
White House launches “U.S. Digital Service,” with HealthCare.gov fixer at helm - dctoedt
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-gov-fixer-at-the-helm
======
brandonb
I worked with Mikey on healthcare.gov and he's the real deal--wicked smart,
but also humble, patient, respectful, grounded, and keenly insightful into how
organizations work and how to fix broken ones.

The day healthcare.gov launched, six people total got through. Six. Nobody
even knew when the site was down, except by checking CNN. Two months later,
Mikey had rallied the 20-something contractors into punching through dozens of
problems, and had recruited a team of (now-) 30-something engineers from
Google, Facebook, YC startups, and other fine places to come in on rotations
to keep the momentum going. As a result, 8 million people got health
insurance.

If you haven't already seen it, I recommend this talk and Time article:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM&feature=youtu.be&t=3m40s)
[http://blog-assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf](http://blog-
assets.newrelic.com/wp-content/uploads/80893.pdf)

And those of you thinking about joining: do it please! You don't have to give
up your life to the government—it's possible to help in short-term
rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to change the way
our government works.

(If you're interested in joining, feel free to email me a resume and I'll make
sure the right people see it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com)

~~~
larrys
"You don't have to give up your life to the government—it's possible to help
in short-term rotations—but this is the best shot we have in a long time to
change the way our government works."

Can you connect the dots for me as far as why, if the government needs help,
they can't pay market price for the help? Or is the drawback to working for
the government something other than that?

~~~
jbooth
If the government pays its employees at market prices for tech, it'd be
another sign of the bloated, inefficient federal government and, uh, socialism
or something.

If they pay a big federal contractor at twice that rate, who then pockets half
and pays its people market rate, then that's private sector efficiency at
work.

~~~
nostrademons
More generally - there is no market when there is only one purchaser. Right
now, the market for "tech talent working in government" is separate from the
market for "tech talent working in private-sector tech companies", and the
former sector has only one customer, which can set salaries basically
arbitrarily.

If you watch the YouTube video provided, it seems like the subtext of this
appointment is that Obama wants to merge these markets, so that the federal
government competes for tech talent out of the same pool as Silicon Valley,
Seattle, Boston, NYC, etc. tech companies. There will probably be many subtle
culture changes there - programmers may stop wearing suits in government
contractors, market rates may adjust, etc. I can't predict exactly how things
will change, but wouldn't count on the status quo remaining for long.

------
nostrademons
I saw MikeyD's tech talk on fixing healthcare.gov on my second-to-last day at
Google; it made me very glad that I'd pushed out my end date until mid-week.
The key idea in it was just the idea of "show up and try" \- that we have all
these broken systems because the people with the skills to fix them won't even
show up and try. Very inspiring - I thought that it very much demonstrated the
entrepreneurial mindset, even if it was the federal government we were talking
about.

I think this may also be evidence of a trend I've pointed out before, that the
press is reliably 2 years late in pointing out where people are leaving Google
to go to. I used to periodically glance at the list of departures back when I
was at Google. Around late 2012 or mid 2013 I saw a lot more folks start to go
into public-sector work: non-profits, academia, or government service. Overall
a positive trend, I think.

~~~
arjunnarayan
Your comment rings sympathetic, and your motivations are unquestionably
honorable, but there's still no way I'd even consider "just showing up and
trying". I'd show up and try for a $200k salary and some staff to take care of
the paperwork and drudgery associated with these government/non-profit jobs.
But not for a shit job with shit pay. After all, Google (and the like) pay
market rate (well, now that the cartel has been busted), and treat their
employees with courtesy and respect.

It's well known that the federal government simply DOES NOT pay market rate
for talent. Now it is able to get away with that behavior in sectors (cough,
banking) where there's consistent regulatory capture: so you're incentivized
to spend some years at the government to learn how the system works, and then
parlay that into a higher pay job subverting those systems. So the government
still gets some rotating talent despite paying absolute shit. But there's no
such regulatory capture possible in tech, nor am I interested in going down
that path even if it existed (I consider it moderately evil, and am still
naively idealist at least in that respect).

