Oddly enough my work authorization form was online last year, but its back to paper this year!?!?
A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#82This looks like an opportunity. There should be an app like facebook where you enter all your data and an app store for forms. Want insurance or DMV or immigration? download the relevant form and it tells you what's missing so you can fill it and the app also give an updated status on your application.
Who would you trust with that kind of information though? I don't even trust the people I'm sending it to, much less the middleman.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having worked in large companies, small startups, and government, government is orders of magnitude the worst offender when it comes to simply wasting money and getting nothing done. The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. In the worst cases for companies, money stops coming in the door and cuts are forced. Contrast the above with t…
I've done corporate, startup, government (higher ed). Another difference with government is the intractable complexity. This plays to the difference between digitization and automation. Automation is the removal of human judgement. It requires simplification of the rules and processes. My local government revamped their payroll system. The first effort tried to digitize existing rules, and failed utterly. The second…
> Automation is the removal of human judgement. It requires simplification of the rules and processes.
My impression, is that government projects often go like this: 1) We want to digitize and make some process X more efficient, 2) Oh, now that we're automating we can avoid "errors" by removing case-by-case handling (X is of course now set up for individual evaluation by a professional bureaucrat). The result is that not only do you get feature/scope creep (handle all the things for all the cases, or declare failure), if you succeed, the system ends up being much worse (it now follows outdated written documentation to the letter, doesn't allow for any leeway).
The obvious way around this, is make a system that automates the easy 80% of the cases. Allow the system to give good information to, the now much fewer, bureaucrats, and allow them to handle the 20% on a case-by-case basis.
After a year, evaluate, and reduce the 20% to another 80/20.
Give up the idea that you should automate policy. It's completely insane, even if it might look good on paper.
It's like with accounting systems: you should always have a way for a clerk to enter in and account for unforeseen things in a way that a) accommodates the system ("-500 towels missing/destroyed") along with a comment-field to elaborate, and to facilitate revision ("Bus crashed through the window, gave away 500 towels for use as bandages").
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say this very often: The MBA (who has no other expertise) is capitalism's answer to the Soviet "apparatchik." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik "Management" is a secondary skill in the sense that it only makes any sense if one also has a primary skill. An engineer might learn to manage and thus become an engineering manager. A baker might learn to manage and might manage a baking company or a restaurant/caf…
MBAs as an empty suit who manages what they don't understand is as much of an useless stereotype as programmer as a code monkey who just creates what you tell him to. You have the same ignorance about them that you accuse them of having about you. I also don't believe programming is as alien as you think it is. I will grant you that most of the diploma mill MBA programs are worthless. But the MBA's going to work in F…
> I will grant you that most of the diploma mill MBA programs are worthless. But the MBA's going to work in F500 companies aren't just idiots.
Are you saying that there are some great MBA programs, that will produce an MBA that adds value without other experience, or are you saying that the MBAs going to work in F500 companies have experience beyond an MBA diploma?
If it's the latter, isn't that pretty much what parent claimed? If it's the former, is that because those MBA programs are cross-disciplinary with real project work loads?
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can renounce US citizenship, as long as you have paid all your taxes up to that point. The point is it's a proactive action. http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-consideratio... Persons intending to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware that, unless they already possess a foreign nationality, they may be rendered stateless and, thus, lack the protection of any government. There are also a lot of ex…
As someone who has looked heavily into this option, I can say that you are drastically understating the simplicity of this option. Getting a second passport takes significant time and investment in most cases.
Granted, but Complicated != Impossible.
People really complain about paying taxes while living outside the country. IMO it's a really complex situation, but the tradeoffs are surprisingly reasonable if you consider it in the long term from both the individual and state level in light of various free rider problems.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#86The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. Large corporations routinely spend gazillions on software projects that end up working poorly or not at all. Everyone who has worked in Corporate America knows this all too well. The root problem is not bureaucracy either. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have fairly large bureaucracies yet they routinely successfully comple…
The root of the problem is really that instead of trying to figure out how to digitize immigration forms, we should be figuring out how to fill capacity within the country and not simply kick poor and underserved communities to the ditch and just cream people from other countries and societies where we are cherry picking off the best. I get it, that won't be a popular sentiment here because the hidden racism backed i…
I know a lot of brilliant people from other countries. My mother is an immigrant. You are the racist here.
EDIT: Xenophobe.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
MBAs as an empty suit who manages what they don't understand is as much of an useless stereotype as programmer as a code monkey who just creates what you tell him to. You have the same ignorance about them that you accuse them of having about you. I also don't believe programming is as alien as you think it is. I will grant you that most of the diploma mill MBA programs are worthless. But the MBA's going to work in F…
> I will grant you that most of the diploma mill MBA programs are worthless. But the MBA's going to work in F500 companies aren't just idiots. Are you saying that there are some great MBA programs, that will produce an MBA that adds value without other experience, or are you saying that the MBAs going to work in F500 companies have experience beyond an MBA diploma? If it's the latter, isn't that pretty much what pare…
I meant the former, but the later is also true. Though even great the MBA programs only take students with good work experience. However, it's not impossible to change industries--e.x. bankers going into consulting. It's hard to tell how much value the MBA actually adds. It's hard to tell if they are just selecting the best and brightest, or if they actually teach something worthwhile. I suspect it's a mixture of both.
I took a couple MBA courses at Kellogg when I was at Northwestern in another grad program. The ones I took weren't real project work loads, but the courses delved into case studies of what companies did wrong and right during critical points in their history. Students would use real world experiences from their past to explain things. I took an IP asset management class with one of guys who sued Zuckerberg for allegedly ripping off HarvardConnect to make Facebook. Unfortunately he never talked about it. I was very curious.
Another large value of an elite MBA is the networking. How many billions of VC bucks have been dolled out to MBA grads at Stanford by people they met there?
In fact, the whole idea of an MBA program is somewhat similar to what YCombinator does.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#88The most important point: > the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen. I keep hearing people talk about government inefficie…
Contracting seems to be a big part of it. The justification for contracting these kinds of jobs out rather than just doing them in-house is that private-sector competition through a bidding process will lower costs, ultimately making the government more efficient. But in many cases I wonder if it wouldn't be cheaper to just hire some in-house developers, rather than bleeding all this money to the likes of IBM, Oracle…
The point is totally to make it more expensive for the taxpayer, so long as the right outsourcing companies get the contracts.
An in-house development team would know the domain, the managers would be much closer to the business and have more authority to make day-to-day decisions.
Plus, if the developers are permanent staff, they're aware that they will be responsible for the system once it's live.
That's much better for everyone, except the politician, whose wife has shares in IBM.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#89It boggles my mind that any organization still pays for "professional services" provided by these massive consulting firms. Every single project I've seen like this involves countless layers of middleware implemented by consultants barely intelligent enough to follow a generic runbook, countless calls "home" to deal with your "unusual environment", delays, and a creaking disaster of a finished product.
Re: A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just one is online
#90The most important point: > the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM So IBM accepted a pile of money for the project and didn't get it done. The blame lies solely on them. Sure, there were bureaucratic obstacles, and government officials who didn't do things necessary for the project, but that's no excuse; IBM was responsible for making it happen. I keep hearing people talk about government inefficie…
A better excerpt:
> Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM
Nothing wrong with a company bidding on a project of undefined scope. They likely properly laid out what that money bought -- hours, months, years of consulting / implementation. If the client did not have the interested in getting to implementation in short order, that is the client's issue. The company (IBM's) clock starts immediately and the dollars start disappearing.