
Why a federal high-tech start-up is a money loser - Animats
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/02/why-a-federal-high-tech-start-up-is-a-money-loser
======
tyre
I don't care if 18F makes money, and in some cases it may make sense for them
not to.

In a perfect market, they would be able to sell their services at the same
price as the value of those services. So if they build a system for the
Veterans Administration (VA) that saves $1 million, they should get $1 million
for it. Their EOY revenue would reflect their value created.

But they are actually selling to themselves. They are a part of the federal
government, and their customers are other agencies. So the price they should
charge is actually (value created - effort to get paid).

If they waste $500,000 of man-hours to get that $1m, then the government loses
$500k for no reason, other than for 18F to be able to point to $1m in revenue
as proof of services provided.

The government as a whole also loses out if price is an issue for the buyer,
but a net win for the whole organization. If bureaucracy means that a
department isn't willing to spend $1m to reap $2m in savings, because maybe
the benefits are nebulous or internal politics or any of the other crazy
things that people do in big organizations, then it actually benefits the
government as a whole for 18F to do it for free.

While I like that they focus on revenue to prove the impact they are having,
selling products to other agencies shouldn't be profit maximizing. Any
inefficiencies, either to the buyer or seller, are taxing to the organization.

Side note: $32m is nothing. I'll take that any day over people building GIF
hosting and SnapChat.

~~~
mdasen
Ultimately, the issue is whether 18F is more effective than other means and
accurate accounting is important to that end.

Let's say that the VA gets bids to create a new system for something. 18F says
they can do it for $900k and ContractorX says they can do it for $1M. 18F gets
the contract and produces a system that cost the VA $900k. Let's say the
system cost taxpayers an additional $1M that isn't billed to the VA. That
means that taxpayers are out $1.9M rather than $1M going with ContractorX. The
issue can be that 18F isn't accurately pricing their services and hiding the
actual cost to the taxpayer.

That isn't to say that I like contractors. I don't. But the point of 18F
should be to prove that the government can create its own digital services at
a lower cost than contractors. If they're "cheaper" in that they're charging
agencies less, but then just taking money from a slush fund to cover the fact
that they're not efficient, that's not a good thing.

Also, price being "value created - effort to get paid" isn't a good metric.
You need to look at alternatives. If a system saves $1M, but you could pay one
source $100k for it and another source $900k, you want to go with the $100k
source. If we had to pay the value created for things, we'd stop a lot of
economic activity. In fact, why would the VA want to do anything at all given
that they're going to be charged the full value of any savings? 18F shouldn't
be credited with $1M in savings if they spent $900k to achieve it when a
contractor could have done it for $100k.

The value of 18F is if they can produce digital services better than other
methods. Other methods are generally paying some non-governmental company for
the services or hiring direct employees for the agency. In order to determine
if 18F is a good model, they need to charge agencies enough to cover their
costs. Otherwise, it's ridiculous. Someone in Health and Human Services would
say, "we could hire people to do this project directly, but then we'd be
paying 100% of their cost, but with 18F they'll charge us a fraction of the
employees cost. In fact, we'll tell them to hire the dozen people we were
going to hire and we'll only pay X% of the salary rather than 100%".

Plus, if agencies don't have to pay the full cost, they'll do projects that
don't make sense. Let's say that a project for the VA creates $1M in savings.
18F says they'll do it for $900k. The VA green-lights it to save $100k. Great,
right? $100k for spending on other things. But 18F actually spends $2M on the
project. The VA gets another $100k in their budget, but the government is
actually down $1.1M. When people see situations like this, they want to take
advantage of it since they're able to basically spend other people's budgets.
"If you use 18F, a bunch of the money for your project doesn't come from your
budget," is the kind of thing higher-ups dream of.

I think 18F will get better at this. Figuring out how much one needs to charge
is hard since it's hard to know exactly how much effort a project will take.
I'm guessing that 18F is looking to generate good-will with agencies rather
than going back to them with cost over-runs. Still, 18F needs to prove that
it's a more effective way than alternatives and it can't do that by just
under-charging and subsidizing whatever projects they get given. If 18F just
offered free services, then every agency would want infinite 18F work (since
it isn't coming out of their budget). Then which projects should be worked on?
The ones 18F finds interesting? 18F wasn't created to be the arbiter of what
the government should do. As such, they need to price accurately based on
their costs. They will get better at this. They will likely have to start
passing along cost over-runs to agencies. But if they get great, motivated
people, they could provide digital services at a lower cost - it just has to
actually be a lower cost.

Even if you hate contractors, a lot of agencies have tens of thousands of
employees. Health and Human Services has ~80,000 employees. The VA has
~313,000 employees. _Why shouldn 't they just hire an engineering team? Why
should they outsource a project to 18F?_ Agencies that large certainly have
enough engineering projects to keep an internal team busy. They're not some
restaurant that outsources their website because they don't have enough work
to keep a dev busy. Well, maybe 18F can gain efficiencies through hiring
better people at higher pay who can create better code and re-use stuff across
agencies. Or maybe the overhead of outsourcing outweighs those efficiencies.
That's something important to figure out and it's an answer that we can get
closer to if 18F accurately charges agencies.