Look, I'm not solely money grubbing. Money is nice. I grew up without it and
now that I have relatively larger quantities of it, my life has unquestionably
improved (with luxuries like consistent access to good dentists). I'd
eventually like more of it. I'm not short-term greedy. I'm willing to defer
compensation for years, if not decades, if I feel that there's potential
monetary reward at the end of the line.

But from what I see, Mikey Dickerson made a pile of money at first, and thus
was free to pursue his political goals of bailing out an incompetent
administration that he nevertheless believed in and wanted their signature
achievement to succeed. And maybe I'll feel the same once my stock options
vest and the mortgage, college tuition, and retirement stockings are stuffed.
But don't forget that 99% of the time it's a solid dead end. Mikey was part of
a high profile rescue of a high profile failure. But anyone else going in with
naive ideals is probably going to get their souls crushed by the sheer
drudgery of it, with no Time magazine cover to boost their profiles at the end
of it.

~~~
fred_durst
Welcome to 2014, where people gladly and boldly proclaim their love of greed
and selfishness. Some people work for the government to make the world a
better place instead of finding ways to make people more addicted to Facebook
or clicking on Ads to buy things they don't really want or need. I understand
that you don't care about anyone but yourself, but is it really necessary to
shout it from the rooftops?

~~~
untog
I think the point they were making is that there is no need for the government
to rely on such instincts. They're very good to have, but many people have to
balance that instinct to help the world with, say, a mortgage. And kids. It's
very difficult to be idealistic.

Government could pay market rate for people like developers. Though there
would be a higher initial cost, I would bet a lot of money that the systems
they produce would save money in the end. Alas, if it's government, it's
broken. And we won't see a change soon.

------
dflock
The Government Digital Service are doing wonders for UK government web
applications - which have gone from 'pretty terrible' to 'global standard
setting', for the ones that they've got around to so far:
[https://gds.blog.gov.uk/](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/)

Hopefully, this success will be repeated in the US.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Agreed - just wrote pretty much the same thing.

I find it professionally embarrassing that my _government_ does better work
than 95% of the private sector. It should also be a minimum standard for the
work any client should expect. Fucking scary :-)

~~~
tim333
I watched Mike Bracken, who I think runs that, talk at Wikimania a couple of
days back. Quite inspiring in some ways. He figures they have saved about
£14bn in government costs by spending about £58m on developers. Quite a
contrast from the NHS fiasco with private developers blowing £12bn before
their thing was scrapped
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health))

You can see Bracken's talk at
[http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/586156...](http://new.livestream.com/wikimania/friday2014/videos/58615661)
from about 2:14:50

------
lifeisstillgood
I would like to fly the flag for the UK Government Digital Service (and I
doubt the name is a big coincidence).

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service)

I am truly amazed that in the heart of the UK Cabinet Offi e sits 25 flagship
projects each one dedicated to building mostly Open software with Agile
practises, of defining and requiring sane and intelligent management if
government projects, who are trying to break down decades of huge supplier
Lockhold and seemingly succeeding.

The quality of the work is impressive, the philosophy behind it strong and the
pragmatism is solid.

For example one of the core team was asked to write up the first service
design manual (oh go read these !). He put in "we prefer Open Source Software
over proprietary". After a couple of high level meetings the minister said
"OK". Now "prefer" is not a strong word ... But I recently pitched my wares at
the Home Office for a tiny deal, about a month after hearing our hero tell
this story. And the civil servants did not say "prefer" \- all that the UK gov
has heard is "we must go open source".

It is a deep cultural change that has me more excited about our governments
future than anything for years.

If the US model can do half as well, China might need to take a back seat for
a decade or two.

------
ondrae
The Playbook [http://playbook.cio.gov/](http://playbook.cio.gov/) and TechFAR
[http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/](http://playbook.cio.gov/techfar/)

Both also available on GitHub

------
encoderer
I was into warfare history recently and read, among others, The Guns of
August, The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich, and biographies of FDR and Truman.
A thought that emerged from that reading was... should we ever again have an
all-encompassing war effort, if that should come to pass, what would be the
role of the San Francisco Bay Area and of the tech community nationwide?

There will certainly be an insatiable need for applied engineering skills as
Machinists, CNC fabricators, and process engineers of all sorts. So certainly
many software engineers could gravitate towards that sort of work. But in what
ways would and could software systems contribute, how would that happen, and
how could it be organized and scaled-up. What, for example, would 10,000
engineers at Google be working on? Because in a WWII-mobilization-style event,
it wouldn't be business as usual.

These are hypothetical issues and there isn't an answer, but I think answering
the question "what can we do _today_ " is a great start and I'm cautiously
optimistic.

