
Eric Schmidt is working to launch a university - plumeria
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-eric-schmidt-us-digital-service-academy-2020-7
======
Upvoter33
"Palo Alto-based Stanford University ... and MIT have historically been the
primary talent pools for the tech industry"

This is far from true. If you look at the total workforce in tech, the
majority is by far from much larger, public schools, like Berkeley, Michigan,
Illinois, Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, etc., etc. MIT and Stanford have had
amazing great people, but they are far from the "primary" source of talent.

(yes, a bit of an aside, but it rankles)

~~~
akhilcacharya
Yeah, it's honestly insulting copy, and ignores other North American schools
like Waterloo that make up a disproportionate part of big tech.

~~~
Upvoter33
(should have included all the great Canadian universities in the list too, my
apologies ... not that I included all the great US universities)

~~~
k4tz
You said "much larger [than Stanford/MIT], public schools", which definitely
includes the top Canadian universities, so you're good

------
vsskanth
I've always wondered why mega billionaires from this era such as Bill Gates,
Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg etc. haven't built universities
like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc. - all started by monopolists from the
previous era. I guess Eric Schmidt would be the first one

~~~
ghaff
It's a federal commission that Schmidt co-chairs.

>haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc.

I assume the answer is that they generally find that it makes a lot more sense
to give oodles of cash to their alma mater or some favored school to get your
name on a building and/or really beef up a department than to try to found a
new school which would likely take decades to establish any sort of
reputation.

~~~
bluedevil2k
You're underestimating the egos of billionaires and how they love winning
compared to other billionaires. A name on a building is nice. A name on a
university that's mentioned with Duke and MIT...now that's something you can
brag about. The owners of NBA teams - all billionaires, most willing to lose
money year-to-year in order to win and beat the other billionaires. The
women's basketball league in Russia - teams owned by oligarchs who all lose
money on the league but spend lavishly to beat each other.

~~~
ghaff
>A name on a university that's mentioned with Duke and MIT...now that's
something you can brag about.

That's the rub though, isn't it. I'm not sure even Bezos has money that would
be needed to pull that off over, say, a 10 year horizon. MIT has almost a $20
billion endowment to give some idea of the sorts of money flows we're talking
about here. To say nothing of the fact that they already have the faculty,
physical plant, reputation, etc.

~~~
bluedevil2k
That’s why I think they should donate (ie buy) an existing university and
transform it. I’d go for Pepperdine, right in Malibu, near the beach, perfect
weather, great architecture.

------
curiousllama
This will fail not because it's a bad idea, but because the government will
reject it.

Contrary to popular belief, established universities do a very effective job
of preparing tech talent for government jobs. The issues, which Schmidt seems
to miss, are twofold:

(1) the government, with few exceptions, is a TERRIBLE place to build
effective tech skills. Slow, heavily outsourced, bureaucratic beyond belief,
and low paid, there is very little creativity and variety in which to build
unique technology, and no reward for the BS.

(2) Current universities already prepare tech workers well. In some cases,
there are even joint CS-Public Policy degrees (e.g., MSCAPP at UofC).

Those engineers with policy expertise just don't want to work for the
government. I know; I was one of them, and I could not for the life of me find
a policy tech job that paid even HALF what tech companies would pay me.

Schmidt should focus on building "the department of innovative technology" and
pay engineers appropriately.

~~~
natalyarostova
Classic modern HN comment. The hard working person with a history of success
who is trying a risky ambitious project will fail, because they didn't
consider the few things a commentor instantly spotted as problems.

~~~
mbesto
Classic modern HN comment response. You act like these criticisms are somehow
inherently negative...

Just because people love to point out the HN discussion where Drew Houston got
scrutiny for Dropbox, doesn't mean that discussion isn't valuable. I'm sure as
hell Drew learned a ton from the criticisms.

This is the point of HN - it's OK.

~~~
natalyarostova
Maybe you're right. I felt the over-confident claim that it would fail to make
it cross the line.

If we discourage people from trying 1/100 or even 1/1000 chances because it's
overwhelmingly likely they fail, we miss out on the massive upside offered by
these risks.

