11–20 of 69 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress. Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
The USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of what the US has ever done with tech.
An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, because well, it's been 20 years, but in my 10 minutes of Googling, here's the first former OTA project lead I managed to find today (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/).
The OTA was (and should still be) a group of people with the expertise to sythesize a large body of research in a topic. You don't learn those skills making Facebook's "like" button load 20% faster. You learn them by spending a good chunk of your 20s reading thousands of pages of research for your PhD.
"The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias." That's cute. No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.
It's really fun watching scientists and engineers, real experts, build all these things the OTA and its allies assured us was either impossible or beyond the foreseeable future state of the art.
An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
As well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lobbying firm. It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, bec…
No one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lobbying firm. It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, bec…
At the same time, I'd prefer people with practical tech experience, not academics who have rarely experienced solving real world problems (as opposed to theory).
"The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias." That's cute. No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.
They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.
History has proven them correct.
You can read the actual reports here:
http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/
There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with experts in the field:
Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates
Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs
Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University
Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories
Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.
Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center
Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord
Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy
George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International
General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff
Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank
Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.
Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University
Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los Alamos National Laboratory
Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union
Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants International Group, Inc.
Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay, USAF (Ret.) Consultant
Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin Marietta Aerospace
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, I'd prefer people with practical tech experience, not academics who have rarely experienced solving real world problems (as opposed to theory).
I doubt that PhDs from Boeing or FFRDCs are going to real strangers to "real-world research problems."