~~~
timcederman
"Let's say that the VA gets bids to create a new system for something. 18F
says they can do it for $900k and ContractorX says they can do it for $1M. 18F
gets the contract and produces a system that cost the VA $900k. Let's say the
system cost taxpayers an additional $1M that isn't billed to the VA. That
means that taxpayers are out $1.9M rather than $1M going with ContractorX."

If the government is paying itself $900k from one department to another, how
are they out $1.9m?

~~~
kgwgk
Those $900k are not staying within "the government", they are being spent in
salaries, machines, services or whatever. Total government spending would be
$1.9mn in that case, $1mn with the contractor option.

------
lsmarigo
Activities that can’t be billed to other agencies are another drain. One
example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was a
blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black
square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and
doesn’t look as good.

for anyone else curious:

(new) Black Logo:
[https://18f.gsa.gov/assets/img/logos/18f-logo.svg](https://18f.gsa.gov/assets/img/logos/18f-logo.svg)

(old) Blue Logo:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/18F_logo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/18F_logo.png)

~~~
jacobsenscott
Meh. I'm sure google spent millions on their logo change, and it was just a
font tweak. Hackernews was gushing. God knows what they spend per week on
google doodles.

There's no winning here for 18f. Either their sites are archaic disasters and
they are criticized for not being up to par with the top tier consumer sites.
Or they spend some money to bring them up to par and its "OMG! An $800 toilet
seat!"

~~~
cloakandswagger
I _want_ government sites and buildings to look like archaic disasters,
because it at least implies that my tax dollars aren't being pissed away on
frivolous opulence.

Google can spend ten billion dollars changing their logo because they're
profitable and they answer to their board & shareholders. I don't remember
anyone asking me if I wanted to contribute money to a government tech startup.

~~~
forgottenpass
"I want government sites and buildings to look like archaic disasters"

And what do you propose doing about people who use arguments of the form: "Can
you believe this government $thing? It looks like an archaic disaster.
Government can't do anything right. Therefore..."

~~~
CaptSpify
We'll have those people either way. Just ignore them

------
ajju
Did I misunderstand or is the story also - A government department was started
with the ambitious goal of "zero budget" and this year with a 183 person team
will have recovered 68.75% of its costs.

And did we forget that fast growing startups don't usually break even either?

~~~
trendia
But fast growing startups are funded by private investors, not taxpayers.

~~~
aerovistae
And fast growing startups are usually working _for_ private investors, not
taxpayers.

------
lucaspiller
I'm currently working for a UN-agency as a contractor, and my team is modelled
in a similar way, like a private development agency so to speak (calling us
and 18F a startup is a bit click-baity IMO). We only work internally for our
agency, not the whole UN, but there are structures like that too - e.g. ICC
provide ISP and hosting services to the whole UN. I'd imagine it's a fairly
common structure in large companies/organisations.

Anyway, whenever a department wants a new IT project they have the choice of
releasing a tender to the public or going to us. We then work like an agency,
providing an estimate, then billing them for X days of development.

The first bit where it gets tricky for us, and I'd imagine 18F, is the specs
usually aren't clear. Customers decide they want something different, didn't
explain what they wanted properly, or something just takes longer than you
estimated. Unlike an agency we have to deal with the code and people for a
long time, so we can't just say "no you only payed for X days work" and leave
something broken.

The other part is maintenance - that is paid for by our internal budget, but
as with any software projects there are always tweaks/changes that need to be
done. Unfortunately the level of beuracracy is quite high, so getting budget
for something that is say 3 days work is more effort than it's worth, so it
often just comes out of our budget.

Anyway, even if we lose money I think it's a lot better for us to do this than
an external agency. For starters an external agency would be a magnitude more
expensive. As we know all our systems we can recommend and build systems that
are more integrated with each other, where as an external agency would just
build one system in isolation as per the spec. I'd imagine it's similar for
18F.

Our design decisions are Bootstrap for everything, so no we aren't spending a
crazy number of hours on just a logo :-)

------
nowarninglabel
This is disappointing to read, given I love what 18F has done. No matter
whether we think they _should_ be breaking even or not, they shouldn't be
creating wildly inaccurate revenue projections and then falling drastically
short of them. That looks like something is going drastically wrong with
management there, especially considering greater macroeconomic conditions have
not changed drastically enough in a way that would cause something like this.
I'd hope there is something other explanation though.

