

America’s Tech Guru Steps Down, But He’s Not Done Rebooting the Government - rmason
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/healthcare-gov/

======
geebee
Interesting that America's Tech Guru is an economics major from Harvard. I
don't doubt his talent, but this wouldn't happen in other professions.
America's legal guru would have gone to law school, the surgeon general would
have gone to med school.

It's generally a good thing that you can follow more than one path to tech,
and I honestly don't think what you major in is all that critical. But I'm
going to have to admit, with a bit of embarrassment, that it's a little
depressing to hear that an econ major is the highest tech guy in government,
and that a president who emphasizes the importance of science and engineering
didn't choose someone with that background to lead.

~~~
skywhopper
The difference is that law and medicine are both highly proceduralized,
regulated, and standardized careers, and they both require far more training,
at a far deeper level.

Ultimately, though, what matters is experience and skills. Again, in law and
medicine, the only way into the profession to gain the experience is to have
the degree. That's not the case in the tech world.

~~~
geebee
Right - but then why are STEM degrees so important? Then why is Obama
encouraging young people to pursue them? Even he didn't choose someone with a
STEM degree to hold the highest technical office in his administration.

I also have a different perspective from you on STEM degrees. It's true that
tech has a "lower barrier to entry" if all you look at is official, legal,
licensed barriers.

But majoring in STEM fields is vastly more difficult than a major typical of a
law school graduate, and elite STEM graduate programs have vastly higher
attrition rates than elite law or medical schools (like, 50-100 times higher).
The coursework is exceptionally rigorous and difficult.

The difference is that you don't strictly have to do this to go into high tech
- lots of people don't. And that's great. But then, again - why is Obama
pushing STEM?

------
exelius
I don't envy this guy; what he's dealing with is a very hard problem.

Government tech has the unfortunate problem of requiring instant scale. As in
whenever you develop a new app or tool, it needs to roll out to a hundred
thousand (or hundred million in the case of healthcare.gov) people and needs
to integrate with dozens or even hundreds of different systems. Which of
course, is the entire problem to begin with.

It's pretty obvious that the old way of doing things is not sustainable. Most
people would say the answer is Agile processes; but that has drawbacks in a
government context. Agile can mean many things. Depending on how you implement
it, but there is an inescapable trade-off of efficiency for oversight.
Government contracts _need_ oversight; otherwise you have contractors who
aren't meeting their obligations and collecting millions of dollars while
throwing obviously unqualified people at a problem. Often nobody on the
government side is even paying attention that the work isn't getting done
until it's too late.

I really don't know what the answer is here. There are lots of problems with
the government procurement process, but there is a lot of money on the line
and the people receiving it have a vested interest in maintaining the status
quo. Ultimately the procurement process is the biggest issue. Contracts go to
the company that can navigate the procurement process most effectively; not
the company best suited to do the job. Given the bureaucratic nightmare that
is government procurement, any procurement process designed to find the best
company for the job will still ultimately reward the companies most adept at
gaming the system through back channels (e.g. calling in a favor with a
Congressman to ensure the criteria for contractor selection benefit a specific
company).

~~~
dublinben
I think exclusive contracts should be abandoned anywhere they can be. Why
should there only be one monolithic Healthcare.gov? Every single company that
wants to should be able to build their own solution to this. They can be
rewarded based on how many users they get, or the best one can win a bounty.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
I agree that exclusive contracts should be abandoned where they can be, but
for a much different reason: I have little or no confidence at all in the
private sector to meet the requirements properly. A lot of the work done by
private contractors ought to be done and maintained directly the government.
The current system is not one of efficiency; it's one of corporate welfare.

------
z3ugma
>>The VA is a prime example of antiquated government computing; its main
systems run on a 1960s vintage system called MUMPS, a dead digital language
that few people under retirement age know how to use.

This is simply untrue. This language is now called 'M', and has been
standardized as recently as 2005. All of TD Ameritrade's trades are processed
on an M database.

M was doing NoSQL, web-scale computing on commodity hardware before many of us
were even born. It can integrate with NodeJS
([http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/465](http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/465)).

Look into Rob Tweed's ongoing work with M
([http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/mumps-
acceptable.pdf](http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/mumps-acceptable.pdf))
[http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf](http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf)
[http://robtweed.wordpress.com/](http://robtweed.wordpress.com/)