~~~
snowwrestler
At the beginning of WWII, the U.S. did not have a large standing army or
significant defense contracting industry. That's why the full-nation effort
was needed.

Today we have the most well-funded and technologically advanced standing
military in the world. We would not need a full-nation mobilization.

~~~
encoderer
The first part of what you said is entirely correct. But a look at the
production numbers from WWII provides some elucidation on the second point. We
produced 100k aircraft in _just one year_. Over 60k tanks. Certainly the
changing face of warfare alters the math here -- we have many force
multipliers to our advantage -- but I think without question in a WWII style,
fully mobilized engagement, the US is by no means fully equipped.

I mean, even if we were, how could we be? That's actually a great lesson in
The Guns of August: Every general is fighting _the last war_.

------
forgotAgain
I want to believe, but I don't. I've seen too many instances in recent history
where administrations have sold a perceived solution to one problem as a
secret sauce to be slathered over everything else. This administration has
been absolutely abysmal at operations. I'd have been much more impressed if
this new group had launched quietly and we heard about it after it had been
functioning with positive results.

I'm not doubting the people named in this announcement. What I'm saying is
that they can only succeed if there is ongoing support from the top. This
feels much more like after the launch they will be left to fend for themselves
in fighting to change a monstrous bureaucracy.

Well at least they didn't use the word "surge" to sell it. I guess that's a
positive thing.

~~~
brandonb
I understand your cynicism, and it's not entirely misplaced, but this team is
both formidable and comes with strong support from the administration—in
particular, from US CTO Todd Park.

For whatever reason, the tech press hasn't picked up on Todd yet, but he's as
good as it gets. Prior to working for the government, he was a two-time
founder: he started both Athena Health (now a public company) and Castlight
(recent IPO). When healthcare.gov went down, Todd was the one Obama asked to
assemble the "tech surge," including Mikey, and he pitched in around the clock
to get things working--literally, at multiple points, sleeping in the office
overnight when things went awry. I promise you that the people in charge don't
consider this a typical, 9-to-5 job and don't leave teams to fend for
themselves. They are there in the trenches.

You can get a sense of who we're working with in this talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4WpQGfPt_E)

~~~
forgotAgain
I don't see it as a technical problem so I don't see technical chops, as
impressive as they are, as a solution.

The problem is one of governance. Unless this new group can cancel contracts
and ban organizations from participating in future projects I see very little
reason to think they will succeed.

They can suggest all they want but if they can't cold stone stop an agency
from entering an agreement then they can't change existing behaviors.

~~~
mdickers47
You might like to read about the powers of OMB (Office of Management and
Budget):

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/organization_mission/](http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/organization_mission/)

It is not obvious unless you spend your time memorizing government org charts,
but US Digital Service is part of OMB.

------
zmanian
I saw the "Saving Healthcare.gov" talk at Uber.The speakers were excellent and
their observations were terrifying.

If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure of
the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of
progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that.

The "Saving Healthcare.gov" presentation portrayed the Federal Government as
brittle, dysfuctional and broken. I came away believing that insider's in the
federal government are largely aware of ongoing failure of the federal
government. I suspect the expansion of security state agencies like NSA and
Homeland Security is in many ways driving by the need to protect a failing
system from any plausible external threat.

~~~
cge
>If you are believe in progressive goals and methods, the success or failure
of the U.S. Digital Service will have a far greater impact on relevancy of
progressive goals than who wins the next election or the election after that.

It's increasingly become my view that fundamental political ideologies as a
whole have less impact on success or failure (societal, economic, or
otherwise) than governmental efficiency and policy implementation. I'm not
sure it matters too much whether the goals are progressive, conservative or
even anything non-delusional, if they're implemented effectively, and even the
most brilliant goals are pointless if the implementation is dysfunctional.

Viewing government as software, it's as though politicians are spending their
time arguing about what sort of programming paradigm should be used, and not
particularly caring whether the software actually works.

