
Facebook's Engineering Director Is Headed to the White House - prostoalex
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/exclusive-facebook-engineering-director-is-headed-114060505054.html
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nobleach
Poor guy is going to hate life so much. The number of times he's going to hear
"we can't do that because some person at some important level - a person that
probably started as a clerk and has been promoted to high level security
doesn't understand it, so... no."

As someone who left federal government for private industry, I am shocked at
just how much freedom I have to experiment. Thinking creatively is rewarded. I
applaud the administration for attempting to get to this level... but they'll
have to remove all the old tired government employees with the authority to
say "no" before this plan will work.

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remarkEon
As someone who's about to leave government (DoD) I'm looking forward to the
opportunity to experiment. That being said, your description is pretty
accurate. Simple things like designing a more efficient workflow becomes
something that metastasizes into a "well, idk that seems to break the usual
business rules" conversation. My sincere hope is that Recordon isn't afraid to
get in trouble. Actually, my advice to him would be "get in trouble all the
time" or "if you're not getting in trouble, you're doing something wrong".

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devonkim
This raises the issue that's plaguing government and big corporation (non-
tech) organizations alike - inability to attract nor retain talent. DoD has
been going through a bit of a contraction and the best developers I knew in
DoD space have all turned their backs on their clearances and run very far
away. At my current place, they're having an issue where we have some fairly
interesting technical work but nobody with the skills to go do it because
they're based in flyover country and people that can do it regularly get
$160k+ base offers in the Bay Area or New York. The brain drain problem is
exacerbating the problems in most of these places because the existing
employees just don't feel like making a change or are benefiting from the
current standard performance of abysmal and dysfunctional across most large
organizations when it comes to anything innovative (as opposed to execution,
which is what established businesses tend to think about mostly through
extensive processes and risk avoidance).

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mtbcoder
Is it not the job of the contracting companies to find and retain the talent
though? One major issue that I see with many of these government contracting
companies is that they exist only to support the US government. They have no
other clients, no products of their own and no non-government projects coming
in. How many young developers want to join companies like that? How long until
even more experienced developers move on to more interesting work? I just
cannot fathom many of these companies being sustainable in the long run. As
for the government, I believe it would be in their better interests to
starting working more with companies outside of the beltway for a change.

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devonkim
It is certainly the responsibility of the contractors to retain talent. This
is extremely difficult for the reasons you've mentioned, and the fundamental
problems are simply that working with the government (or any enterprise) is
insanely administrative-overhead prohibitive and tends to lock you into
operating specifically for just the government. Most DoD contractors in the
beltway besides the usual big ones are starving for contracts and those that
have survived are now involved in commercial work for a lot of their business
probably. Growing most of these contracting companies is similar to trying to
grow boutique web design businesses only far, far more expensive.

From a talent pool perspective, for every person like Mikey Dickerson (US
Digital Services, Healthcare.gov overhaul) you have now 10 people that are
barely able to understand what DevOps even stands for as much as 100 acronyms
and jargon only applicable to government systems and regulatory measures.
Mikey doesn't even have to think about an SF-86 probably - who can you clear
for a TS now that's considered top talent by Silicon Valley standards when
these people would have these same companies trying to knock their door down?

It is currently against young developers' best interest IMO to join anything
BUT the most interesting, high-talent seeking government contracting companies
IF they have any thought of going into that line of work. They must also be
prepared to have their work oftentimes be thrown away and be laid off
repeatedly as these projects tend to be extremely tough to sponsor now in
today's post-sequester era of contracting. It's heart-breaking to see the
junior developers I saw across so many companies wasting away their talent on
oftentimes rather stupid work due to completely inane reasons solely related
to being government work.

You're on the right hunch to where the end-game is. The end-game state with
the current trajectory is 2-3 huge defense contractors that mostly do non-tech
contracts stuck with loads of useless retirement-age administration amid
pockets of some competent ones all in charge of scores of kids that just
couldn't get into GOOD software companies... and Google, Microsoft, Amazon
supplying the majority of the underlying technology. All the "integrators"
will have been absorbed into mid-tier companies probably and the various
Pentagon incubator-ish programs considered failures for lack of innovation AND
lack of projects successfully seeded.

Myself, almost all my ex-coworkers from DoD-centric companies, and a good
number of people I've been interviewing are completely throwing away their DoD
/ government backgrounds in their careers for greener (we know for sure)
pastures. There's just not enough funding for interesting work and DoD is
contracting back toward its fundamentals of creating jobs for opportunities
that are really, really boring that nobody talented or interested in being
able to cite an interesting project in a job interview wants to spend time on.

US DoD's leaders are not completely stupid and have finally managed to get
Amazon's GovCloud approved for certain uses. IBM sued of course, but how many
people even use IBM's cloud again in industry? Getting stuck in the vendor
wars of its time is something DoD definitely doesn't want to do, and this time
around it sounds like someone actually might get slapped for buying IBM.

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wmblaettler
The title reads as though he was the single Engineering Director of Facebook
("Facebook's Engineering Director"). But a quick look on LinkedIn shows there
are dozens of Engineering Directors at Facebook, which the article confirms -
"one of Facebook's engineering directors".

Might want to change the title to match the article's.

(Not to diminish in any way his achievements at Facebook or otherwise.)

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fezz
The new US Armed Forces motto:

Move Fast and Break Things

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hackuser
> Move Fast and Break Things

Funny, but it raises a concern: You can't take that approach to White House
IT. If something breaks, the consequence isn't that users' feeds of vacation
photos malfunction; instead people die, nuclear codes leak, etc.

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hueving
Whitehouse IT isn't responsible for anything important like that. That kind of
stuff resides in the dod. Whitehouse IT would be responsible for communicating
the message of the President to the public, doing special projects websites to
garner support for a bill the president is hot on, etc.

Nobody will die if these IT people screw up.

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chernevik
Hate to rain on the parade, but the government should maybe deal with basic
record retention before we look for it to enter the Information Age. We can't
get at Lois Lerner's email, we can't get at the Secretary of State's? We're
supposed to believe the White House didn't wonder why email to the Secretary
of State wasn't going to a .gov address?

Information and the flow of information is power. So far I don't see much sign
that this Administration is actually interested in handling that power in an
accountable fashion.

Until we get that priority squared away, I'm not very interested in the bells
and whistles.

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hga
" _We can 't get at Lois Lerner's email_"

That turned out to be a flat lie. Recently, when the appropriate investigators
went to the people who maintain the backups, they found that no one had ever
asked them for the emails, and they were available. Supposedly, a criminal
investigation is underway.

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radoslawc
Good for him. However this part of article bothers me: "As a longtime advocate
of open source — an online model that allows free access to websites’ source
code — Recordon was awarded the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2007."

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juletide
Would you mind explaining why that bothers you? It seems innocuous to me.

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sukilot
The word "website" is not correct in that statement.

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janekm
In the context of Facebook it's not that inaccurate though (it doesn't say
only the source code of websites).

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at-fates-hands
What are the odds the incoming administration (be it Democrat or Republican)
will keep these high profile IT people around after Obama exits?

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shit_parade
why anyone works for a government which openly tortures is confusing to me.
Where do people draw the line, is it at genocide?