~~~
duaneb
Just because it's still being maintained does NOT mean it's not antiquated and
does NOT mean it's a good use of taxpayer money.

~~~
walshemj
Just because its old tech doesn't mean its bad either - when one very large
employer I used to work with turned off its old in house payroll system
written in COBOL the second month of the new brought in system was a disaster
70% or so of the staff didn't get paid :-)

I cant say more as I was sworn to secrecy but lets say some very stupid
contract operators had a large part to play

~~~
duaneb
Sure, but COBOL is also a huge maintenance cost compared to something written
in, say, java, which has no end of somewhat versed developers.

~~~
zimpenfish
That rather depends on how competent those "no end of developers" are. From my
experience of Perl+Ruby developers, I'd be amazed if even 1% of Java
developers were good enough to migrate an existing system without catastrophic
results. And those 1% are a) hard to find, b) very expensive and c) likely
already tied up and hoarded like gold-egg laying geese.

~~~
walshemj
Yes if your one of the worlds largest users of IBM mainframes as this company
is finding good Cobol programmers is not going to be hard.

------
rmason
Procurement is an exceedingly hard problem to conquer and its acute for
software. I personally think that government should move to a two tiered
architecture. Creating API's allows them to make projects small enough that
more nimble and agile firms can participate.

Philadelphia tried this exact thing and built its procurement atop Github:

[http://civic.io/2013/03/27/experiments-in-github-based-
procu...](http://civic.io/2013/03/27/experiments-in-github-based-procurement/)

------
DMac87
I don't understand - "More broadly, the government’s entire approach to
technology was top-down and inflexible", so the solution is to hire more
people at the top (White House)? It seems to me that "government IT" is such a
vast concept, ranging from the physical computers at each DMV to
healthcare.gov, to Medicare billing systems (not to mention the NSA)...
Wouldn't it make more sense for individual agencies to re-jigger their IT
policies, rather than some broad and vague White House initiative?

~~~
mpyne
> Wouldn't it make more sense for individual agencies to re-jigger their IT
> policies

How do you get bureaucracies to _do_ that though?

Not by fiat from the top. The system simply doesn't work that way, the career
bureaucrats have usually _made_ a career out of subverting the orders that
come from politicians which they don't like. Read Robert Gates's book about
him running the DoD to see what he had to do to get _some_ progress on _some_
things at DoD, and then realize that most agencies are not lead by people as
capable as Gates.

That's why they are hiring some people near the top. The USDS will serve as
the White House's eyes and ears for agency management of IT, and the
bureaucrats within the agencies can either get on board (and get performance
evals listing how they helped supported "Presidential efforts") or try to get
in the way (and get caught by staff at the USDS who can actually _call them
out on their bullshit_ and teach agency heads how to spot bullshit).

Cachet isn't everything in DC, but it is a lot of what you need for change to
occur.

------
127001brewer
_But that depends on the government’s success in luring great people to revive
the dead zone of government IT._

In my experience, that's only a part of the problem - good people _usually_
don't stick around for too long (since they don't want to deal with the
inertia and other difficulties of this environment).

Also, I take issue that only "great people" can be found in Silicon Valley -
for example, I recently developed a web application for the government (as a
contractor) that's modern, mobile-ready and which uses MongoDB.

~~~
incision
_> 'In my experience, that's only a part of the problem - good people usually
don't stick around for too long (since they don't want to deal with the
inertia and other difficulties of this environment).'_

In my experience, the worst danger of sticking around in Government is the
appearance of being 'part of the problem' when it comes time to move on.

------
mpthrapp
> "Vets applying for benefits face a laborious process using an outdated
> interface written in Delphi"

Great article, but why the Delphi hate? I use Delphi 7 daily at my current
job, and I actually quite like it.

~~~
scrollaway
How much must you like Delphi for you to see hatred where there is none?

The interface is outdated, the language is just another fact. Would you assume
someone is hating on C in a sentence such as "This is an outdated program
written in C."?

The assumption you make leads me to believe that you don't like Delphi as much
as you claim, and yourself recognize that the language itself is outdated as
well.

Which, as a daily Delphi 7 user, is something I'm sure you have come to
realize a long time ago. :)

------
frankosaurus
> Achievements that Internet companies seem to pull off effortlessly are
> tougher than Mars probes for federal agencies.

Survivorship bias.

