The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#2FYI, if anybody has questions, there are several YC alums who have joined the government in some capacity (healthcare.gov, USDS, Nava, PIFs) and are on HN.
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#3TLDR: This is another USDS submarine.
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#4TLDR: This is another USDS submarine.
[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I wonder what their PR budget is like?
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#5FYI, if anybody has questions, there are several YC alums who have joined the government in some capacity (healthcare.gov, USDS, Nava, PIFs) and are on HN.
What do you see is being done to combat the issue of big contractors (Booz Allen, CGI, etc) who don't want the gov't building software with small teams because it would hurt their ability to obtain huge billion dollar contracts?
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#6It's so strange that Medium articles don't have dates on them. Is there a way to tell when an article was published? Am I missing something?
The reason that I ask, is that I could've swore this article was posted last month, but it was an actual different FastCompany article (http://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks).
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#7It's so strange that Medium articles don't have dates on them. Is there a way to tell when an article was published? Am I missing something? The reason that I ask, is that I could've swore this article was posted last month, but it was an actual different FastCompany article ( http://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks ).
They must want people to always feel like every Medium article is fresh.
Meanwhile in the page source:
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#8Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#9FYI, if anybody has questions, there are several YC alums who have joined the government in some capacity (healthcare.gov, USDS, Nava, PIFs) and are on HN.
What do you see is being done to combat the issue of big contractors (Booz Allen, CGI, etc) who don't want the gov't building software with small teams because it would hurt their ability to obtain huge billion dollar contracts?
The existing contractors definitely don't like it, and on healthcare.gov, we learned to expect zero cooperation (indeed, plenty of interference) from the management of those companies. [1]
But ultimately, the people making the contracting decisions are agencies like CMS, HHS, the VA, and DHS. And with USDS, the agencies now have solid third party to provide technical advice--for example, that a consumer login system shouldn't cost $80 million to develop.
That's why you see results like the one quoted in the article, where a $200m initial healthcare.gov system was replaced with a $4m one. And if you read between the lines, you'll notice that the major federal contractor for healthcare.gov decided not to bid this year: http://www.wsj.com/articles/healthcare-gov-contractor-optum-...
Sometimes the good guys win.
[1] On the other hand, the engineers at those companies generally want to do the right thing, if they are empowered to.
Re: The Tiny Team Taking on a Massive Reform of Government IT
#10I have a friend who worked at a similar "elite" program in the government called the Presidential Fellows. These are a bunch of highly qualified MBAs, Programmers, and other such overachievers from the private sector who had overwhelming faith in the governments ability (and responsibility) to get things done.
My friend went to DC with a lot of optimism.
Halfway or more through the program, I met my friend at a wedding. My friend's take on the problems with government IT was that it wasn't resolvable by such a small team, because the problems were cultural, deep-grained, and protected by turf-guardians who had a lot to lose with reform.
Without the President spending significant political capital, nothing will ever get done.
The most egregious instance of wastage that could not be resolved involved an instance where a certain government department was receiving emails for archiving. Was printing out the emails. Was sending those printouts to another department by snail mail. That department was then scanning in the emails and archiving the digital images to computer storage.
The stupidity of this process was manifest to everyone without mental disability, and yet nobody could change the process due to the various contractors and their patrons, and the various government employees employed in the process.
Later, talking to other government IT workers (not Presidential Fellows) I came to the conclusion that Govt. human capital is not of the highest quality, and Govt. is perhaps the worst place to work unless you have a thick skin that helps you to resist demoralization at every turn.