~~~
ajju
How many fast growing startups have accurate financial projections?

~~~
personjerry
But most [investors|employees] disapprove of bad projections.

~~~
jonathankoren
That's typically a hindsight position.

------
rileymat2
It is clear that they have not billed enough to break even internally, but
have they saved/made more for other agencies to break even for the government
overall?

Presumably (maybe a bad presumption), agencies that use their services save
more/make more than they are billed for.

It would be a shame to kill a group that was saving money overall because they
did not bill enough internally.

------
snowwrestler
The sniping about 18F seems pretty transparent: federal IT shops don't want to
do anything differently, and private IT vendors don't want any more
competition for their contracts.

18F might be one of those ideas where you can tell that it's working because
it's getting attacked.

------
ecaron
One piece of 18F that I've always appreciated is their published API standards
- [https://github.com/18F/api-standards](https://github.com/18F/api-
standards). They spawned it off the frequently mentioned White House API
standards, and it phrases a lot of the opinions well without being preachy.

But more than anything else, this made me feel like there are real humans
behind 18F. So I wish them all the best and hope this article (and ones like
it) falls into the camp of "Haters gotta hate" and just inspires them to find
more visible success.

~~~
randomfool
I fully agree that they should be doing stuff like this... but I doubt it
falls under billable hours.

With all the government outsourcing it's difficult to have a consistent stack.
I have hopes that 18F brings some sanity.

------
bsimpson
> The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t
> worth the time and doesn’t look as good.

That was a really odd injection of opinion to read in what appears to be a
news piece.

~~~
personjerry
A surprising number of news pieces actually end up giving you some sort of
opinion.

As a made-up example, a news article on Samsung's falling stock might focus on
its Note 7 failures, making the assumption (and thus giving the reader the
impression) that the mobile phone is the main cause of the company's
decreasing revenues, when in fact the company's general electronic components
sales have been dying for months. But this slow decrease is much less
sensational and might've missed the headlines. This sort of "opinion" is far
more difficult to notice, but still exists in reporting in the form of
attempting to speculate on the reasons behind the facts.

This article just happens to be particular blunt about its assumptions.

~~~
kuschku
> This sort of "opinion" is far more difficult to notice, but still exists in
> reporting in the form of attempting to speculate on the reasons behind the
> facts.

But that’s how it’s usually marked – as a seperate, independent part of the
article, marked opinion or speculation, or by putting it in context.

------
jonstewart
Hi Silicon Valley! Thanks for visiting our nation's capitol!

kisses,

DC

\--

Seriously, this shouldn't be surprising. It's a noble effort, the work is
probably worth the so-called "losses", but the reason the government is the
government and not Silicon Valley is that in government, there are a bajillion
rules to keep you from screwing up too badly.

There's been a fetishization in DC of Silicon Valley techniques, but 1) it's
not at all clear that the current Silicon Valley ethos really is worth
replicating, and 2) the conditions aren't right here, it can't be replicated
without fundamentally changing the conditions. One of the conditions is that
there's oversight over everything, and there's the press.

One little article in the federal section of the Post isn't going to kill off
anything alone, but it will be interesting to see what happens to 18F after
the presidential transition. If there isn't high level cover for it, it will
be ground to dust.

~~~
dchichkov
It is people that make the difference, not the place or techniques.

~~~
jonstewart
Well, the people here in DC are rule-makers and rule-followers. So there are a
lot of rules and a lot of people enforcing the rules.

------
JBReefer
18F gives me the creeps because of [https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-
inclusion-by-customiz...](https://18f.gsa.gov/2016/01/12/hacking-inclusion-by-
customizing-a-slack-bot/)

Something about government robots and goodspeak speech correction feels
Orwellian, even if it's really tiny.