------
ghaff
It reads to me more like Schmidt is proposing the government set up its own
"US Digital Academy" so that they _don 't have to compete_ with MIT and
Stanford. (I assume the model would be something like free or low tuition in
exchange for a requirement to work for the government for x years upon
graduation.)

~~~
neilk
I think you're probably closer to the truth there. Even if it isn't an ISA
university, my first guess is that it's a way of laundering government funding
to create an institution under private control. (This is how most great
universities get their start anyway, it's nothing new).

I'm sure ES also has a vision for a modern university that has merit, but I'd
be skeptical if it was about more free inquiry and public service - probably
more alignment with industry.

Google execs often couch their plans with claims about how it's going to be
good for the world, especially partnerships with the government. For instance,
the takeover of Moffett field to provide a place for the founders to park
their jets, as well as space for the new Google HQ.

~~~
ghaff
>I'm sure ES also has a vision for a modern university that has merit,

I don't disagree with any of your points. Cornell Tech in NYC is arguably an
example of reimagining things with at least a somewhat clean sheet of paper
but I haven't studied it in any detail. One thing that is probably be clear is
that there's too much stovepiping in universities in general. MIT's new
interdisciplinary Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing is another
example of trying to bring more disciplines under one roof.

------
stupendousyappi
The biggest challenge in recruiting technical talent to the government is the
GS payscale. This program is being recommended to Congress, so I assume it's
an attempt to indirectly increase compensation by offering free tuition to
people who commit to government employment- it also is likely attempting to
target college age kids, who could accept government payscales more easily
than someone who already works in the private sector and has gotten used to
higher compensation. Schmidt is no dummy, and I expect that this would work,
but it's still a hack around the fundamental problem of IT compensation scales
that are roughly 50% of private sector levels.

A more straightforward solution would be to just create a new payscale (say,
the Executive Technical Service) for IT professionals and other technical
domains where federal compensation lags the private sector. The Senior
Executive Service (the payscale for senior leadership like department and
agency executives, including most political appointees) has about 8000
members- if you gave this system twice as many people and paid them all $100k
more than the GS system would, you'd increase the federal budget by about $1.6
billion a year, or 0.04% of the 2019 budget, almost all of which you'd recover
anyway by replacing IT contractors who generally cost the government between
$250k and $350k each a year. Unfortunately, this solution would really piss
off the big federal contractors, who would heavily lobby against it, which is
why it doesn't happen even though more reasonable payscales have been found
for federal doctors and lawyers.

------
zazerbayev
I think this is a great idea.

You must ask yourself why the government is able to retain word-class managers
and jurists despite stiff competition from the private sector. James Comey was
an executive at the world's largest hedge fund, why did he quit for a
government job where he was making 100x less? Any federal judge could've made
a fortune in corporate law, why didn't they choose to? Because there is a
sense of prestige and national duty about their posts. Creating a similar
status for technologists in government would go a long way towards recruiting
and retaining top talent.

If we want to convince people that being a government engineer is worthwhile
and respected, starting with students seems reasonable.

~~~
zjaffee
I think it's more complicated than that, all of these roles come with
substantial amounts of near unilateral executive power that can impact the way
the country is run for decades to come.

Even all of the existing US government tech posts like the USDS and 18F are
ultimately there purely to service the needs of a bureaucratic agency and
their particular management.

For a technology specific role to have the same level of prestige as someone
on the federal bench or leading the FBI, they'd need to be giving them
unilateral regulatory powers over the broader technology industry in the
country.

~~~
wslack
I'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of
government.

The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law,
running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the
government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to
taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires
investment and taking risks.

~~~
zjaffee
I think there would be comparable prestige if the government did something
like roll out public broadband or made some sort of publicly owned social
media.

------
pmorici
Maybe this article is missing some important details but I don't see how
having a special university is going to help the problem of getting more
technical talent into government work.

There are already tons of government scholarship programs with strings
attached in the form of post graduation service requirements and other hiring
funnels that bring in new graduates. The government's problem isn't hiring new
grads it's keeping those people once they get a few years experience. The
biggest drain is probably government contracting companies who often offer
literally twice the salary for the same work. Combine that with the soul
sucking aspects that you would find at any large company and you have the
perfect recipe for not being able to recruit and retain qualified mid career
people.

It's hard to imagine how any amount of indoctrination in the ideals of public
service at a special school will overcome those things without something else
changing.

------
hinkley
Maybe I'm just a bitter pessimist, but I don't relish the idea of Schmidt
telling _more_ people how to think.

------
tehabe
I remember a story that Leland Stanford asked what is needed to found a
university and the answer was 200 million dollars. What they didn't tell him,
that it also takes 200 hundred years.

Universities are a longterm project, if a university is good or not, is
something you don't really realise while you are there but when you are
finished and try to use your knowledge.

