I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
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Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#2"People in charge of regulating computers should know how computers work. They should even be good at computers."
While I agree with this statement.... Elon and Dodge are "good at computers" now? Lol
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#3"People in charge of regulating computers should know how computers work. They should even be good at computers." While I agree with this statement.... Elon and Dodge are "good at computers" now? Lol
The timing of this with Elon's SQL comment on X is especially comedic
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#4The problems the author described encountering in their decades of government don't seem to aline with what DOGE is addressing / doing right now.
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#5If you have termites, you don’t just light the house on fire.
So many tech people try to solve all the problems of Gov tech in the executive branch, which is intentionally slow and conservative. And yet, watch any Congressional hearing about a tech topic, and it’s painfully obvious that Congress has very little expertise in tech issues on staff.
Instead of going 12 rounds with OIRA about the PRA (which I hate as much as the author does), what if we…changed it?
The Judiciary also has no idea how to think about tech issues.
Don’t blame the executive branch for the perverse constraints and incentives created by the Legislative and Judicial.
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#6[flagged]
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#7I do federal work and this is 100% correct. As a serious question, why couldn't a different administration accomplish this?
Obama's United States Digital Service, which the author worked for, did not practice the broad authorities to rewrite the federal service that the current administration is exercising. This suggests to me that a healthy democracy is perhaps subject to some kind of a "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy," wherein the assumption that rules should be respected somehow becomes a bad assumption when an organization gets large.
I've read a lot about the meaningless work at FAANGs that don't appear to tie to any bottom line, to the effect of "most employees at FAANGs seem to do nothing useful." In contrast, all federal work draws its authority to exist at all from Congressional direction, so there's always a clear connection to a "why" in the federal government for literally every role, and one that the person in that role seems to always be very aware of. None the less, federal work gets similarly mired in seeming ineffectuality where day-to-day action is so tied up in internal "red tape" the positive impact gets lost, like the 300k lives noted in the article. Government folks can always draw a straight line from their role to the impact on the public, but too often can't seem to get the authority to take any actions that move them along that line because of organizationally-imposed rules.
Which is all to ask my real question: is this "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy" an inherent feature of large organizations? How do we overcome it?
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#8This makes fun at a dept of labor website for listing abilities:
> It tells veterans their primary skills are that they can "communicate by speaking" and "use [their] arms and/or legs together while sitting, standing, or lying down." Thanks for your service. If you don't believe me, look for yourself.
But to me it’s clear why these abilities are listed: veterans with disabilities. The author not getting that is just… do you ever stop and think?
The author is also complaining that it took two years to get approval to use the cloud and using that to show that the govt is too slow. That’s a crazy take to me, there are countless large and small companies where this did and is taking longer.
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#9[deleted]
Re: I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up
#10The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating your job was categorically does no fucking good, and neither does writing about it after the fact. You may think you're fighting the good fight, but this isn't a grassroots protest if the only people you were complaining to were your manager and/or your colleagues.
Yes, inefficiency and bureaucracy suck. No, the answer is not to scrap it all without knowing what the hell you're doing and "just wing it", which is exactly what Musk and co are doing. Strangely enough, the solution is probably a compromise. Compromise takes two sides actually talking to each other, with people familiar with the matter present, and an acceptance that the goal is to make the process better without negatively impacting important things like security, safety and data integrity.
Please forgive the tone of this message, but I can't help wonder how many thousands of people are going to die because of the effective abolishment of USAID and other programmes.