Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 454 posts

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#311

Post by dcow »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #289
dcow wrote: 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.

The request was at best a bad joke, and I think you know that too. If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email." If yo…

I think it’s a brilliant and effective way to route out insubordination and dead workers.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#312

Post by [deleted] »

dcow wrote: post #256
nosianu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#313

Post by scintill76 »

dcow wrote: post #283
scintill76 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments” (Edit: I accidentally pulled this from a different article not about 18F, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/02/24/musk-doge-fe... . I believe my broader point still true, but I'll elaborate more below.) This email came AFTER thousands of layoffs!…

I don’t think you’re interpreting the article’s wording correctly.

Well, why don’t you write your interpretation, and explain how that quote from TFA means that the email came before any layoffs.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#314

Post by thedufer »

epistasis wrote: post #231
afro88 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which facts do you believe are not straight?

I would assume they're pointing at the comment at the top of this thread ("They built / manage login.gov?") rather than the article itself.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#315

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

Both public and private are means to an end. Privatization is better than nothing.

If what it takes to ensure research and public services continue, is moving them from government to states and corporations, so be it. In fact, that may be the way out of our horrible partisan divide. The right gets what they want, a shrunken government and ability to enforce their ideology in red states, except they can't control what happens in blue states. The left gets to no longer feel threatened and enforce their ideology in blue states, except they can't control what happens in in red states. What's left of the government resolves interstate disputes and maintains interstate services, though many formerly-interstate services become intrastate (e.g. USPS). The military protects everyone from foreign adversaries. The US doesn't devolve into anarchy.

I suspect that's not what either side wants, but honestly, what's the alternative? Domination, where a large section the population is miserable and angry? Anarchy, where everyone (who can't leave the US at least) suffers? AI superintelligence (I'm skeptical)? Or perhaps the majority left's and majority right's beliefs aren't fundamentally incompatible, and everything seems polarized now, but after some things start breaking and others not breaking, time passes, some people feel betrayed or upset, but the government doesn't collapse, the "average left" and "average right" will be able to respectfully debate each other again. That's what I hope, but I suspect it ends as described above (maybe once people start living in their own ideological areas, the debates are so respectful they wonder why they can't compromise and merge, but when merged they're too emotional to debate or compromise).

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#316

Post by s1artibartfast »

dcow wrote: post #226
blactuary wrote: post #192

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.

Where are you getting the idea that the email is related at all? For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#317

Post by dcow »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #309
dcow wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked, I would probably listen to my CEO’s boss. And what a poor CEO for risking his entire workforce and his own position on a political squabble.

I think it's a great moment for the CEO to have a spine and show the stupidity of the board in that moment. "To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk…

I’m sure this great CEO will continue to be a great leader under other management, then. We’ll see if Cuban actually follows through on his offer or if it’s just political virtue signaling.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#318

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

dcow wrote: post #311
sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request was at best a bad joke, and I think you know that too. If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email." If yo…

I think it’s a brilliant and effective way to route out insubordination and dead workers.

I hope you never end up in a position of management, because it's a real shitty way to manage people.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#319

Post by IX-103 »

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #268
microtonal wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Natural monopolies exist, for sure. Your insurance example is odd though - insurance markets are generally highly competitive. The recent cases where we’ve seen a loss of competition in the market (CA home insurance, for example) have been driven by regulators imposing price controls. The issue with healthcare is that providers have leverage over insurers, not that there is a lack of competition for insurance.

No, the problem with insurance is not that providers have leverage over insurers. The problem is that people buying insurance have imperfect information about what that insurance will and won't cover when they buy it. Even after you get insurance trying to find a list of things that are covered if impossible. Even if you call the insurance company, they won't tell you.

How is a discerning buyer supposed to choose insurance based on anything but price when that is the only information available?

Then there's the entire bureaucracy that is medical billing. You have to know which obscure codes for diagnosis can be used with which, similarly obscure, codes for treatment. None of those codes ever exactly match what is happening to the patient, so you have to choose one that is close enough and hope the insurance agrees.

You ever wonder why it takes 6+ months to get a medical bill? That's why. It has to be processed by the medical billing bureaucracy until it bears only the slightest resemblance to reality and then shuttled back and forth between the provider, the insurance filing system, and the insurance underwriter. Only once that is done can they send you a bill.

How much cheaper could providers offer service if they didn't have to pay dedicated staff to play some perverse game of telephone with the insurance company?

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#320

Post by chgs »

dingnuts wrote: post #18
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah I had to step back from this when I saw it* on my feed because I was so disenchanted by how positive the replies were. Not even sure what their issues with DOGE are if they think this is a great solution... ETA: I'm on about his bluesky post, to be clear, not this thread

the issue with Elon Musk's involvement is the WAY these things are being done. If what was previously funded through coercion -- tax dollars -- can be funded through voluntary charity of a billionaire that is 100% a good thing and we can still be upset about the rule of law and all that while being happy that billionaires are stepping up to pay their fair share when the tax money is taken away. HOWEVER Congress has N…

It most definitely not a good thing. It makes these reliant on that billionaire rather than the public.
Post reply on HN