
Inside Obama's stealth startup - fred256
http://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks
======
TheMagicHorsey
My friend has been a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the last year.

Basically people can't get things done because they are being stonewalled by
the old-guard in the various departments they've been tasked with reforming.
There are outside vendors with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
contracts on the line, and they don't want those contracts to be cancelled by
implementing commonsense new technology reforms.

My friend described a process in one government department where digital
documents were received, were printed, were then physically mailed to a back
office site, and then manually entered into a system by typing. The contract
for the scanning was worth millions. The contract for the back-end was worth
millions. People's jobs depended on there being this whole useless exercise.
Nothing could be reformed.

I think its important that we have optimism, but nothing short of sledgehammer
and mass layoffs of government employees and contractors is going to improve
government.

~~~
iandanforth
Name names please. Perhaps it's naive, but I imagine that if we have a
specific instance to work with we're much more likely to be able to force
change.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
The problem is people can't go public with this stuff. They will be
blacklisted from ever working in government again. And these are regulatory
agencies that can make trouble for you in the private sector world too.

This is why I'm being so vague. I could actually give you specific details,
but then my friend would be identified.

My friend said even with the small level of reforming he was trying to do,
people stopped inviting him to meetings--because he was embarrassing with the
way he was saying the Emperor has No Clothes, with respect to the processes
being used.

Imagine a tech company where everyone basically has tenure, and promotions are
based on how long you've been warming your seat. Now bake that organization
for 50 years. That is your govt. IT department.

~~~
mkempe
Surely all these amazing people who were pretty much hired directly by Obama
himself can fearlessly go talk to him about that. Or is he simply throwing
hundreds of them into a volcano, knowing that nothing lasting and significant
will be achieved?

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
I think you misunderstand how much access to the President even high level
techies in the government have. He has an enormous amount of demands on his
time, and limited waking hours and political capital to spend. Reforming Fed.
tech is not one of his priorities.

~~~
mkempe
What you say is not the gist of the article nor how Obama, supposedly,
recruited them.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
What I'm requesting is that you don't believe the article hype.

Of course, don't take me at my word. Wait a year, or 2 years, or whatever you
think is a reasonable time to wait for results ... and then check the USPTO
website, or the FAA website, or the BIS website ... whatever your favorite
govt. IT portal is, and see if its better. Better yet, ask a friend in
government if things have gotten better in his/her department.

------
civilian
I heard about this a couple months ago, with largely the same sales pitch:
"We're looking for software developers to help rebuild the government's
systems. You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should
think of it as a tour of duty. And we're looking for 500 people! Also you'll
be relocating to DC."

If I was rebuilding important systems, I'd happily take 300 people at market
rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-;

~~~
jonjenk
I know some of the people who have signed up for this and I can say with
confidence that I'd happily take them at any salary.

The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to
do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most
financially rewarding option is encouraging.

~~~
tolmasky
There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust
anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world"
in a startup or being patriotic for the government.

 _> The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided
to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most
financially rewarding option is encouraging._

There's actually really simple reasoning behind this: the flip side to your
statement is "the fact that the government isn't willing to pay for work that
is important is discouraging".

You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects
(everything from military contractors to the bay bridge that got built by a
FOREIGN company, went over budget, and now may not even be safe). Clearly some
projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for. If your project doesn't
command market rate, then either it _isn 't_ as important as they're trying to
tell you it is (since they've clearly demonstrated a willingness to pay in
other areas), or, perhaps worse, it is but they just don't care about it
enough.

Its so _strange_ that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't
negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments
never seem to come up.

~~~
ethanbond
In what world are you _owed_ a Silicon Valley salary? Only at a Silicon Valley
company, and even then only if you signed the piece of paper that offered it.

It seems awfully cynical to think there's no tech work that you would take on
to justify a little cut in pay. If it's not for you, it's not for you. But
there are huge swaths of people who get real satisfaction from working on the
problems that government work exposes them to.

It has little to do with patriotism nor the monetary value of your work.
People do things for incentives – they can be monetary or otherwise. As
someone else mentioned, federal employee benefits can be really, really
fantastic for the way some people want to live their lives. Probably not for
those wanting to own a Maserati by their 30th birthday, but for those who want
a low-risk, comfortable retirement after a consistent (if lengthy) tenure it's
not a bad option.