~~~
_delirium
I think it's fairly widely recognized in politics that whether government is
perceived to "work well" has a large impact on what people trust the
government to do. So politicians sort of agree and are acting on it. Enough
that it's become a fairly common debate whether politicians are acting in good
faith, or are rather trying to manipulate the efficiency / perceived
efficiency of policies in order to achieve ideological goals.

For example, left-leaning Americans frequently allege that the current GOP
policy is precisely based on that. Rather than (only) trying to convince
people _ideologically_ that small government is good, Norquist-style, the
allegation is that their policy is to actively try to sabotage the
government's ability to deliver social services, so people see it as
inefficient/broken and therefore stop supporting it. Also occasionally a
debate in Europe, especially around infrastructure projects (local/provincial
politicians from the opposite party are sometimes accused of trying to
actively cause a big infrastructure project of the ruling party to turn into a
boondoggle, so the party can seem incompetent). In the other direction,
officials are sometimes accused of cooking the books to make something that
isn't running efficiently seem like it is. I think a lot of this kind of
terrain is where modern politics is fought once you get beyond the first
layer.

------
natural219
For the last ~5 years, I have disengaged from almost all political
conversation because it's mostly tabloid nonsense.

This is the _first_ thing I've seen in 5 years that actually excites me about
politics again. I just started reading about this, so I don't know if it's any
good. However: Mikey Dickerson and his team are making all of the correct
noises, and I'm very excited to see what comes of this.

This is a good (policy paper?) describing the initiative and some of the ways
Mikey et al are thinking about the problem:

[http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digit...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-
government/digital-government.html)

------
Clanan
While I appreciate the brainpower the USDS is bringing to bear, I'd like to
hear more about how they'll actually handle the politics and reality of what
they're doing - disrupting bureaucracy and federal processes. Specifically,
how can a service like this be effective when going up against entrenched
bureaucrats, massive big corps, etc.? Healthcare.gov was an exception, due to
the media spotlight and the political reputations at stake.

(Disclaimer: I'm investigating federal contract opportunities, so I would LOVE
to see the process overhauled.)

~~~
chiph
I expect they won't be doing much disrupting - but a lot of saving and
guiding.

The political aspect cannot be overlooked. The turf wars in government are
unbelievable. What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful
time after time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up
and invite them in. Sort of like the A-Team, but without the outstanding
warrants:

 _Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.
If you have a problem... if no one else can help... and if you can find
them... maybe you can hire... The A-Team._

~~~
incision
_> 'What's going to let them succeed is by their being successful time after
time. Only then will the heads of those other agencies call them up and invite
them in.'_

Right.

I think that possibly the greatest value in something of this sort is to be
able to point to the team, the playbooks and the free guidance as a
unassailable proven formula.

Offering a safe, defensible choice of this sort for the people at the top of
these agencies is very important.

Everyone knows the saying 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM'.

A legitimate source of excellence within the Government could supplant 'IBM'
in that notion as the as a 'go to', safe source for solutions that actually
has the best interests of Government in mind alongside technical excellence.

------
incision
Great move.

In my experience it can be very hard spur change from within Government, but
he's coming in at a point high enough that he should be able to simply set the
example.

Shame I don't know the guy, I'd love to work for him.

~~~
jonathanwallace
This was my first thought as well. Is he hiring? As there's no chance I'd want
to take on the risk of getting a regular government IT/developer job and being
enmeshed in the nightmare that is my conception of government bureaucracy but
I would like to contribute to make a difference.

~~~
incision
> _' Is he hiring?'_

No idea.

I'm thinking 'small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent'
suggests something that people would be recruited for and appointed to moreso
than traditional positions to be filled. There's of the sort posted for OMB
today at least.

 _> 'As there's no chance I'd want to take on the risk of getting a regular
government IT/developer job and being enmeshed in the nightmare that is my
conception of government bureaucracy but I would like to contribute to make a
difference.'_

Your conception is pretty accurate.

I think the best shot most of us have at 'making a difference' would be to
develop solutions to specific, self-contained (if possible) problems.

To look not at what central Government is doing, but at the community-level
agencies/programs and what they need.

