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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

#251

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 think it does matter whether the work is done by the federal government or private corporations. While their dysfunctions as large organizations may be similar, when they're successful, they behave very differently.

The goal of any profit seeking company selling to the government is to extract as much value as possible. The goal is not just to provide X service which was initially requested at a price that undercuts your competition. The goal is to win the contract for X for year 1, and then to under-deliver it in a way that the customer is basically forced to buy X for year 2, because it would be a massive lift to shift to a different service, but probably the customer needs to buy Xv2 to actually accomplish anything and by the way Xv2 works best if you also buy services Y and Z. Perhaps you do some "study" to determine that actually the problem is larger than what the customer initially described and several other expensive problems must be tackled to fully solve it. Efficient use of tax-dollars to solve the problem within the scope described is not the goal of government contractors. These companies grade themselves based on their revenue and margins, not on what they deliver to the tax payers. They're profit-seeking companies and they do just that.

By contrast, when government agencies are working well, they do what they're chartered to do by Congress. Whether that goal is good or not may be a matter of perspective (e.g. do we need a separate SEC and CFTC and CFPB? Could there be a single financial products/services regulator?) but to the degree their stated missions are incoherent, that's at least partly a failure of Congress, which the people have an indirect way of correcting.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#252
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very aware of this, which is why I mentioned corruption in my comment, and how the only solution is to make the government smaller. Should have read the comment to the end.

A smaller government may cut the red tape, but it can only service a smaller number of client or citizens. Or offer far less. Furthermore, I can point you to SCRUM teams that are small, but are wildly inefficient. Size isn’t the root cause of inefficiency. The better take is why is the bidding process so opaque? Why the red tape and micromanaging? Most importantly: Would this still lead to a better outcome than motiv…

[deleted]

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#253

The headline sucks (as of this posting) as one it doesn’t match and two even the matching headline is not accurate. Mark Cuban is encouraging the employees of 18F to start their venture to provide govt services. He will invest hoping that DOGE will see right through their mistakes and seek to hire them back. Except he is wrong. Musk is a lot of things but one thing he isn’t capable of is backtracking showing his acti…

In this case nobody will ask him, but it also means he's not the one who'll pay for it.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#254
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?

Why does the government need two identity providers? Login dot gov is good, agree. But why do we need two?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#255
post #242

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 mo…

> 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? I couldn't even login to ssa.gov before it was integrated with login.gov. Every year or two I'd give it a shot, it told me my account was locked, I had to visit a Social Security office to get it unlocked. I tried t…

The old SSA identity thing was useless. Out of the dozen or so people I know who have tried to use it, not a single person was able to make it work.

It was so, so bad.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#256
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals. What a wild take! Only some of sooo many reports all over the media 5-6 days ago that you somehow missed: "Key US agencies tell staff not to answer Musk email on what they did last week" https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0qrj20g5vo "Elon Musk’s Federal Worker Emails: Agency Leaders Can Decide If Employees Must Reply, White House Says" ht…

Sounds like insubordination.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#257
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I can’t think of one privatization effort in the US that improved services, or kept services steady at a lower cost. There may be one but it’s certainly the exception. Though it greatly enriches those helming the effort.

ahem SpaceX.

No Musk fan, but that company has been doing a real bang-up (literally) job of developing affordable launch systems.

I think the SLS is a disaster, and I suspect is very much in DOGE's crosshairs.

As always, "it depends" is really where the truth lies. There doesn't seem to be anyone that is "always right," or "always wrong."

It's the extremists that believe that there is "always right/wrong," that cause the pain.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#258
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week"

This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced. The US healthcare system is evidence that this is an overly simplistic view. In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. In a for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is consi…

> In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, and we work to decrease it. That’s cute. But the reality is often closer to this version: In a not for profit healthcare insurance system, every dollar not spent on patient care is considered waste, so we give it to ourselves and find a way to call it patient care.

Or you can put them in contingency fund...

That's not hard...

US is the richest nation with poor healthcare. Think about that...

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#260
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread discusses DOGE laying off a small agency that made useful online tools for people to access government functions at much lower costs than private contractors were previously charging the government. It is not obvious that this is an example of "fraud, waste and abuse". Other decisions they have made include laying off anyone unfortunate enough to be on a probationary period because they were recently deem…

None of the individuals working for this agency could provide a list of 5 things they did the prior week, either. The subthread here was talking about waste generally I wasn’t intending to move any goalposts. Ignore fraud. I still think it’s unacceptable for government workers to be insubordinate or absent to the point where they can't provide a weekly standup update when asked. That’s inefficient waste in my book.

If someone entirely outside my chain of command demands I give them a status update, “no” is often an appropriate answer.

It doesn’t mean I can’t. It means I shouldn’t.

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