Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser • Hacker News Board

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#161

Post by morgante » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

rndmize wrote: post #107

lsmarigo wrote: post #10

Activities that can’t be billed to other agencies are another drain. One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and doesn’t look as good. for anyone else curious: (new) Black Logo: https://18f.gsa.gov/assets/img/logos/18f-logo.svg (old)…

From the actual report - "18F Branding – Staff spent 727 hours (valued at an estimated $140,104) developing the 18F brand. An example of one of their branding projects is the 18F logo change, seen below in Figure 8." Pretty poor journalism. Brand development strikes me as a much bigger category than a single logo change.

Wow that's incredibly terrible reporting. Designing a logo is a subset of branding, and a small subset at that.

727 hours on branding in a year for an organization of 200 is quite reasonable.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#162

Post by striking » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #156

yummyfajitas wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The greater point is that 727 hours of staff time were spent on it.

Is that a lot of time for a logo redesign? I've spent more time brushing my teeth than that.

If you're younger than 29.88 years old: no, you haven't.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(727+hours+%2F+(4+minu...

This is assuming you've brushed your teeth for two minutes, twice a day, since the day you came out of the womb.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#163

Post by brainfire » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #155

jrockway wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author comments that he doesn't like their new logo.

The greater point is that 727 hours of staff time were spent on it.

That is a great point in favor of it being a hit piece, because that's wrong - rndmize pointed out below [0] that it's a misinterpretation of the report.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12862065

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#164

Post by dictum » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

johansch wrote: post #61

cloakandswagger wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a couple of experiences dealing with serious, fancy pants designers to convince me that most of them are charlatans. Even something as simple as widening a button was stonewalled by "explorations", "design strategy meetings", "pattern library meetings", etc. The end result was getting even a single component mocked up took at least a week and was no better than what I could have come up with in 30 minutes.

Quite a few UX/design people who have actually gone through education/training (as opposed to learning by doing) seem to suffer by an extreme form of process overload. It makes sense I guess. It's really easy to teach processes and it probably makes the them feel "professional".

I'm an UX/design person and I notice that too. I think you could put two capable teams to create a website for some company, one required to do a lot of research and documentation, and another left to design it as they please, and the result probably wouldn't differ much.

It's akin to software engineers spending time to automate tasks that aren't that recurring.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#165

Post by chiph » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

easychewie wrote: post #38

JBReefer wrote: post #12

18F gives me the creeps because of https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz... Something about government robots and goodspeak speech correction feels Orwellian, even if it's really tiny.

Even though many people see "guys" as a harmless, genderless word, not everybody does. You can think of the opposite word to guys (for example: gals or girls) and wonder if a group of men would feel comfortable being referred to as girls. When someone refers to you using a word that you don’t identify with, it's easy to feel excluded from conversation or misidentified. Good grief. What a bunch of girls.

As a southerner - the answer was in their list. The correct term is "y'all", the plural (and sometimes singular) of "you".

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#166

Post by llimllib » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

mdasen wrote: post #82

tyre wrote: post #25

I don't care if 18F makes money, and in some cases it may make sense for them not to. In a perfect market, they would be able to sell their services at the same price as the value of those services. So if they build a system for the Veterans Administration (VA) that saves $1 million, they should get $1 million for it. Their EOY revenue would reflect their value created. But they are actually selling to themselves. Th…

Ultimately, the issue is whether 18F is more effective than other means and accurate accounting is important to that end. Let's say that the VA gets bids to create a new system for something. 18F says they can do it for $900k and ContractorX says they can do it for $1M. 18F gets the contract and produces a system that cost the VA $900k. Let's say the system cost taxpayers an additional $1M that isn't billed to the VA…

> The VA has ~313,000 employees. Why shouldn't they just hire an engineering team? Why should they outsource a project to 18F?

They're working on that! Marina Martin, the CTO of the VA, has been building out the VA Digital Services team with some awesome people. Vets.gov is growing fast, and is open source, and should hopefully help a lot of veterans.

I work with a lot of those people, and they're doing really good work.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#167

Post by devonkim » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

rambos wrote: post #128

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #120

I love 18F! A few months back they published a set of web design standard [0] that I really liked. Accessibility is among their top concerns, so it's legible in all devices and there's a lot of contrast. I used their color suggestions for my blog [1] (still haven't updating syntax highlighting, terribly sorry about that). The two things I changed were typography sizes and fonts. I decided it would be best to use prei…

Doesn't it seem wasteful that 18f spent all that time on the standards, instead of maybe a guide/theme on how Gov't sites should adapt, already open-sourced (bootstrap), frameworks?

Frameworks and standards like that are more often needed because there's a huge ecosystem of custom, proprietary libraries and frameworks that also exists within government. Previous attempts to try to release standards that only address specific frameworks that are popular within the open source world may only ever apply for 20% or so of federal agencies. There's even "agency-specific" forks of open source software that looks nothing like what they were based upon now. But really, you have tons and tons of different frameworks out there that have wasted taxpayer money delivering nothing material in value except "the government owns its IP" meaning "it avoids political / legal problems." See https://github.com/ozoneplatform/owf-framework for an example

Second of all, nothing precludes them from releasing standards-compliant variants of frameworks after the higher level standards are complete.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#168

Post by pc86 » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

icantdrive55 wrote: post #127

protomyth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$32m is not nothing, it would pay for a big chunk of a lot of programs. The federal government could actually pay the amount of educational money promised in the original legislation to the tribal colleges for many years. It would pay our tribal college's general fund for well over a decade.

32 million is a senator's pet project. A "build my bridge, and I'll sign your bill." It happens in every bill. I first realized how much money is wasted is when I read the grants in The Stimulus Recovery Act of 2009. I was looking at the money that went to my county. Just in my county, I was shocked. The nonprofit I used to work for got close to a million for the founder's "I won't say, because I don't want any scrut…

> I'm a liberal guy. I don't believe in waste.

> I could care less about 32 million.

Hmm..

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#169

Post by NoGravitas » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #111

wpietri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a money grab, it's a badly designed one. I interviewed with 18F and would have had to take a pay cut even on a cash basis. (Government salaries are strictly limited by law.) They certainly don't give stock, and (gasp) you have to buy your own meals. So financially it's not a good deal at all.

no risk and guaranteed but limited salary...not great incentivization.

If the hours are likewise limited, that can be a valuable benefit for some people.

Re: Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser

#170

Post by msimpson » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 1:44 PM UTC

JBReefer wrote: post #12

18F gives me the creeps because of https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customiz... Something about government robots and goodspeak speech correction feels Orwellian, even if it's really tiny.

First of all, since when did "guys" uniquely refer to the male gender? Second, how was this even worth the time it took to create?