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

Join the U.S. Digital Service

whitehouse.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 239 posts

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#221

Post by dang »

ripb wrote: post #181
debacle wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet is enabling a government of the people for the first time since our population exploded in the last century. Things are bad right now, but they're getting better. As long as the Internet remains an open and free place, society as a whole will continue to progress and grow at a faster and faster pace.

>The Internet is enabling a government of the people for the first time since our population exploded in the last century. Is that you, Obama? What is this nonsense? >Things are bad right now, but they're getting better. Things - socially, politically and economically - are continuing to get worse for the average person. What world are you living on?

> What is this nonsense?

> What world are you living on?

This breaks the HN guidelines twice: it's uncivil and unsubstantive. You could make it a much better comment by taking the substantive sentence ("Things...") and following up with some concrete reasons.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#222

Post by trhway »

wpietri wrote: post #196
trhway wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>suspicious that Washington's culture could really accept a lot of the Agile and Lean notions that are commonplace in the high-tech world. given my experience with thorough, to the letter, under supervision of no-expenses-spared-top-notch experts implementation of Agile/Lean/Scrum - 2 years non-stop across pretty much the whole company, only very-super-important-critical-projects got exception - the government would…

I share your suspicion of large-company Agile: by and large I think it's at best Mini-Waterfall, and at worst it's the same old bullshit with some new jargon on top. However, the large amount of bathwater doesn't mean there isn't a baby there. And the places I see doing best at making the necessary culture shift are the ones with a sense of mission. So I have hope. And honestly, even if this merely means a transition…

>However, the large amount of bathwater doesn't mean there isn't a baby there.

Applying generic systems analysis (where it doesn't matter whether it is protein building, network protocol flow or software engineering process) one can easily see that Scrum is a highly synchronous low-latency process (that is the "baby" that management loves) which comes at the cost of dramatically decreased bandwidth. In addition, changing a team's process inside, Scrum indirectly completely changes how the team interacts with up- and downstream teams/components - in particular on practice eliminating any chance for early integration and for any iterations of the integrations.

That became obvious to me during the first day at the first Scrum course, especially after i tried to ask those questions to the teaching Scrum expert from the consulting company and received blank face with some blabbing in response. Some time later, different company with different consultants - that first hand 2 year experience i described in the previous post - the Scrum drawbacks on practice happened to be even worse than i thought they may in theory. We actually have great time right now at our BigCo. as after the Scrum fiasco, and quietly dropping the Scrum company-wide as the result, the management still seems to be kind of "in shock", and they haven't brought up any new fad in the process improvement so far, so we're just doing typical old-fashioned per-feature waterfall, and it just works as usual - which is huge achievement compare to Scrum :)

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#223

Post by blahwoop »

catherinedevlin wrote: post #214
blahwoop wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is 18F the USDS or are they separate entities?

We are technically separate from USDS, but we're in close cooperation and constant communication with regard to overall strategy, hiring, technical and cultural techniques, and seriously watch out for those guys at Board Game Night. Basically we're BFFs.

awesome. thanks for the clarification. if i am interested in a position. should i be applying to 18F, USDS or both?

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#224

Post by zedpm »

Are there any specifics anywhere regarding the positions, desired skill sets, or anything other than generic descriptions? I've seen a few people comment here about positions being in D.C., but I can't find any details like that.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#225

Post by nadams »

chaqke wrote: post #218
nadams wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent alone would come out to about 50% of your take home pay[1] (estimated of course - you would probably get less depending on benefits). Assuming if you hunted you might be able to rent for $1500, but from zillow[2] the rent appears to be from $2-4k+. If you showed me an apartment for $1.5k and the average is $2k I would want to know what is wrong with it. In my suburban area - I could get a mortgage for a $100k ho…

Some easy numbers: 1k/month is ~12k/year, which is ~15-18k of pre-tax salary. To re-emphasize, 1k/month in lower rent is worth 15-18k of salary. I have friends paying more than $2k/month more than me, which is around a negative 40k raise (I live in San Francisco, but share). It's very easy for humans to misinterpret recurring costs.

