To be fair, many tech companies have no use for someone who looks and dresses differently from them either. For example, a fifty year old woman who comes to an interview for a developer job wearing a business suit. She could be an incredible developer, but sorry, she wouldn't fit into the culture...
I suspect this will draw downvotes but I think you're right on. The bias towards people under 30 regardless of the skills and experience that others carry is growing rapidly. Frankly I do not think it will end well and could be directly responsible for this bubble popping due to quality gets worse and worse.
It definitely won't end well for the founders if the 50 year old woman sues (and wins) for age and sex discrimination and winds up as the majority stockholder in the company.
"Culture" is not a valid legal reason for discriminating against a member of a protected class.
Yeah, our current CEO has some weird notion that we're all going to dress to match and basically present as a uniformed presence...I think it's the silliest goddamn thing in the world.
This isn't anything unique to tech: This is something imbedded in society. I was lucky - the pharmacy I worked (more specifically, the managers at the stores I worked at) didn't care about weird hair color or viewpoints, only that we treated people well. Wal-mart wouldn't have hired me at this stage - last I knew they kept a hair color policy. My mother started getting interviews when she died her hair away from gray: Industry didn't seem to matter. My experience has always been that seeming normal and getting along with the interviewer has always been the easy way to get a job: Using a brain, unfortunately, isn't.
So what? Unless you have some SJW agenda it doesn't who builds the system, so long as the system gets build (and build well).
Washington needs geeks because they can't build the systems without us and they can't get geeks because they are washington. Geeks can build a system with (or without) a few workers.
I didn't read GP to say that it was necessarily a bad thing - only that they were pointing out that the social discrimination cuts both ways. In my experience, they're right, it does.
There's a lot of (understandable) cynicism here. But if this makes you mad and you want to do something about it, email your links/resume to jobs at hcgov dot us.
We're a team of a dozen or so software engineers (many ex-Google and YC) who've been working on fixing Healthcare.gov for the future, since December. We're actively looking for experienced software engineers. Several have joined in the past few months.
(If you've seen this comment before, we were looking, but now we're very-much looking.)
The external environment may be frustrating compared to what we're all used to, but internally and day-to-day we're running like a startup-- github/node/backbone/AWS/asana/standups/etc. We're finally shipping and we're going to keep shipping.
Change starts with a small group of thoughtful, committed software engineers (...paraphrasing...) and there are many groups now seeding different parts of the system; our area is Healthcare.gov and associated systems. Because we began in a crisis situation, and other unique factors, some of the usual downsides mentioned in this thread don't apply to us.
Email us! We can also refer you to the other groups referenced in the OP if they make more sense for you.
Bravo for stepping into government and I wish you the best of luck. Dealing with the bureaucracy is always painful. After a decade in the Navy, I always thought that talented programmers could do so much for the service, but the current system wasn’t designed for them. Just take some of the people making it into Nuke School, move them to a programming pipeline, and form teams to attach to commands to help automate processes, create new processes if applicable, and help with SaaS procurements. Give the teams their own command structure and embed them in a manner similar to JAGs and Docs. Switch IT to DevOps.
Unfortunately, the current software procurement process is totally broken. It is the waterfall to end-all waterfalls. Most of the militaries ‘high tech’ is at least a decade old when it becomes operational. I remember in 2005, using a memory device the size of a brick (it’s nickname) with something like 256kb of memory. It could hold a total of 64 lat-long points. The upgrade to a card holding megabytes was still far behind a cheap thumb drive. Using an IPAD is so much better that the military started to okay flights with them.
Sadly, the military contracting process is so bad that they trap themselves with providers (HP) that border on treasonous behavior. I exaggerate, but when you make a profit off of the military and provide essentially crap, you walk a fine line.[1] Fixing this process from the top will require some serious changes and I wish I new what they were.
Why would you work for somebody who doesn't respect you, except in a crisis situation? We will never, as a profession, get the respect we deserve until we make them give it to us. And they way to make them do so isn't to come running whenever they are in a crisis - it is to put a zero on the price in a crisis.
It might help to say a bit more about what you're looking for. (Are these jobs in Washington DC? Temporary or permanent? Do you require U.S. citizenship?)
Actual nepotism: "we're a team of painfully inexperienced and/or incompetent people, some of whom aren't even engineers, but we're all from the Dickerson family 'cause the boss-man is a Dickerson".
I can't imagine government employment and software engineering culture ever meeting. In a government job seniority and time in job counts more than competence. You sit on your ass for long enough and you get more for it. In the Bay Area the new and young eat the still beating hearts any of the old and cranky people who made the poor decision to mentally check out later in their career and stopped learning. Most engineers who want a career don't check out because they know this, the fire inside them never dies.
This field is fast paced, and the government bureaucracy is antithetical to fast moving changes. It crushes souls, it does not inspire innovation. Not even powerful technology behemoths with lots of brain power can save themselves from new kids beating out new technology in their dorm room. How could the federal government ever adapt to such a system? Expect more healthcare.gov disasters until they figure this out.