I can name at least one "huge corporation" (in Silicon Valley, no less) that
very successfully offers lower salary compensation for a shot at similarly
meaningful work. Maybe these arguments never hold up because it's hard to be
"patriotic" about the 38th _x_ for _y_ startup to launch this week.

~~~
tolmasky
No one is "owed" anything, I'm simply pointing out two things:

1\. Be skeptical of offerings that are below market rate in exchange for
intangibles, like being "part of something". You often discover that there are
certain people on the organization who get to both be a part of something and
have good compensation. Now, if the argument is "the package has other
benefits like retirement etc etc, then sure, that is orthogonal to my argument
about "sacrifice". In fact, if you simply enjoy the work then I also think
that's fine. I'm saying don't be convinced about something's importance.
Notice in my comment I specifically called out startups and gov.

2\. This entity seems to find seemingly limitless pockets for other things,
making this sacrifice suspicious.

Fundamentally I believe in treating your employees well. _Sometimes_ amazing
tasks require arbitrary salary sacrifices, more often though someone's taking
a big paycheck.

~~~
bovermyer
If I remember correctly, my benefits when I worked as a subcontractor for the
federal government were fantastic. Definitely helped make up for the lower
pay.

~~~
camenk
What kind of benefits are there compared to private sector? Care to elaborate
more on this? Or it's too sensitive?

~~~
azernik
According to this [1]:

* Good health care

* Lots of time off

* A defined-benefit pension plan

* Good support for parents

~~~
enraged_camel
I have a hard time believing that all of these combined will make up for the
difference in pay compared to an equivalent private sector job in New York,
SV, Seattle or even Austin.

~~~
toomuchtodo
We all value things differently. I'd rather have more time off than a market
salary. I'm not going to lay on my deathbed and wish I had committed extra
lines of code.

------
adwww
This is at least in part inspired by the (for the most part) success of the UK
cabinet office's Government Digital Services.

Despite years of multi billion pound IT projects at the hands of Microsoft,
HP, Crapita etc going over budget and delivering poor results late, the small
internal team have produced some very modern, very successful web services.
They even had a GitHub and PivitolTracker board publicly available if I
recall.

So yeah, whether it can resist being outsourced and off shored is one thing,
but with the right people (sounds good so far!) I wouldn't write it off as
another government IT disaster just yet.

~~~
l4in
Do you have any more information about the success of the UK's GDS? How do you
evaluate their success? Are there any similar EU organs? Do you know any ways
for a CS student to learn more about governance?

------
pdeuchler
The religious and reverent tone of this article gives away the true purpose
for this initiative. Power.

Make no mistake, those pushing this project are Machiavellians of the highest
order. They did not spend their entire lives playing the political game and
manipulating their way to the top in order to "do good" and "change
government". If they truly wanted to "do good" they could very easily
accomplish huge strides with a single stroke of a pen, yet this fails to
happen day in and day out. Furthermore the very idea that those who control
the machinations of government would want to change that system is ludicrous
on face, and requires significant cognitive dissonance to believe. This is
about leverage.

Before the Snowden revelations the government had most of the tech companies
comfortably in their pocket with no real downside to those companies. Those
revelations have forced companies to choose between consumers and the
government, a choice that seems to be slightly leaning towards consumers
recently (rollouts of security features, encryption by default). Regardless of
the vast abilities of the NSA, they still rely on Silicon Valley for an absurd
percentage of their intelligence gathering.

This scares the Washington elite (please note this elite is not constrained by
political party), and so they go after the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's own
power base. Talent. This is a warning shot, a demonstration that a 45 minute
meeting with the president is sufficient to fully co-opt some of the best and
brightest SV has to offer.

Let's be real here. If the President really cared about the VA he wouldn't
have waited until he was a lame duck to spearhead some website when the
reality is the VA is woefully underfunded and highly dysfunctional as an
organization from structure to implementation. No javascript front end will
change those things. This lip service to building better systems to "help
people" is a poor mask over the fact that they would control the people who
designed and built that very system, and thus, control the system. He who has
the power to destroy has _the_ ultimate power.

Everyone on this website knows Google is one of the most powerful companies on
earth because of their talent. Everyone knows that startups die when the lead
engineer gets poached. You don't take talent from Google to _not_ compete with
them... this is just war games on a much more abstracted level.

~~~
ethanbond
Could you give an example of how the President could "very easily accomplish
huge strides with a single stroke of a pen?"

The government is specifically designed _against_ what you are stating
is/should be the norm. This is literally the antithesis of the American
government's mandate and design.

~~~
pdeuchler
The President managed to authorize a taskforce of 500 software engineers
without much fuss, I don't see your point here.

But even assuming your premise, First Ladies are very often tasked with lip
service public good projects, it probably wouldn't hurt to add some
Presidential oomph to the existing forays. That seems like very easy low
hanging fruit.

~~~
ethanbond
A power that's delegated to him by the Constitution. There are very specific
guidelines surrounding what a President (or any other member of government)
can and cannot do.

You're saying the President should spend more time putting his name behind
social initiatives? Something tells me you'd be unimpressed.

