perspective, why is this considered quality software? I see it's an open-source Ruby on Rails app[2] with basic documentation, tests, and monitoring. As a non-RoR developer, I'm curious where this project falls on the spectrum from merely adequate to exceptional, and why.

[1] e.g., in this comment section: “login.gov is one of the few government services that as a private sector techie I'm in awe of”

[2] https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#230

Post by api »

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…

"If you want to turn someone into an anti-government laissez faire capitalist, send them to work for the Fed for a few years. If you want to turn someone into a communist, send them to work on Wall Street for a few years."

Someone who used to work in finance told me that once.

Humans are very, very bad at large scale organizational efficiency. I have never seen a very large organization that is not an absolute disaster in terms of waste. The relationship seems to be exponential as a function of organizational size.

There's an extra wrinkle with government though: I am not sure we want government to be too efficient. Government has a monopoly on force. Making it into a bureaucratic tar pit is one time tested way to restrain it and make sure it's subject to proper checks. The cost is high, but the cost of a runaway murderous regime is higher.

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