~~~
guessmyname
Ha ha ha this Americans and their political correctness. I cringe every time I
see things like this and the HN community doesn't escapes from it, in fact, I
have seen more _" political correctness"_ towards sexism here more than in
other communities on the Internet _(at least the ones I visit)_. I still do
not understand why people pay so much attention to these things. I can only
imagine how people would react in countries with a language with Latin roots
like French, Portuguese, Spanish where there are multiple ways to refer to a
individual or group of people with different genders more than in neutral
languages like English.

~~~
wpietri
> I still do not understand why people pay so much attention to these things.

Quite a lot of people who respond as you do actively don't want to understand.
But in case you're one of the ones who is actually curious:

Historically, sexism has been a problem. For millennia, women were basically
property. The last couple hundred years, we've been unwinding that. E.g. less
than 100 years ago, women finally got to vote. They didn't have equal access
to credit cards until 1974. In the 1990s, US states finally all made marital
rape illegal. In the early aughts, women reached parity in the proportion of
people getting medical and legal degrees. (The proportion of actual doctors
and lawyers hasn't caught up yet; it's around 33% now, and I'd guess it will
hit 50% about 2040.)

One place that sexism still resides is in language. That language at least
sometimes shapes thinking. Many women in professional contexts reasonably
object to gendered language that excludes them. So to be polite, many
workplaces are shifting to use more inclusive language.

So, TL;DR: we're in the middle of overturning millennia of pervasive sexism, a
language shift is part of that, and if we're lucky we'll be done with the
project in only decades.

~~~
Anasufovic
What is your solution for gendered languages?

~~~
Naritai
Regardless of what speakers of those languages do, we can do everything we can
to remove gender bias from English. We don't have to keep doing something just
because others are doing it.

~~~
wpietri
Yup. I don't have a solution for gendered languages because it's not a problem
I deal with much. I'm going to work on English, and I'll trust that other
people will find the right solution for their cultures.

~~~
refurb
Are you working hard at not referring to ships using a feminine pronoun (i.e.
"this is her maiden voyage")?

~~~
wpietri
Nope. Gendering ships has always felt awkward to me.

------
aplomb
They're essentially an internal dev/consulting shop and they needed to
approach it from this stand point or they'll continue to be underwater. Every
contract that IBM or Accenture, et al wins, 18F should have made the sale that
they'll be there guarding the hen house as the project progresses - easy sale
and easy project staffing. Branch off from there and take down small dev jobs
to build mass and it'll snowball from there if managed properly.

Leadership heads need to roll, ranks thinned, and they need to focus on the
mission.

~~~
brazzledazzle
So they should nickel and dime them on scope changes and deliver solutions
that meet the requirements but are useless? I know I'm straw manning a bit
here but asking them to operate like these contractors is highly questionable.
Their mission isn't to be cheap and competitive but to change how the
government uses technology and make it more agile. To drive culture changes
and set standards that allow government agencies to produce solutions that are
aligned with their goals.

How many failed government IT projects have we read about that fulfilled a
contract but was ultimately useless? Or stories about government
inefficiencies and a failure to keep pace with modern technology?

I don't know why there's an expectation that they do this cheaper or at the
same price as government contractors. Have we forgotten what happened with the
healthcare.gov site already?

------
TheAceOfHearts
I love 18F! A few months back they published a set of web design standard [0]
that I really liked. Accessibility is among their top concerns, so it's
legible in all devices and there's a lot of contrast.

I used their color suggestions for my blog [1] (still haven't updating syntax
highlighting, terribly sorry about that). The two things I changed were
typography sizes and fonts. I decided it would be best to use preinstalled
fonts instead of loading a third-party font. I don't think third-party fonts
justify slower load times for a static website like my blog. But overall, I
really like their color scheme, as it's very comfortable to read on any
screen.

[0] [https://standards.usa.gov/getting-
started/](https://standards.usa.gov/getting-started/)

[1] [https://blog.cesarandreu.com/](https://blog.cesarandreu.com/)

~~~
rambos
Doesn't it seem wasteful that 18f spent all that time on the standards,
instead of maybe a guide/theme on how Gov't sites should adapt, already open-
sourced (bootstrap), frameworks?

~~~
acdha
Take a look at [https://github.com/18F/web-design-
standards/blob/staging/LIC...](https://github.com/18F/web-design-
standards/blob/staging/LICENSE.md) and count the number of existing open-
source projects which they're re-using. This looks to me like an experienced
team who did their homework to assess how much flexibility and control they
needed and reused as much open-source as possible while still meeting their
other requirements.

------
justinsaccount
FTA:

> “Since its launch in March 2014, 18F has struggled financially,” says GSA’s
> Office of Inspector General (IG), citing loses every year, now totally over
> $31.6 million.

And from a random site that seems to agree with a few others:

> In fiscal year 2015, military spending is projected to account for 54
> percent of all federal discretionary spending, a total of $598.5 billion

In 3 years 18F has spent 31.6 million. Even if it lost 31.6 million every
year, it could do that for NINETEEN THOUSAND YEARS and still not equal what we
spent on the military in one year.

Imagine a country where 18f had a budget of 600 billion dollars a year.

