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

I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#21

Post by mezzie2 »

thisisnotauser wrote: post #20
Molitor5901 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the generational question every administration faces: politics. Consider federal employee reform. This means dealing with unions, congress, and everyone who depends on each and every office in those agencies, which all brings in politics. So change has to come slowly, over time. IMO Trump just doesn't care about the consequences, or maybe he does but he is certain of victory, so he's going full tilt. He'…

I think I contend we must disagree with the assertion "change has to come slowly, over time." At some point, moving too slow must be more harmful than failing to address all stakeholders' interests. To wit, perhaps we would not have seen the political situation evolve as it has over the past decade if the administration that implemented the USDS had accomplished more with it sooner.

I agree. Especially since we don't exist in a vacuum. Speaking from an American perspective, if we don't change and innovate, we're going to have our lunch eaten by cultures that do.

The rest of the world isn't going to twiddle their thumbs while we decide to placate everyone's egos. (I'd say 'letting Elon run amok in our government' falls in this category as well - it's clearly an ego thing for him as a donor stakeholder).

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#22

Post by dv_dt »

thisisnotauser wrote: post #18
dv_dt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is yet to be seen what the current administration is actually accomplishing. Tearing down administrative capacity without regard to leaving chaos and shortfalls is a lot easier than reform

Unfortunately true, and perhaps answers my question: meaningful improvement is hard, maybe even impossible. Meaningless harm is easy. But that answer doesn't really solve the inherent problem that more rapid improvement is necessary, maybe even critically so. To paraphrase JFK, is the issue here that an institution that makes meaningful improvement impossible perhaps also makes meaningless harm inevitable?

I think there are many meaningful improvement strategies which could be applied that haven't been tried yet from any administration at scale.

A lot like replacing running tech systems while they're running - it's trickier doing that than stopping and starting. But, there have been a lot of technology systems less complex than the federal gov't that have stopped, changed to the new system and restarted, only to find that the new system completely broken.

If you want to replace while running, you can set up a parallel co-running system at lower capacity, trial run samples through and compare results, then take some capacity of actual cases, basically take steps to keep growing maturity. For the govt there's actually an interesting case to do this to serve younger more tech savvy citizens, while allowing older citizens to stay on the existing system - then slowly shift capacity from old to new systems.

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#23

Post by djray »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #15
djray wrote: post #10

The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating…

> The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. If this is the first time you’ve heard of inefficiencies of this kind, you’re in a filter bubble.

To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#24

Post by xnx »

dv_dt wrote: post #12
thisisnotauser wrote: post #7

I do federal work and this is 100% correct. As a serious question, why couldn't a different administration accomplish this? Obama's United States Digital Service, which the author worked for, did not practice the broad authorities to rewrite the federal service that the current administration is exercising. This suggests to me that a healthy democracy is perhaps subject to some kind of a "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy,"…

It is yet to be seen what the current administration is actually accomplishing. Tearing down administrative capacity without regard to leaving chaos and shortfalls is a lot easier than reform

"Why are we paying for all these nukes? We don't even use them." -Elon Musk next week (probably)

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#25

Post by omnivore »

I think there's a big difference between -- hall monitors making stuff impossible and what we're seeing now. USDS part of the executive branch made things more difficult, but if you'd given those folks even half the runway these doofuses have right now, imagine the sort of good they could've done.

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#26

Post by omnivore »

mezzie2 wrote: post #19
bkfunk wrote: post #5

If you have termites, you don’t just light the house on fire. So many tech people try to solve all the problems of Gov tech in the executive branch, which is intentionally slow and conservative. And yet, watch any Congressional hearing about a tech topic, and it’s painfully obvious that Congress has very little expertise in tech issues on staff. Instead of going 12 rounds with OIRA about the PRA (which I hate as much…

I've been wondering for a while now why we aren't pushing for more technologists in office. I know most of us don't feel ourselves to be temperamentally suited, but it seems sorely needed. Maybe some of the recent grads who find themselves in a losing tech job market can pivot.

it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#27

Post by mezzie2 »

omnivore wrote: post #26
mezzie2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering for a while now why we aren't pushing for more technologists in office. I know most of us don't feel ourselves to be temperamentally suited, but it seems sorely needed. Maybe some of the recent grads who find themselves in a losing tech job market can pivot.

it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.

I think it'd be best to start with getting people to run for local, non-partisan offices. School board, etc. You're right that trying for anything higher than that is going to run into life ruining amounts of interference from existing interests, but I think it could be done at the lowest levels first.

> the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.

Which is one thing that makes me think of recent graduates. Recently retired people/people in tech who've FIREd also might be viable. People who either can't get a high paying tech job or who had them and are past that stage in life - politics is better than service sector work (for the recent grads) and the retired wouldn't depend on the money.

Skillswise, there are more people going into CS who don't have a passion or intuition for technology - we pushed a lot of people into CS and STEM in general over the last decade or so who wouldn't have pursued it in the 90s-2010s. I bet there are lots of C students who could do a better job at understanding tech than our current leaders and a better job at communicating with non-technical people/schmoozing than most of the talented techies.

> at least advising these people

I think they need to hold office. Advising isn't going to cut it - the incentives for our current politicians to listen to this group aren't there. The only incentive lever we have any hope at pulling (outside of radical system change) is threatening their seats.

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#28

Post by insane_dreamer »

djray wrote: post #10

The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating…

> The problem is that this is the first time any of us^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I are^H^H^H am hearing of these inefficiencies.

fixed it for you

Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

#30

Post by marcus0x62 »

djray wrote: post #23
marcus0x62 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. If this is the first time you’ve heard of inefficiencies of this kind, you’re in a filter bubble.

To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.

From the article:

> The White House got involved, requiring months of in-person mediation meetings. I was never able to get the domain back

Post reply on HN