~~~
pvg
Stanford isn't 200 years old, neither is Berkeley. Many UC campuses are a lot
younger, UCSC was founded in 1965.

~~~
ghaff
Even in the East a lot of universities aren't that old. A lot of well known
institutions postdate the Civil War and those aren't 200 years old yet.

------
x87678r
> funnel tech workers into government work

Government work doesn't pay well, so it will never be as prestigious as
Stanford or MIT.

EDIT - previous title had the headline part where it said it will "rival
Stanford and MIT"

~~~
jonwachob91
Not everything in the world can be measured by pay.

Sure, an FBI Criminal Profiler earns a tiny fraction of what a google dev
earns. But one can take serial killers off the street, and the other just
makes ads more annoying.

A Social Worker earns almost nothing, but they get to help the most needy of
people get the help they need. A FB engineer earns 10x the pay, but just makes
ads more annoying.

A teacher earns almost nothing, but they get to teach the next generation of
society. An Amazon engineer earns 10x the pay, but just finds ways to sell you
more stuff you don't need.

No one goes into government work b/c the pay, they do it for reasons they find
more important.

~~~
tehlike
"the other just makes ads more annoying"

The meme that never dies. Advertising funded tons of tons of businesses on
apps and on web, employed hundreds of thousands directly and created a large
economy.

Disclaimer: Former google, current facebook employee, working in ads.

~~~
fock
and most important of all: it created a new group of rent-seekers from
scratch. well done!

~~~
tehlike
Not sure what you are saying.

~~~
fock
well, did adtech change the available income or why is it that it's so much
bigger than the old way of doing advertisement?

I think the only point, why you are seeing this "growth" is that you have an
oligopolic structure which is just skimming money (mainly to the benefit of
the 0.1 percenters) without creating any additional value compared to the
traditional way of doing advertising? Or how again are you increasing
available income with your smokescreen of targeted ads?

EDIT: actually I think wikipedia captured it perfectly
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-
seeking](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) \- and no, financing
some productive webbusiness (which there are?) with a minuscule fraction of
the ad money or following personal spleens of the founders/crazy people is not
altering the outcome.

~~~
tehlike
Plenty of (say, gaming, entertainment etc) companies in developing countries
employed plenty of people due to advertising revenue, which would otherwise
not be viable.

Google display ads takes a fraction of revenue and passes the rest to
publishers. Same with audience network.

Digital advertising lowered the barrier significantly to making profit for
lots of digital businesses. It enabled lots of physical businesses to get
recognition and discovery in one way or the other.

Not sure why this is not clear, but happy to discuss more.

~~~
fock
Why not pay them directly in a functioning economy, if its worth it? Why do
you need to skim from random (!) other ventures to finance this kind of
business?

I'm also not sure, if I understand this correctly, but 32% (or _1 third_ )
seems like quite a big "cut" for any service to me - but apparently ratios
changed with the internet which allows placing these ads at such a low cost :)
[https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en)

So, do these "digital businesses" create anything, or just skim money? Just
because you've built a network of rent-seekers, this doesn't really change the
concept.

Also could you explain how physical businesses actually benefit from the "new
kind of ads" in a more concise way compared to the weasel-wording "one way or
the other" \- is more product sold because of ads in a certain area (doubtful,
because ads won't change available income), does the percentage of advertising
spend go down, when all business go "online" (doubtful as well, or how can you
generate growth beyond the growth of the economy, which is the declared target
of most adtechy-enterprises?!). So this is frankly neither clear to me nor
apparently to you (nor anybody else I suppose), but these are the hard
questions society has to answer, before accepting "adtech" as a productive
sector of the economy.

------
setpatchaddress
I can't help but think ARPA is a better model than what sounds like a
government-controlled vocational school for script kiddies.

------
bigpumpkin
The question isn't whether it will rival Stanford and MIT, because it never
will with a one year program. The question is whether it could incrementally
attract more talent into the industry.

------
codekansas
The naming, "US Digital Service Academy", seems to suggest that it will be
tied to the US Digital Service - which would be great. I think that might be
the only government organization that I would actually be excited about
working for.

Side note, I really hope the tour-of-duty model becomes more popular with
techies, and more encouraged by employers. I can see it having numerous
bidirectional benefits

------
habosa
Eric is one of the most accomplished leaders in tech but also one of the most
overconfident and out of touch. So this could really go either way.

------
082349872349872
On a tangent: when he was young, Schmidt worked (alongside a young Wadler) on
the Poplar functional language.