~~~
JBReefer
I don't get your point at all, I'd say the US's ability to project force is
worth 19,000x a year more to me than what 18F does.

~~~
justinsaccount
Why is it that 18f _lost_ ~10 million dollars a year, but the military does
not _lose_ 600,000 million dollars a year?

Sounds like a double standard to me.

~~~
Pyxl101
It's about what an organization spent compared to their budget. It sounds like
18F was budgeted $0 since they were expecting to earn back their costs in
revenue by charging other agencies for their services. Since they did not
fully recoup their costs, they "lost money".

If you budgeted the military $1 trillion and they spent $1.1 trillion, then
they would also have lost money.

------
winter_blue
They could've created feature/bug bounties and/or grants for open source
contributors, and tried to build an open source community around what they're
building. This would naturally attract/increase volunteer contributions, but
they might also be able to control costs better with such a model.

18F is an uniquely special position since they are building software for the
general public, and so are in a great position to attract OSS contributors, as
contributing to 18F would be a way of helping your community/country, and
would make people feel better.

~~~
morisy
They've actually done almost exactly this and are working to scale it up
within limits of contractor system:

[https://micropurchase.18f.gov](https://micropurchase.18f.gov)

~~~
winter_blue
Wow, Micro-purchase @ 18F is very awesome. That is exactly what I had in mind
-- it's so cool they're already doing it!

------
pryelluw
_One example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo
was a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a
black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and
doesn’t look as good._

How is that even possible?

~~~
dangrossman
727 hours is a team of 10 working for less than 2 work weeks. Or a team of 6
having a couple 1-hour meetings with other groups in addition to doing the
design work. It'd be hard for any medium to large organization with an
internal design team to rebrand without using hundreds of hours of staff time.

~~~
kyleblarson
that said, assuming you are working in the US, are you willing to work an
extra few minutes over the course of the next year to generate the tax revenue
for this?

~~~
snowwrestler
The entire budget of 18F is about 10 cents per taxpayer. 700 staff hours is
far below a penny per taxpayer. I'm fine with it.

In addition, most 18F employees are salaried, so this is not likely to be an
actual cost overrun, but rather an opportunity cost.

------
jdavis703
> Activities that can’t be billed to other agencies are another drain. One
> example is staff time totaling 727 hours on a logo change. The old logo was
> a blue square with 18F in the lower-right-hand corner. The new logo, a black
> square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t worth the time and
> doesn’t look as good.

I thought newspapers were supposed to report facts, and leave opinions to
either the op-ed pages, or quotes from sources. Who made Joe Davidson a design
critic?

------
codingdave
Why is this a problem?

IT is a cost center in most organizations, not a profit center. 18F serves a
similar function - it streamlines other organizations, with the hope being
that at the end, the cost savings in those other orgs is more than the cost to
run 18F. As long as we are saving money overall, then less taxpayer money has
to be shelled out to keep the country running, and it is a win. Or am I
missing something?

------
pcurve
If they booked 0 in revenue but helped other agencies save money by lower
procurement cost or generate revenue, is that a problem?

~~~
jldugger
I assume their financial model is to charge agencies for their services. Often
times by competing with private vendors. If such an agency is 10 percent over
budget, it means they're undercharging agencies by that much. By failing to
charge their true cost, they're potentially undercutting vendors who would
have cost the taxpayers less overall.

It sounds like upper management doesn't want to do the hard work of accurately
pricing their services, or maybe is intentionally undercharging to ensure they
get to provide the service. In some ways, they're definitely in a bind -- if
they undercharge, they're crowding out private competition, and if they
overcharge, they look like greedy bureaucrats.

------
Spooky23
I have a unique perspective here, as I helped run a .gov (although not at the
Federal level) that aspired to run as a self-supporting business.

It's difficult to do because the government isn't a business, and the decision
cycle isn't the same as a commercial. Government is appropriation based, uses
cash accounting and _loves_ capital expenses. Businesses are diametrically
opposite.

There's also a weird calculus for what factors into an ROI calculation and
what doesn't. If money is appropriated, there's little incentive to reduce
spending (and incentives _to_ spend unnecessarily!) and rate structures don't
influence decisions.