Not that he shouldn't do it, but, as you said, he's assembled a 500-person
strong startup to rebuild gov't infrastructure and numerous people here find
it futile.

------
sswaner
I hope they are able to make some good, lasting progress. I fear that a
Republican administration would dismantle the startup style team and replace
it with a more enterprise approach (bring in IBM or Accenture type companies)
that would spend substantially more and accomplish substantially less.

The basis for this concern is the contrast in technology efforts in the last
presidential campaign, where Obama brought in Harper Reid and a small team of
very talented people. Romney hired some big companies.

18 months is not a lot of time to change the federal government.

~~~
fixxer
Don't let the marketing machine fool you. Both sides use a ton of enterprise
software and are in bed with companies that practice strong enterprise tactics
(DNC & Catalist; GOP & whatever the Kochs/Rove are calling their thing).

The Obama campaign had a great organization with a ton of youth techies in
control (funny things happen to organizational structure when salaries are 50%
of what one can get in the private sector), but so much of what you read is
absolute hype. Regarding the performance of Narwhal, lots of sour feelings
between the analytics team and the tech team.

~~~
d_shaw
The not-so-new-anymore GOP one is called Para Bellum.
[http://www.parabellumlabs.com/](http://www.parabellumlabs.com/)

~~~
fixxer
Looks like an awesome start-up. They've got Macs and there is a picture of a
girl diagramming something with "Web" in it. The future is now.

~~~
fapjacks
It shouldn't surprise me at all that their name means "Prepare for war"...

------
conductr
"user-friendly government" ... awesome, start with voting. This has potential
to touch every "user" and should be low hanging fruit for such a crack team.

~~~
apendleton
That'd be swell, but unfortunately for the most part, voting isn't the within
the purview of the federal government, because it's not one of the enumerated
powers in the constitution. Thank the 10th amendment, federalism, etc.

------
ianstallings
I think the biggest impact they'll have is on the mindset of the US government
has as a whole. Particularly their involvement in health care technology
reforms such as the HITECH additions to HIPAA regulations:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Information_Technology_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Information_Technology_for_Economic_and_Clinical_Health_Act)

Or Medicare's _Meaningful Use_ initiative: [http://www.healthit.gov/providers-
professionals/meaningful-u...](http://www.healthit.gov/providers-
professionals/meaningful-use-definition-objectives)

If you visit your doctor and see new technology in place, and also see data
privacy taken seriously, there's a good chance that government incentives were
involved. Now these guys might not have been directly involved in the trench-
related work, but the administration is definitely pushing these agendas.

~~~
GolfyMcG
They are pushing these agendas but unfortunately the standards are rather
abysmal.

"Meaningful Use" has become the butt of many jokes. HITECH is the preferred
compliance framework for Healthcare companies but it takes dramatically
longer, and by extension is more expensive than comparable frameworks like SOC
2. The UX of most new Healthcare IT is embarrassing, by the standards of
anyone who grew up in Web 2.0.

Add to this the amount of money being spent for this innovation and it's
painful how inefficient of an investment the government is making. There are
some companies really trying to push the envelope but the majority of the
industry is mired in red tape and antique thinking.

------
DanielBMarkham
I need to remind the somewhat younger and more idealistic HN crowd that
national service is just that: _national_ service. If it's "Obama's startup",
it ain't national service. It's partisan service.

It's an important point, because time will tell how some future Republican
administration will both treat and be treated by this group. If you're working
with millions of federal jobs, you'd better be ready to play the long game;
not just play the PR game.

I wish guys joining the best. But if you're only in it because of Obama?
Please don't go. I wouldn't want to see a situation where IT systems favored
by one party were automated while those favored by another were not. That
would take what could be a great good and turn it into a great evil.

------
kelvin0
The problem with this is the entrenched culture and feudal turf wars within
various departements in gvt will likely need to be addressed, even if you have
the top tech talent of the universe working on this ... I wonder how they
expect to get everyone to play nice with the new 'recruits'

------
ajays
These folks all seem like political appointees. What happens in 18 months when
Obama is gone? I hope the successor keeps the initiative going, as it seems
like a good cause.

------
sabalaba
Is the federal government's inability to recruit and retain top talent really
a mystery? It's surprising that an institution that is capable of confiscating
double digit percentages of it's people's labor and capital gains[1] is
unwilling to pay market or above market salaries to its employees.

If they want to capture the best and brightest, they'll have to do more than
just appeal to patriotism.

[1]
[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456)

~~~
navait
What does tax policy have to do with how the federal government compensates
it's employees?

~~~
gboone42
Taxes, in one form or another, are where the federal government gets the money
it uses to pay its employees.