[http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-81-11_Re...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-81-11_Real_Programming_in_Functional_Languages.pdf)

------
Jtsummers
Interesting. I don't see the point, though.

The issue with the US government and software is not a lack of talent (within
the country, or even within the government itself). But a poor structuring and
assigning of responsibilities and a severely risk-averse culture, paired with
the overreaction of a risk-accepting culture occasionally showing up and
fucking it all.

There is, or will be, sufficient talent in the US to maintain and develop
government software systems. Flat out, people keep going into CS and software
engineering degree programs. Programming itself is ludicrously accessible
compared to nearly any other technical discipline because the cost of entry is
about $200 and time.

The problems that actually need to be resolved:

1\. Government employees (contrary to popular opinion) are grossly underpaid
for their expertise. This leads many of the best to leave and go to private
industry and/or government contractors. Those who remain are truly civic
minded, or zombies. Moving away from GS helps here (pay for time in grade),
but the alternatives are also severely abused. NSPS paid people for changing
positions, so there was a ton of job hopping before it was canceled. Expertise
wasn't really cultivated, only the same stupid culture of bouncing between
jobs you find in parts of private industry. AcqDemo is somewhat better, but in
implementation lost all its potential value. Still better than GS, but only
barely.

2\. In-house development shops are typically made to compete for contracts in
the same way as private companies. This creates some interesting conflicts
within the organizations. And a ton of the in-house software development
efforts are spent on maintenance, not developing new systems. So a different
kind of expertise shows up, but not the expertise needed when truly novel
projects start up.

3\. The people in charge of the IT and software development efforts are
usually inexperienced with IT and software development. They're either
straight out of college EEs (CS people are at a disadvantage in many
government shops) or career civil servant bureaucrats. The latter rely on
those same inexperienced EEs. This leads to an incredibly advantage for
contractors to push program offices around because they can come off as
reliable experts, until you've been burned a few times. But hit a couple
milestones and the civil servant in charge is already promoted out of that
position and a new one is left holding the bag when shit hits the fan.

4\. Risk averse IT severely restricts development environments even when
software is made in-house. This leads to incredible slowdowns and often
automation is impossible due to having to develop and test on multiple
test/dev network enclaves that are separated even from each other. An example
is the typical CCB (configuration control board) process which is a monthly
(at best) meeting where, mostly, managers decide what new things can be
installed on the network. You want an updated version of VS or GCC? Gotta wait
a month. You want to use a common library? Gotta wait a month. And that's on
top of the delays imposed by security scans (a manual process, that could be
automated if it's necessary).

5\. Risk accepting IT goes too far the other way as a reactionary response to
the risk averse culture that held them back. Their fuck ups lead to the people
in (4) being able to justify their positions and cement their culture.

You have to improve the approach to IT, the staffing of the acquisition
offices to have competent individuals in the appropriate fields, not just
successful (from a promotion perspective) bureaucrats, and probably increase
pay across the board for technical people.

~~~
throw_m239339
> The issue with the US government and software is not a lack of talent
> (within the country, or even within the government itself). But a poor
> structuring and assigning of responsibilities and a severely risk-averse
> culture, paired with the overreaction of a risk-accepting culture
> occasionally showing up and fucking it all.

Bureaucracy in a nutshell. I wonder if there is a single country the western
world where it is actually efficient...

~~~
Jtsummers
Bureaucracy will never be efficient. It is resilient and can survive. It is an
organism. It presses itself into the cracks and crevices of society until it
seems like the essential material composing our structure. But it's not, it's
just slime mold.

------
Animats
Who's supposed to fund this? Is Schmidt putting up the money himself?

Is this to be a real college, with accreditation, or something like
"Singularity University" or Udacity or DeVry?

~~~
sdinsn
> Who's supposed to fund this?

The government- Schmidt is making a recommendation to Congress.

> Is this to be a real college, with accreditation

Yes

------
michaelbuckbee
The article doesn't mention it, but given the current crisis and the huge move
to remote education underway currently it would be interesting if this had an
approach that took that into account.

------
thephyber
The elephant in the room when talking about making government work more like
startups:

We don't allow governments to fail (easily) but startups fail frequently and
we acknowledge that both bankruptcy and team failure leads to knowledge that
is rare to gather without actually experiencing the failure.

I'm not advocating for anything in particular except to acknowledge this fact.

------
duxup
The federal government pay cap in 2019 was $166,500....

These folks are going to go to this university that is better than Stanford
and MIT (let's assume this mammoth task happens) and then eschew working for
big tech paychecks in favor of working for the government?

