241–246 of 246 posts
1. What guarantees does it offer for ideology neutrality? 2. What guarantees does it offer for the diversity of ideas? 3. What guarantees does it offer for excluding censorship of the expression of thought as a measurable true defense of freedom of thought and expression?
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How does the fed pay these programmers more than the normal federal compensation schedule? Is the compensation uncapped if they work through a contractor? If they dont, why do these programmers choose to work there?
I have limited first-hand experience, but yes, contractors can be paid independently of government pay scales as far as I know, and far more than you'd think (in terms of breadth of jobs) is done by contractors. I remember reading that the people who do security clearance investigations largely are, or were, contractors. My impression is that if you do work directly for federal or state government, you also are likel…
Multiple programs were built to fix the compensation for military members whom were paid even less than civilian counterparts in the same offices. It's why the churn rate is so high. Even then, the majority of cleared jobs still aren't commensurate with external salaries.
"Palo Alto-based Stanford University ... and MIT have historically been the primary talent pools for the tech industry" This is far from true. If you look at the total workforce in tech, the majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan, Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc., etc. MIT and Stanford have had amazing great people, but they are far from the "primary" source of talent…
These schools are very good btw. Berkeley is tied with Stanford for example, UI #5, Washington #6, UT is #10.
Conversely Harvard is ranked #15, but that's the things about rankings: they're often used to prune out people who don't "know someone", and when the metrics do not match someone's perceived "elite" status, they are ignored.
All of the schools you mention are attended by elites and commoners, produce talented people and untalented people, jerks and kind folks, and all the permutations of that.
I just wish we'd focus more on competent and kind, and less on connections or wealth - companies that do this will prosper IMHO, and companies that rant about "meritocracy" will wither as they drive away half the population.
Women are just as capable of coding well - creating a toxic culture is reducing your talent pool by half, something people obsessed with "facts and logic" should think more about. Insisting on "elite" schools when the good ones are public will also harm you long term if you're doing more cutting edge stuff.
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Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer: Listing whatever experience you can (high-school jobs, sites created for friends, college jobs) alongside interesting personal projects is a huge leg up for getting through recruiting. If you're early in your career, find a few small-time jobs somewhere in tech that'll hire you, and learn as much as you can as fast as you can. MSPs are desperate for people…
> Speaking from my perspective as a prolific FAANG interviewer That's interesting, and somewhat rankling - as both times I interviewed at the G in FAANG, not a single interviewer gave a nickel about any of my experience, or projects I had worked on. It's such a joke that the keys to a golden line on your resume and a giant salary are gated by the luck of which 7 people get picked to grill you that day, how busy they…
Job hunts are a campaign. If you're pretty good you'll land a job but you might not land every job.
While this varies from company to company generally resumes get you interviews and interviews get you jobs.
Even if you have a 95% pass rate for any one interviewer, you're at like 77% for passing a 5 person panel. Good but hardly a guarantee.
But if you have even three job interviews, the chance that you'll get atleast one is 98.7%. Not so bad!
Sure it's a bit hand-wavy but I hope it takes the edge off this interviewing business for you the way it does for me.
Cheers!
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> The issue with the US government and software is not a lack of talent (within the country, or even within the government itself). But a poor structuring and assigning of responsibilities and a severely risk-averse culture, paired with the overreaction of a risk-accepting culture occasionally showing up and fucking it all. Bureaucracy in a nutshell. I wonder if there is a single country the western world where it is…
Bureaucracy will never be efficient. It is resilient and can survive. It is an organism. It presses itself into the cracks and crevices of society until it seems like the essential material composing our structure. But it's not, it's just slime mold.
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I think it's more complicated than that, all of these roles come with substantial amounts of near unilateral executive power that can impact the way the country is run for decades to come. Even all of the existing US government tech posts like the USDS and 18F are ultimately there purely to service the needs of a bureaucratic agency and their particular management. For a technology specific role to have the same leve…
I'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of government. The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law, running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires investment and taking risks.