In short, I'm not supportive of government waste, but it's pretty clear that
any money appropriated to 18F is delivering a positive return. The OMB people
should address the perceived shortfall by just taking money away from targeted
programs.

------
al2o3cr
"The new logo, a black square with 18F centered and a different font, wasn’t
worth the time and doesn’t look as good."

LOL now WaPo writers are also design critics. There's no citation for this
statement, it's literally just the author talking shit in an ostensibly "news"
article.

------
XFrequentist
Alternate title: Government agency produces many times more value than its
miniscule 32 million USD cost.

------
rch
2014: $0

2015: $22.26 million

2016Q3: $27.82 million

This looks like encouraging growth to me.

------
lifeisstillgood
The issue here is showing the world how it is possible to be in government and
still produce modern open software development.

It is about changing the game not making a profit.

Government software should be all open source
([http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto](http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto)) but it
should also be developed using modern best practises - which is what the GDS
in U.K., 18F in the US are trying to prove - they are trailblazers, not profit
maximisers.

------
tfgg
If 18F means a single healthcare.gov disaster is averted, doesn't it basically
pay for itself?

------
CharlesMerriam2
The article is remarkably uninformative. Is 18F doing a terrible job at
consulting? Or at navigating governmental accounting? It does matter.

------
dccoolgai
Looks like some big bloated money-wasting federal contractors that are seeing
their margins hit by 18F caught the Post on a lazy day and had their Press Sec
feed the Post a pre-written piece so the reporter could get to happy hour
early. I expect better from the WP.

------
user5994461
Two questions: How much do they pay? Where are they located?

That should be enough to determine if they have any chance at success.

\---

I worked for government projects in a small European country. It was actually
a decent job in a decent company. I could recommend to people to work there.
Salary and perks were average for the area, shit for the world (not much room
to do better in the area, no great companies).

IMO: In the major USA locations, this has absolutely no chance to work. There
are numerous tech companies who will offer better pay, better work conditions
and better perks. Anyone will a brain cell would just go to a tech company and
avoid government like the plague.

And if someone wanna try anyway, he'll quickly realize that all his peers are
elsewhere, and he's gotta leave to join them.

------
gaius
18F is the Military Occupational Specialty code for something in Special
Forces, that can't be a coincidence.

------
jkingsbery
Whether or not it's worth the money, many true startups that lose that much
money die out. The threat of dying off if the company can't figure out how to
get sufficient revenue is one major source of creativity in startups. So, it's
just another government agency.

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pmorici
The real question is if the start up model will extend to them going bankrupt
and being shut down if they don't reach at least break even in X amount of
time. If not then they were never really a startup model they were just a
standard bureaucracy.

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celticninja
Government imitating Silicon Valley again.

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stuaxo
Because most startups lost money ?

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234dd57d2c8db
Governments can never provide value like this, government is not a business!
Sometimes this trade off is worthwhile. I'd like to have my housefire put out
in a timely fashion. I will sacrifice some of my income for this. However, the
idea that the government can become some kind of silicon valley startup is
just absurd. I can't believe as taxpayers we are forced at gunpoint to fund
these ridiculous ideas. And people wonder why we are 20 trillion in debt and
our currency is being devalued every year.

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wpietri
This is actually intended as a cost-saving measure. Government IT is
enormously snarled. Quite a lot of money is spent on outdated systems and
giant contracts with enormous overruns. Very few people with serious technical
chops actually want to work for the government as a lifetime career choice.

The theory of 18F is that you bring in high-grade technical talent for 2-4
year stints. You have them jump in to help unsnarl knotty problems, using
approaches that are obvious to we Silicon Valley types but not widely adopted
in government IT circles.

I know all this because a couple of years back I interviewed with them. I
decided to stay in private industry, as I didn't want to leave SF. But they
have a lot of really smart and dedicated people who want to change the way the
US government does technology, making it faster, cheaper, and more effective.

So I think the real question is not, "How much was spent?" but "How much did
they save?" That's a harder question to answer, but I think it's the only real
way to evaluate 18F as an initiative.

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cpdean
that 727 hours for a logo change is pretty wild. here's the difference:
[https://twitter.com/deanc/status/794150888940113920](https://twitter.com/deanc/status/794150888940113920)

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tn13
LOL! Who was expecting different results ? Fatcats in DC use our money to
gamble over programs and lose the money. This is not the first nor the last in
fact this is the template in which major plans like Obamacare have been
molded.