~~~
kxyvr
That is not entirely true, but the devil is in the details. As an example, the
Federal government employs thousands of physicians at the VA and, depending on
specialty, they are paid significantly more than this. Last time I checked,
they capped out at $400k:

[https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2020/PhysicianDentist/PayTables_...](https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2020/PhysicianDentist/PayTables_20200216.pdf)

Anyway, the point is that the federal government can and does pay
significantly more than the GS pay scale to people who are federal employees
and enjoy federal pensions. Whether or not the feds will choose to pay that to
those who work in technology remains to be seen.

~~~
duxup
I remember a couple departments (including the NSA) complaining about the
federal cap when it came to some IT projects, so I'm not sure it is a sure
deal to get past that cap.

The VA is a whole other land of bureaucracy that plays by its own rules.

~~~
kxyvr
Oh, I very much agree and they were most certainly capped at that
organization. It's a major problem because and I very much agree with your
original comment that there are better options now working for big tech.

I guess my point above is that feds can fix this if they truly wanted to.
There's precedent for them hiring people for far more money than the regular
GS rate when they need to. It would be impossible to hire a surgeon for $160k,
but they need them, so they pay more. At the moment, the government doesn't
feel they need to pay more, so they don't. I hope someday that will change and
think it's important to educate and lobby the federal government to help them
understand this and change their policy.

~~~
wslack
This isn't a decision that can be made within the executive branch (I think).
Congress would have to pass laws that enable "bureaucrats to get paid more."

------
jb775
> _would ideally produce graduates imbued with a sense of government duty._

I'm not sure this is the best selling point to attract a young & diverse
student body, given current world events.

------
WalterBright
> one that would ideally produce graduates imbued with a sense of government
> duty.

I wonder how they plan to do that.

------
hprotagonist
cool, give it a century or so to get used to itself and we'll see how we've
done.

------
jeffreyrogers
Peter Thiel was thinking about starting a university at some point too. He
decided not to because it was too hard. Seems like it could be a great idea
though. Government at all levels in the US has a lot of problems and getting
smart, reform-minded people into it would hopefully help correcting that.

------
sebastianconcpt
1\. What guarantees does it offer for ideology neutrality? 2\. What guarantees
does it offer for the diversity of ideas? 3\. What guarantees does it offer
for excluding censorship of the expression of thought as a measurable true
defense of freedom of thought and expression?

~~~
sebastianconcpt
What would be valid reasons for the previous comment to be _just_ silently
downvoted?

------
j45
This likely will prove to be much bigger news than many anticipate today.

------
nickgrosvenor
Good for him

------
thaumasiotes
Huh. As the page loads for me, the headline is also the entirety of the
content.

Though it is longer than presented here. The rest is "...and funnel tech
workers into government work".

The news is summarizing itself now!

~~~
dhosek
The formatting at businessinsider is often pretty crummy. There is a whole
article after the picture and some bullet points.

~~~
thaumasiotes
No there isn't, not for me.

~~~
plumeria
Try this link: [http://archive.vn/jFoU3](http://archive.vn/jFoU3)

------
selfishgene
My favorite quote is at the end:

"Per the report, the Digital Service Academy would serve as a third reservoir
for the best and brightest technology workers, but one that would ideally
produce graduates imbued with a sense of government duty."

... because places like MIT and Stanford sure as hell don't!

It looks like Schmidt just wants the next generation of students to forgo
their dreams of starting the next Google.

I think a better idea to help this country stay competitive is for companies
like Google to stop offshoring their operations ... and pay their goddamn
taxes like the rest of us.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/31/21044662/google-end-
tax-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/31/21044662/google-end-tax-loophole-
double-irish-dutch-sandwich-2020)

[https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-
faceboo...](https://fortune.com/2019/12/06/big-tech-taxes-google-facebook-
amazon-apple-netflix-microsoft/)

~~~
dumbfoundded
I can't speak for Stanford but MIT is extremely closely tied with the federal
government. The Lincoln Lab for instance gets ~$1B/year from the Defense
Department. The only reason MIT became a well known institution at all is
because of its ties to the military.

~~~
selfishgene
MIT became a rich institution because of its ties to the military.

Lincoln Laboratory is often called a "PhD graveyard" for good reason: it's
where reject academics who were denied tenure go to die.

