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The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

wired.com

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Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#881

Post by ulbu »

sam345 wrote: post #661

What evidence do people have that anything damaging is happening? Because these people are assumed to be conservative and not progressive? How is this any different than an internal audit whose work would be kept confidential? Or even a third party vendor who presumably would be covered by confidentiality agreements? The allegations in these comments are completely without evidence and are outright politically biased…

laws are not about evidence and punishment. they are just as much, if not less, about preventing the apparition of evidence. oftentimes, evidence means you’re too late.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#882

Post by bestest »

BigParm wrote: post #873

Elon is stealing any and all data to train AI. His padawans are AI guys. At least he's going in personally with a crew like a proper heist.

It is AI related, but I don't think it's only "train". I believe Musk is a real visionary (villain?), and he's going to replace the whole government apparatus with AI. POTUS included.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#883

Post by guax »

niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

Even If I take everything you said here to the T, being brilliant in making tech startups does not AT ALL mean they'll be brilliant understanding government processes and structures.

This over arrogance of us techies thinking because we're good with computers we're the best at everything is what people are annoyed and, justifiably critical of.

You're going to be responsible to assess and dismantle a government agency with thousands of employees and billions in budget being in your twenties with ZERO gov experience is indeed a huge red flag and not merely putting a target because they're young.

We've all met incredibly accomplished people who are not to be trusted with sharp objects. Expertise in one area does not translate to another easily.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#884

Post by guax »

tonymet wrote: post #403
m463 wrote: post #122

Posts here talk about the legality of this, that what they are doing is not allowed, or that they're doing something naively without understanding. But what is the goal? Maybe what goal to they think they're pursuing? This is hacker news, so I'm asking for an answer without political rhetoric.

Between Elon's stated goals, the systems under scope and my personal experience from state & local finance, they are performing a strategic efficacy audit of treasury spending. The US Treasury normally doesn't audit transactions -- they execute requests for transfers from other agencies and defer governance to congressional oversight. The GAO doesn't even audit in the intuitive sense. They audit that spending is bein…

Asking the treasury to do ideological/legal analysis of transactions is the same as giving your bank the responsibility of approving your credit card expenditure based on their idea of what you need/should buy.

The fact that they're going for the payment system and not for contract/orders analysis is exactly the red flag people are and should be concerned about.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#885

Post by muddi900 »

simianparrot wrote: post #790
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

It’s good to read a comment of sanity amidst all this instinctual bellyaching whenever T or E do anything. But in particular when a formerly well respected publication writes a hit piece like this… I used to scoff when people said “TDS” was a real thing, but having observed the same with Elon over the years and then listening to hours long talks between him and others, I realised “EDS” is clearly also a thing. And lo…

[flagged]

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#886

Post by rayiner »

jalapenos wrote: post #878
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #859

In pondering the mindset of these people, I was reminded of a very different submission on hn yesterday [1]. Quote: "Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive" Seems to me that in their narrow, reckless arrogance they're doing something similar to the mechanisms of government. This is all broken and people who built it were idiots. Lets just scrap it and built i…

A more likely scenario is they're now fully aware how little time they have versus how long things take and how much heal dragging they're going to face every day of it. So they've decided this time to rampage straight out of the gates and sustain it as long as they can. This is a key weakness of central planners - the centralization and the slow rate of development of the bureaucracy. It takes far more effort to dev…

Shock and awe.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#887

Post by alp1n3_eth »

There's probably going to be a flood of lawsuits, complaints, etc. following this. Cleaning up inefficient gov processes and waste would be good, but this is the completely wrong way to go about it. A single team, made up of extremely young people, some of which haven't even finished college yet, is not qualified in the slightest to do so. This is on top of them having no gov experience, and experience with how things work on the individual teams they're trying to clean out.

Not to mention they've probably already accessed Secret and up levels of classified data without a clearance, which would get any normal gov employee fired and potentially thrown in jail depending on the offense.

I also want to highlight that OPM is the backbone of workers rights for the government. Most skilled positions working directly for the gov are already underpaid. OPM was one of the few pros they had to offer; robust worker rights that are required across the fed.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#888

Post by nxobject »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #836
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

> The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%. Their youth and technical ability isn't the problem. What are problems are their inexperience and recklessness and evident lack of awareness. Government and the administrative state are serious undertakings. Move Fast and Break Things is extraordinarily dangerous in this context.

“Move Fast and Break Things” really does only apply to the scenario where you have to clean up your own messes.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#889

Post by fuzzfactor »

rtpg wrote: post #496
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

If you look at the Manhattan project org chart and take people randomly at the top, they're all at least in their 40s. "There are young people on the project" is a thing but at the end of the day things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth (at least in theory attempting to represent the will of the people), balancing various interests and ethical or moral questions that are usua…

>things like the Manhattan Project are downstream of the will of an entire behemoth

Plus that project in particular was more about destroying things exponentially faster, than it actually was about building things somewhat faster.

The faster building process was achieved in a relatively linear way at best, and the only thing built was a tool for destruction, no comparable efforts were made toward building things of lasting value which would need to more than compensate or the tech effort is a net loss.

Or, after destruction is induced, a recovery can not be made since the time required for building has the time it took for destruction in the denominator.

Re: The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

#890

Post by sgarland »

boringg wrote: post #561
niceice wrote: post #440

Average age of engineers and scientists in the Manhattan Project was 25. Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical. Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency. The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status…

You cant compare manhattan project, NASA to a bunch of good software techs ripping apart the government. The first two projects required high levels of intelligence and new concepts. These guys are the modern equivalent of name any destructive revolutionary group looking for stuff they don't agree with. I don't however refute that you can be a brilliant mind and active contributor at any age. Just that these guys are…

Not to mention, NASA famously has incredibly strict coding standards and guidelines [0]. I somehow doubt there’s anything along those lines at DOGE.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

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