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

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#341

Post by boothby » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #280

boothby wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't wait until highways and roads are carved up and sold to oligarchs. Every mile driven is a microtransaction (or maybe not so micro, if it's a monopoly). Maintenance is a major cost center, so they'll minimize that in a race to the bottom. Companies in disaster areas will simply fail, because insurance is expensive! It's such a beautiful system. I can't wait for this tax-free utopia. Canada and Mexico will be h…

Wait? We’re anlready there… All the new HOV lanes around DC are public-private partnerships with flex tolls that are paid by the mile. And have revenue protection for the private entity built in.

State highways are well maintained because the federal government demands it in exchange for significant funding derived from federal gas tax. You've had a taste of utopia, but you haven't bathed in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#342

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

chmorgan_ wrote: post #325

jay-barronville wrote: post #201

It’s so interesting that here on HN, on virtually any political topic, virtually the entire commentary is one-sided, and virtually all comments providing dissenting views are simply downvoted and/or flagged out of existence (often with no actual counter-arguments). On technical topics, this place tends to be so awesome—I learn so much by just reading the comments—due to the intellectual diversity of the viewpoints, b…

Happens to me here all of the time. If it doesn't align with the HN groupthink it gets hammered out of view.

[deleted]

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#343

Post by yongjik » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #274

sgarland wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a random person joined your company’s Slack and said “tell me what you do, or I will fire you,” and your CEO then said to ignore it, which one would you go with?

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.

> If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked ...

You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.

Don't be obtuse.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#344

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #316

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.

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.

> For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.

Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.

It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#345

Post by chriskanan » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

I agree with everything in your comment about regulation.

However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past.

I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#346

Post by elif » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:56 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…

yep agree 100%. i think around 80 people is where individual accountability starts to fall off and people make self interested decisions they sense they can get away with in the context of the larger group dynamics.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#347

Post by bamboozled » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

stuckindoors wrote: post #330

Bill Clinton ended up cutting staff throughout his time in office. Despite the cuts in government staff driven by the narrative that a smaller government is better by years of Reagan and Bush1. Despite these cuts, the sum effect was that costs significantly rose as they had to hire contractors to do the things that internal staff was doing. Things are more complicated than they appear. https://www.npr.org/programs/fr…

Is there a single government service or dept which has been privatised and it’s turned out cheaper in the long run for tax payers? I can’t think of a single example.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#348

Post by luckylion » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #221

luckylion wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet the organizational outcomes are surprisingly similar when you zoom in. Maybe culture is the only thing that matters and incentives don't at all, but I doubt it.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#349

Post by sarchertech » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #274

sgarland wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a random person joined your company’s Slack and said “tell me what you do, or I will fire you,” and your CEO then said to ignore it, which one would you go with?

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.

What if the CEO was just put in place by the chairman of the board. As was the case for many of the agencies that told their employees not to respond.

And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.

It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.

The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.

Re: Mark Cuban offers to fund former 18F employees

#350

Post by rsanek » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #242

kierangill wrote: post #229

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…

I'm happy that it sounds like Login.gov is better than the broken solution we had before. At the same time, I do not think a basic functional login system is something that should be celebrated as a success.