Clinics, libraries, rec centers, public schools and whatnot all have problems
which can helped with technology, but you'll need to spend a lot of time,
effort and a degree of sneakiness to get anything done.

~~~
gohrt
Note that the original healthcare.gov-fixers were "Friends of Obama" \--
volunteers on Obama's presidential campaign. They have technical chops, but
this is still largely patronage.

~~~
djur
I would contest that "largely".

Once it became apparent the rollout was a fiasco, Obama was associated with
two major tech projects, one successful (his reelection campaign
infrastructure) and one now famously unsuccessful (healthcare.gov). Bringing
in people who he had worked with, who he trusted, and who had famously done
excellent work for him in the past was an absolute no-brainer.

I have trouble believing that Obama's motivations were "largely" along the
lines of "these guys helped me on the campaign, I'm going to do them a solid
and bring them in to work on this hellish, high-profile disaster of a
project".

------
dekhn
Mikey was my manager for a while. Great guy. I advised him to figure out how
to make an impact while his brand was hot, and this is what he ended up
deciding on. I hear he doesn't even have to wear a suit all the time, either.

------
thrownaway2424
I know Code for America operates on the local level, but I wonder if there's
anything to be gained by the federal government turning to CfA for an existing
group of self-identified coders interested in assisting on government
problems.

~~~
seanherron
Have you seen the Presidential Innovation Fellows
([http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows](http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows))
program? We're a group (about 60 alumns so far) focused on doing CfA-esq
projects within the Federal government. Jen Pahlka just finished up spending a
year with the program helping scale it up and do even more awesome things.
Ping me if you're interested.

------
thoreauway
Anyone have information on how to contact them/be a part of this group?

~~~
brandonb
Feel free to send me a resume, and I'll make sure Mikey and friends get it:
brandon.ballinger@gmail.com (I worked on healthcare.gov with Mikey, Todd,
Ryan, and the other people starting this effort.)

------
blutoot
Typo in the WaPo article - site _reliabilty_ manager.

Perhaps off-topic but are (Google) SREs the Ops-equivalent of Data Scientists
in terms of expectation of cross-domain skills? Mikey Dickerson's LinkedIn
profile [0] shows he's a champ in S/W Engg + Distributed Systems + Sys-Admin +
what-not. I know calling each of them a "domain" is a bit of a stretch but I
couldn't come up with a better term.

[0] www.linkedin.com/in/mikeydickerson

~~~
dekhn
The typical SRE is a PhD in physics who realized they enjoyed hacking on the
departmental cluster more than they enjoyed writing papers. Well, OK, that's a
stretch but:

To a one, SREs are the smartest group of people I've met, with a ton of
practical knowledge about distributed systems, a strong quantitative bent, and
a desire to fix problems on live systems. If you want to call that the Ops
equivalent of data scientists, fine, but I prefer think of them of scientists
who study the failure of distributed systems in a live environment.

~~~
blutoot
Thanks for that perspective. Do they ever find time to do side-projects? It
sounds like these people work 24/7.

~~~
eropple
I'm a devops engineer (I guess we're called SREs now too) at Localytics. We're
not Google-scale, but our stuff isn't small, and a big focus of what we're
doing is making sure we _don 't_ have to work 24/7\. Automation, automation,
automation. Handle failure states automatically and only inform humans after
the system has fixed itself or if the system can't fix itself.

It's pretty fun.

~~~
blutoot
How do you control the quality of that automation code? Doesn't that add an
overhead to your operations?

~~~
dekhn
Good testing. I got hired as a Test Engineer in SRE at Google to write
automation code tests. Good coverage from unit tests, good integration tests,
and good system tests (many of them using fake systems with scripted failure
modes). Then finally, a fair amount of testing on "real" machines as new code
gets integrated.

Then make sure you have great monitoring because it will still fail at runtime
and you're the poor sap on call who has to deal with it.

------
siculars
Max salary aside (which is obviously reserved for the bosses - what can the
rank and file expect to pull down their first 2,3,5 years on the job?), the
problem with working for the government is that you're working for the
government. I don't think you can fathom the level of bureaucracy and pointy
headedness that exists in the government. For most it is a burden too great to
bear.

