There was a project to convert a PDF to a website that enabled millions to get health care, so yeah maybe grunt work, but grunt work to give millions of people access to health care ( and not theoretical million, we kept metrics and had a score board ). However that wasn't me, I was tasked with moving the VA out of its 300+ data centers and into the public cloud providers. We designed and architected the cloud deployment for the entire VA ( the worlds largest hospital chain, insurance company, and benefits organization all wrapped into one ). We had to throw out the plans that the AWS and Microsoft Engineers presented us with because they were trash and wouldn't actually work and then a handful of engineers from the USDS designed the system, showed the VA how to use Terraform and Ansible to provision and secure their systems, deployed it, and got an ATO for it. If that weren't enough since one of the values of the USDS is "Create Momentum" we took one of the "mobile applications" that was almost non-functional and running in a legacy data center costing millions, and used it as a showcase as to how you can take a legacy application and move it to the public cloud to both improve its usability and reduce the cost by a factor of 10.
People who are driven by personal gain, and comfort will never make it at the USDS. The work is hard and thankless, its exhausting and there are never enough people for the amount of work that needs to be done. The hours are long. You have no tools, and really odd and limiting restrictions you have to deal with. If you are concerned about any of those things stay away, you are not good enough to join. You need to have unquestionable technical credentials and the mental fortitude to deal with whatever gets thrown at you. You have to be able to stand up to Secretaries, Generals, Members of Congress, and Presidents and tell them what should be done. Its ok if you can't do it there aren't many who can, but if you can you will change the world.
> If you are concerned about any of those things stay away, you are not good enough to join.
Who is your target audience with this little speech? 14 year old boys? I'm asking, because I stopped responding to "Prove you're not yellow, you coward" nonsense about that age, and I was pretty slow...
Its not some kind of reverse psychology. Having one bad employee can ruin years of work by a team to build trust and goodwill. Having to rebuild trust after someone burns an career executive because they were disgruntled about pay or working conditions can take years. If you know you are motivated by pay or working conditions then don't join, you won't be happy. This is the same thing I tell people who are thinking about joining a startup, if you are just in it for office perks go join Facebook, they have great BBQ.
> running in a legacy data center costing millions, and used it as a showcase as to how you can take a legacy application and move it to the public cloud to both improve its usability and reduce the cost by a factor of 10.
Hahaha ... what? You reduced the cost by moving into one of the most overpriced hosting options? Or are you telling me that the government is getting massive discounts?
Yeah, there were two major factors. First its not cheap to run a professional data center, this isn't even a government thing almost all big companies are making this calculation and moving towards the big cloud providers. Second when you run your own data center you need to plan for the surge capacity. In this case they had well over 10x the amount of capacity they needed provisioned so they could handle a surge of traffic. In AWS we just set up an auto scaling group with a ansible baked AMI and only pay for what we needed.
Its expensive, but in this case the savings were massive ( saved almost 20m per year )
Can you explain exactly how this cost savings project is "changing the world"? You did a cost savings job on the cheap for a large government and didn't get paid for it is all I hear. They could afford to spend $20 million per year on a datacenter but can't afford to pay their workers in this program market rate salary??
That application we moved over was used to schedule doctors appointments. Before we got involved it was being used to schedule about 100 appointments a month. The failure rate of people trying to use it was over 95%. By moving to the cloud, using modern tools and better design we increased usage to 10,000 per week.
Veterans could get appointments to see their doctors. The number one kind of appointment was mental health. That is how it was changing the world. What we did with that one application can now be done thousands of times over for their other projects. We wrote the playbook.
Good for you, you did your job and fixed a broken system. Note that this does not require anything other than average technical competency. It's expected that people know how to do their jobs. And my original question still stands -- how are they able to afford spending $20 million on a broken system, but not able to pay their employees a fair, market rate salary?
People who are driven by personal gain, and comfort will never make it at the USDS. The work is hard and thankless, its exhausting and there are never enough people for the amount of work that needs to be done. The hours are long. You have no tools, and really odd and limiting restrictions you have to deal with. If you are concerned about any of those things stay away, you are not good enough to join. You need to have unquestionable technical credentials and the mental fortitude to deal with whatever gets thrown at you. You have to be able to stand up to Secretaries, Generals, Members of Congress, and Presidents and tell them what should be done. Its ok if you can't do it there aren't many who can, but if you can you will change the world.