
18F is a Financial Disaster - mangeletti
http://www.sacbee.com/news/business/technology/article110227682.html
======
rubyfan
Comrades! This seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars :-/

FTA:

 _The report said 18F spent about 20 hours or $4,148 on two customized "bots"
for Slack, an online messaging application. One of the automated programs
would monitor users' messages for the words "guys," "guyz" and "dudes," which
could have been perceived as being not inclusive for women. It prompted users
to consider replacing those words with 21 options that included buds,
compatriots, fellow humans, posse, team, mateys, persons of any kind, organic
carbon-based life-forms living on the third planet from the sun, comrades and
cats._

~~~
zajd
What's so bad about a few people spending some time on a bot to improve
inclusivity in the organization?

Do you know what 18F competes with? $4000 is literally irrelevant.

~~~
rubyfan
Because it's taxpayer money.

$4,000 for some engineers to fuck around at work might not sound much but that
$4,000 came from taxing people. Believe it or not but to a lot of people
$4,000 is a lot of money. That $4,000 could go to school supplies, education,
WIC, Medicare, etc.

It also illustrates tax payer subsidized income inequality while a lot of
people are struggling. Again some highly paid engineer making more money
fucking around at work than some other taxpayer delivering real value but at
lower wage.

~~~
int_handler
While I agree that given the information from the Inspector General's report,
18F certainly needs to be more disciplined about how it spends its resources,
do you really think that 18F is the most egregious example of a government
agency fucking around and wasting money? How about the DoD's $8.5 trillion of
unaccounted taxpayer money [0]?

[0] [http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-
Unaccou...](http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccounted-
Should-Congress-Increase-Defense-Budget)

~~~
rubyfan
Of course it is not the most egregious. That someone else is wasting several
orders of magnitude more money doesn't make it OK for 18F waste a smaller
amount.

------
jeffbr13
"18F is a Financial Disaster" is not the title of the article and is explicit
editorialising.

On a lighter note, seems like a fun place to work! And the kind of attitudes
on display here seem to be the kind you'd expect from a group of people who
have the VC-funded mindset, but the cost-pressures of the US's government
budget.

~~~
int_handler
Agreed. Many of the "unbillable" work items listed in the article seem to be
establishing important procedures and tools to improve productivity and a
positive work environment, which most tech companies do as well.

Makes you wonder whether the author and the poster are affiliated with one of
those old-school government consulting or contractor companies that would
gladly see 18F disappear so that the government would outsource the work
instead.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Agreed. Many of the "unbillable" work items listed in the article seem to be
> establishing important procedures and tools to improve productivity and a
> positive work environment, which most tech companies do as well.

I have nothing but disdain for someone spending $4,000 of public money writing
a Slackbot to politely encourage you to not use the words "guys" or "dudes"
[1] [2]. If that's important to you, go burn up VC dollars doing that, not tax
money that is desperately needed for real work. This opinion is not about
having an agenda; that's common sense.

I'm off to craft a FOIA request for the historical Slack logs for 18F.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792768)

[2] [https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-
customiz...](https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-customizing-
a-slack-bot/)

~~~
int_handler
While I completely agree with you that spending $4,000 on these slack bots is
a waste of time, that is still a minute fraction of the cost of "unbillable"
items listed by this article. Why not submit an FOIA request on one of the
other items instead, such as the $140k spend on "developing the brand" and
find out what actually involved? [0]

If you really want to be outraged by a waste of taxpayer dollars, I would
recommend that you take a look at how much state governments are overspending
on prisons vs education [1], wasteful spending in defense [2], and the $8.5
__trillion __in unaccounted taxpayer dollars spent on defense [3].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793035)

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/01/pf/college/higher-
education-...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/01/pf/college/higher-education-
prison-state-spending/)

[2] [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/29/where-did-us-
taxp...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/29/where-did-us-taxpayer-
money-go-tale-afghanistan-43m-gas-station.html)

[3] [http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-
Unaccou...](http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccounted-
Should-Congress-Increase-Defense-Budget)

------
karmajunkie
Question for anybody with 18F here... do many of your management personnel
have experience with consulting (particularly on government projects) or are
your hires primarily from product backgrounds?

I'm of the mind that this is about what I'd expect from people who are
generally more concerned with less-tangibles like culture and product, but I
don't really know if that's the general background of the personnel hired.

My suspicion is that if you looked at most agencies you'd see this same kind
of apparent frivolity but in a way that makes it less easy to track. It also
bears repeating that while some of the stories presented in the article are
excessive, 18f has always seemed to me to be more aimed at being a force
multiplier for other agencies rather than just boots on the ground. When I
worked in government non-profit (of the IRS designation, that is!) we spent
quite a bit of "non billable" time doing exactly that instead of providing
services directly. Once I started consulting in the private sector though, the
billable hour became much more important.

~~~
int_handler
I am not affiliated with 18F but do work for a major tech company. I am not
convinced that the consulting model is better for the kinds of projects that
18F is trying to undertake, such as developing the web services for government
agencies.

Most tech companies invest in things such as culture, internal productivity
tools, and developer and testing infrastructure that are not deliverables to
clients and thus not billable. While these may incur a higher start-up cost,
these are critical for ensuring long-term productivity.

Correct me if I am wrong but my impression is that the consulting world is
much more concerned with delivering and then moving onto the next project,
with very little shared work or infrastructure between projects.

I'm sure 18F has areas of improvement for how it spends its resources and how
it tracks costs and billing. Every organization does. However, I would not be
surprised if the reason 18F exists is that the government found that
outsourcing this work to consultants led to higher costs and lower quality
deliverables compared to products being released by tech companies and thus
wanted to try a different approach.

~~~
karmajunkie
I tend to be of the same mind, but if justifying their existence through
billing their services to other government agencies is a part of their
charter, then they pretty much have to consider that. Even if a significant
portion of their budget is intended to be internally billed, going off on a
logo redesign that "costs" 140k worth of meetings and face time to get buy-in
is simply not a worthwhile use of the time.

As I said earlier I'm not sure that the billable hour is the best way to judge
their effectiveness but as a long-time consultant who's worked in both
government and private settings, they would do well to find a better
compromise of the time.

------
lucideer
> "At a time when federal departments were cutting budgets, it was funded
> under a model that envisioned it would earn back more money than it cost to
> run"

I would have interpreted this as meaning "would make net savings by being
cheaper than projects outsourced by federal departments", not "would make a
net financial gain". The latter seems highly unrealistic. I assume they're
producing value for the government for the $32 million "loss" quoted.

------
tim333
I'm not sure 18F was supposed to make money. It's govenment funded and
produces things like [https://analytics.usa.gov/](https://analytics.usa.gov/)
and [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/)

~~~
jff
Being a government agency, it may in fact be prohibited from making money.

"Not supposed to make money" isn't the same thing as "spend $140,000 on making
your logos look hipper".

~~~
rubyfan
Revenue and profit are different. For example USPS has revenue.

Based on the IG's comments it looks like the expectation is that 18F should be
billing project hours.

~~~
brianwawok
USPS is not a government agency. Only kinda sorta.

~~~
rubyfan
From Wikipedia:

 _The United States Postal Service (USPS), (also known as the Post Office,
U.S. Mail, or Postal Service), is an independent agency of the United States
government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It
is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United
States Constitution._

------
nwmcsween
This is what happens when people given little or no incentive to actively
create something that another would buy. When someone is trying to make ends
meet AND create a product they prioritize necessities and hammer out something
usable, when given free reign most just become a drain (some create amazing
things given this chance though). Optimally you could hire someone who has
learned this lesson.