~~~
sailfast
If you're a developer with some experience, I'd expect you'd be brought in
around a GS-12. There may be some more clever hiring practices that get you
more. [http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-
leave/salaries-...](http://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-
leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2014/DCB.pdf)

That said, perhaps there are some folks attempting a slightly different tack
within government: [http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-
bureaucra...](http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/85724876053/hacking-bureaucracy-
improving-hiring-and-software) Not sure what their rate structures look like.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
If I'm reading this correctly, a GS-12 is between 75k and 98k.

------
mindcrime
Oh boy, another white elephant government agency that we don't need. I feel SO
much better now, knowing that the US government is done wasting taxpayer
dollars of failed IT initiatives.

Here's an alternative idea: _radically_ (and I mean _Radically_ ) downsize the
federal government, cut its scope and size by about 90%, and eliminate the
need for almost all of its IT projects altogether.

~~~
webXL
You are being downvoted by the big government fans who believe that one size
fits all health care policy is going to solve all our problems just like the
one size fits all education policies have.

They proclaim to treat science with the utmost reverence, but rather than
conduct and analyze not even just a few experiments at the state level, they
decide to slam together massive programs in a few short years and experiment
on 310 million Americans all _at once_. As if they have all the information
and the wisest and most experienced people running things. Things evolve kinda
funny in the public sector when you get a new boss every few years with new
campaign backers to repay. I'm not sure if there's a single government program
that if cut or changed, wouldn't cause some politician to lose an election.

In the private sector, we don't have to worry about that kind of thing.
Millions of concurrent experiments take place and thousands of people get
fired and get hired everyday, satisfying some need that a government
bureaucrat could never predict. Sounds inefficient, but so was the absolute
miracle of Evolution. There's always a better way, but to think that your
better way is right for everyone? Well that's just plain ol' hubris.

I don't know how many more healthcare.gov's or NSA scandals or failed foreign
interventions we need before we say _you know what, perhaps we should abandon
the "go big or go home" strategy or false dichotomy that our politicians
present to us._ That mindset is far too rampant in big government without any
kind of scientific underpinning.

------
sylvinus
There was a talk at dotScale about the healthcare.gov website and what went
bad on a technical level: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-
kBRdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQyj-kBRdo)

------
eddievb
So, uh, where do I sign up?

------
higherpurpose
Hopefully it will be focused on securing those services, too, since the
government seems to care so much about "cyberthreats" anyway.

------
Fede_V
Fantastic video, thanks. Is there a link somewhere to the checklist he passed
around to the audience, or is that private?

------
dang
There is also [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2014/08/11/white-house-launches-u-s-digital-service-with-healthcare-
gov-fixer-at-the-helm), via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8164480).
Which article is better?

~~~
dctoedt
I posted the NY Times link. The WaPo article to which 'dang links (which I
hadn't seen) goes into more depth and seems to do a better job.

The respective headlines undoubtedly made a difference in upvotes here -- the
NYT headline, which referenced an ex-Googler, is now near the top of the HN
front page, while the (better) WaPo article, posted a few minutes earlier but
which didn't mention the SV connection, is languishing with just 1 point.
[EDIT: I just upvoted it; it still has just 2 points.]

~~~
dang
Ok, we've changed the url from
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-
engi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/us/politics/ex-google-engineer-to-
lead-fix-it-team-for-government-websites.html).

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rdxm
holy crap...before everyone spooges all over themselves and this guy mike.
might it not be a good idea to step back and understand what it means to turn
the ship at the federal level!?!?!?!

it's embarrassing enough that someone in the HHS thought they had even a
remote clue about delivering technology at scale, but seriously, does anyone
really think that much has changed!?!?

it's super cool that a few more than 10 or 15 folks can sign up for a federal
service at one time, but does that have any relevance at all to real change?

short answer: no. as in hell no....as in fuck no....

if you vote for someone with an R or a D after their name you are a part of
the problem not a part of the solution...in particular, if you bail out an
empty suit like obama or bush, you are also a part of the problem, not a part
of the solution...

~~~
djur
Your mistake is in identifying the government with the people who represent it
(Obama, Bush) rather than the people it represents (us). If the work Dickerson
and the USDS does helps improve the ways government serves the people, then
they are performing a good work, regardless of whether the president is Obama
or Bush or Ron Paul or the floating, disembodied head of Eugene Debs.

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eglover
Even the best lose their talent with too much time in government. It's been
shown too many times to count. Fixer? Doubt it.