I don't understand your point -

Assuming $2k/month is $40k - that is almost half of $100k. So almost half your salary is going towards just rent.

Let's say you made $50k in a suburb area - using your numbers you would only pay $10k/year for a mortgage ($500/month) - with only $20k difference in salary.

$100k in CA ~ $60k $50k in suburbs ~ $40k

Realistically you would probably make $60-$70k in suburb areas which, according to your numbers, would make the same if not more AND own a house.

Of course this is ignoring other factors like food, utilities, bills and taxes.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#226

Post by tsaoutourpants »

sukilot wrote: post #44
tsaoutourpants wrote: post #18

Will work for fedgov once fedgov stops using tech to violate the people. Until then, GFYS.

The oppressive part of government is plenty funded. Hurting the non-oppressive part is just spiting yourself.

Spiting myself? I'm sure I make more money in private sector.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#227

Post by yoz »

kzahel wrote: post #88

I would seriously consider joining as a developer. If it didn't mean moving to DC. I couldn't determine if there were any remote opportunities or positions in the Bay Area.

I work for 18F in the Bay Area. We have a team of (currently) 17, mostly working out of the GSA office at SF Civic Center, though a couple of us usually telework.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#228

Post by yoz »

anarchitect wrote: post #91

Would anyone from the Government Digital Service [1] in the UK care to comment on this? GDS is a world-class operation which has many smart people using modern technology to solve real problems for UK citizens. Much (all?) of the work is open source [2]. [1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/about/ [2] https://github.com/alphagov

I'm not part of GDS, though I used to (like frabcus) volunteer for MySociety (or, more accurately, for FaxYourMP & TheyWorkForYou, which were later pulled together as MySociety). Also like frabcus, I know quite a few of the GDS folks.

I now live in the Bay Area and work for 18F. GDS has been hugely inspirational for us, and we talk to them fairly often. Personally, it's their model of focusing on user needs, using continual user research to drive design and implementation that speaks loudest to me. Far too much public-facing government IT has been driven by department needs rather than user needs. If you talk to UK citizens about GOV.UK, they mostly seem pleasantly surprised by how well it Just Works.

Re: Join the U.S. Digital Service

#229

Post by wpietri »

trhway wrote: post #222
wpietri wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your suspicion of large-company Agile: by and large I think it's at best Mini-Waterfall, and at worst it's the same old bullshit with some new jargon on top. However, the large amount of bathwater doesn't mean there isn't a baby there. And the places I see doing best at making the necessary culture shift are the ones with a sense of mission. So I have hope. And honestly, even if this merely means a transition…

>However, the large amount of bathwater doesn't mean there isn't a baby there. Applying generic systems analysis (where it doesn't matter whether it is protein building, network protocol flow or software engineering process) one can easily see that Scrum is a highly synchronous low-latency process (that is the "baby" that management loves) which comes at the cost of dramatically decreased bandwidth. In addition, chan…

I can't really answer for Scrum, especially as taught by consulting companies. I think of Scrum as a set of too-basic but reasonably good ideas that quickly ended up mostly as a certification scam. I wrote more about that a number of places, including here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

I think that's especially true for dramatic company-wide, top-down Agile adoptions, which I have never heard of working. I think people doing that cannot possibly understand Agile philosophy, which promotes local control and continuous improvement of top-down control and giant leaps.

My positive experience is mostly with smaller shops, but I've definitely seen many places where companies have grown up releasing early and often and have no problem working in what I'd consider good Agile style. Wealthfront, Etsy, and Spotify are all explicitly and openly like that. But I think there are plenty of other places that aren't explicitly Agile but ended up that way as a natural evolution.

For example, when I visited YouTube to study their process, there were a great number of developers, designers, and product managers all working in relatively independent small teams. They'd release at least weekly but sometimes more often. There was no overarching plan; each team had particular goals to pursue, and coordinated with other teams as needed. They never used Agile jargon and didn't think of themselves as Agile, but I think they were acting in ways that exactly matched the spirit.

Post reply on HN