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

washingtonpost.com

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

#41

Post by cloakandswagger »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #37
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)…

Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on google doodles. There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites. Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet seat!"

I want government sites and buildings to look like archaic disasters, because it at least implies that my tax dollars aren't being pissed away on frivolous opulence.

Google can spend ten billion dollars changing their logo because they're profitable and they answer to their board & shareholders. I don't remember anyone asking me if I wanted to contribute money to a government tech startup.

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

#42

Post by guessmyname »

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.

Ha ha ha this Americans and their political correctness. I cringe every time I see things like this and the HN community doesn't escapes from it, in fact, I have seen more "political correctness" towards sexism here more than in other communities on the Internet (at least the ones I visit). I still do not understand why people pay so much attention to these things. I can only imagine how people would react in countries with a language with Latin roots like French, Portuguese, Spanish where there are multiple ways to refer to a individual or group of people with different genders more than in neutral languages like English.

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

#43

Post by justinsaccount »

JBReefer wrote: post #31
justinsaccount wrote: post #13

FTA: > “Since its launch in March 2014, 18F has struggled financially,” says GSA’s Office of Inspector General (IG), citing loses every year, now totally over $31.6 million. And from a random site that seems to agree with a few others: > In fiscal year 2015, military spending is projected to account for 54 percent of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion In 3 years 18F has spent 31.6 million.…

I don't get your point at all, I'd say the US's ability to project force is worth 19,000x a year more to me than what 18F does.

Why is it that 18f lost ~10 million dollars a year, but the military does not lose 600,000 million dollars a year?

Sounds like a double standard to me.

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

#44

Post by tyre »

ikeboy wrote: post #32
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…

>In a perfect market, they would be able to sell their services at the same price as the value of those services. Uh nope. A perfect market means the price is equal to their costs, not the value provided. A monopoly is when you can extract the value provided as rent.

Sorry, I meant in this case, since they are a monopoly. Good clarification!

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

#45

Post by ecaron »

One piece of 18F that I've always appreciated is their published API standards - https://github.com/18F/api-standards. They spawned it off the frequently mentioned White House API standards, and it phrases a lot of the opinions well without being preachy.

But more than anything else, this made me feel like there are real humans behind 18F. So I wish them all the best and hope this article (and ones like it) falls into the camp of "Haters gotta hate" and just inspires them to find more visible success.

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

#46

Post by kyleblarson »

dangrossman wrote: post #17
pryelluw wrote: post #7

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. How is that even possible?

727 hours is a team of 10 working for less than 2 work weeks. Or a team of 6 having a couple 1-hour meetings with other groups in addition to doing the design work. It'd be hard for any medium to large organization with an internal design team to rebrand without using hundreds of hours of staff time.

that said, assuming you are working in the US, are you willing to work an extra few minutes over the course of the next year to generate the tax revenue for this?

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

#47

Post by lucaspiller »

I'm currently working for a UN-agency as a contractor, and my team is modelled in a similar way, like a private development agency so to speak (calling us and 18F a startup is a bit click-baity IMO). We only work internally for our agency, not the whole UN, but there are structures like that too - e.g. ICC provide ISP and hosting services to the whole UN. I'd imagine it's a fairly common structure in large companies/organisations.

Anyway, whenever a department wants a new IT project they have the choice of releasing a tender to the public or going to us. We then work like an agency, providing an estimate, then billing them for X days of development.

The first bit where it gets tricky for us, and I'd imagine 18F, is the specs usually aren't clear. Customers decide they want something different, didn't explain what they wanted properly, or something just takes longer than you estimated. Unlike an agency we have to deal with the code and people for a long time, so we can't just say "no you only payed for X days work" and leave something broken.

The other part is maintenance - that is paid for by our internal budget, but as with any software projects there are always tweaks/changes that need to be done. Unfortunately the level of beuracracy is quite high, so getting budget for something that is say 3 days work is more effort than it's worth, so it often just comes out of our budget.

Anyway, even if we lose money I think it's a lot better for us to do this than an external agency. For starters an external agency would be a magnitude more expensive. As we know all our systems we can recommend and build systems that are more integrated with each other, where as an external agency would just build one system in isolation as per the spec. I'd imagine it's similar for 18F.

Our design decisions are Bootstrap for everything, so no we aren't spending a crazy number of hours on just a logo :-)

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

#48

Post by aplomb »

They're essentially an internal dev/consulting shop and they needed to approach it from this stand point or they'll continue to be underwater. Every contract that IBM or Accenture, et al wins, 18F should have made the sale that they'll be there guarding the hen house as the project progresses - easy sale and easy project staffing. Branch off from there and take down small dev jobs to build mass and it'll snowball from there if managed properly.

Leadership heads need to roll, ranks thinned, and they need to focus on the mission.

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

#49

Post by chrissnell »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #37
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)…

Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on google doodles. There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites. Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet seat!"

What business does a government agency have spending nearly 800 hours (plus inevitable expenses on stationery, biz cards, signage, etc) on a logo? How does this benefit the taxpayer? Why do they need this logo? This logo changes nothing for anybody except the people who worked on it. This is not good stewardship of our tax dollars and you can bet your lunch that this won't be the only FW&A problem found at 18F.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #37
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)…

Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on google doodles. There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites. Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet seat!"

[deleted]
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