I am specific about the Bay Area although I know some other places are similiar because I've seen cultures clash when a big company from Texas acquire some new SF startup and the cultures collide when you have a place where being friendly is important meet a startup where competence is the only currency that counts. It doesn't matter if you're friendly, it doesn't matter how long you've been in that position, here nobody cares about these things, although being friendly is nice it is not enough, and in many places you can get by somehow in a way you can't in the Bay Area tech scene.
> ...meet a startup where competence is the only currency that counts.
I don't disagree with your overall conclusion that it's going to be difficult for government to make itself more attractive to many segments of the labor pool, but this notion that Bay Area startups are pure meritocracies is a myth.
Startups pass up highly competent candidates all the time (citing "culture fit") and while there may be somewhat less tolerance at small companies for employees who are completely incapable of carrying some weight (out of pure necessity), there are plenty of crappy, poorly-architected applications being built at Bay Area startups. You just don't encounter them every day because relatively few people actually use them.
> It doesn't matter if you're friendly, it doesn't matter how long you've been in that position, here nobody cares about these things, although being friendly is nice it is not enough, and in many places you can get by somehow in a way you can't in the Bay Area tech scene.
It's worth pointing out that many folks in the "Bay Area tech scene" would have a hard time getting by in other markets and industries if they could even get into them. Not every company in the Bay Area is Google or Palantir, and not every person who can thrive at the type of companies that are plentiful here is capable of thriving in environments where other types of skills may be more commonly required.
The valuing of seniority hits a nerve. There's an inability to reward top performers even if the person's supervisor knows they deserve more pay. Pay is heavily determined by years of experience and their step system. Granted merits do come into play a lot more regarding promotions, there's also circumstances when teams promote an individual "up and out" so they won't have to deal with them anymore. It's so hard to fire someone, it's easier to promote them....
This is a recipe to losing the best and brightest. In addition to this, the slowness and amount of red tape they have to deal with. Tech culture, for better or worse, revolves around new technology and shipping vs. gov't tech with a lot of maintenance of legacy systems. One friend told me a military base's system is running on top of Pike (language), that no one knows. There was a stackoverflow thread that show about 6 people on the site uses it...
It doesn't matter if you're friendly, it doesn't matter how long you've been in that position, here nobody cares about these things, although being friendly is nice it is not enough, and in many places you can get by somehow in a way you can't in the Bay Area tech scene.
The problem is that this attitude overflows into everyday lives, and that's why people protest the Google bus. People don't want to live in a world with insensitive assholes that get their jobs done. They don't want to live in a brave new world devoid of history and culture, segregated by industry, education, age, and class.
They especially don't want to live next door to the enlightened bay area techie that can't stop complaining about his company's acquisition by those darn Texans.
People protest the Google Bus because cities let them use public bus spots and because big tech companies high pay is contributing to gentrification. It doesn't have anything to do with high efficiency and competency as a currency.
Because we live in a world that is not homogeneous and are all enriched as a result. Ending up as one's own version of Howard Hughes, locked in a room with a gun and a pile of money, is unappealing to me.
I strongly disagree that we are enriched as a result. In fact if the world didn't have these conservatives in it we would have been much ahead.
And just because there are some people you don't want to associate with doesn't mean you don't want to associate with people - just that after compulsory schooling I don't want to talk with/spend time with about 80% of the world. That leaves a bit over a billion, so it doesn't matter.
> I can't imagine government employment and software engineering culture ever meeting.
In which case I suggest you read up on DARPA, CERN and Fraunhofer. And speaking of innovation, the Manhattan Project certainly produced some powerful technology, although IIRC not by "new kids in their dorm rooms".
It is entirely possible that simply being unfriendly is a form of incompetence. It can be a pretty good marker for team dysfunction. I've had a few passive-aggressive teammates - I have a low threshold of tolerance for it.
I work neither in SiVa nor the Bay Area ( by choice - no offense, but no thanks), I work in Texas and nobody in the building knows everything needed to do just about any one thing.
Government employment is "risk-aversion first" and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Think of the gummint as an insurance company with an army. It'll make more sense. It takes all kinds.
People who reach the highest echelons of government, whether it's research or bureaucracy, don't get there by sitting on their ass and drawing a paycheck. It's a ridiculous fairytale dreamt up by sad little idiots who believe themselves to be special because they're cogs in the wheel of private industry.
None of these bespectacled t-shirt wearing, hoodie-ensconced "whizzes" would have a job or a place in society if it weren't for government employees and the projects they undertook.
This Tim O'Reily blog post on Linked In is about a Time magazine article which is about the rescue of the Healthcare.gov project by technical experts from "outside government" and is actually pretty interesting, at least to skim.
Could we get it a better title for the HN post that might encourage more people to follow the link?
Actually can we get it submitted with a title that explains what it is, and then have a mod change it to the first H1 on the page without comment? Thanks in advance
The mods have been doing a much, much better job of explaining title changes recently (and occasionally either reversing them, or not making them in the first place.)
But there are so many regulations to government contracting that you can't simply choose the people most able to complete the project. You have to choose from the limited set of people that have jumped through all the necessary hoops and cleared all the necessary hurdles, which basically eliminates anyone capable of producing something usable/stable. When all hell's breaking loose and you're attempting to avert a crisis, only then does it seem that you can bring in qualified people, but those people aren't going to be paid the hundreds of millions of dollars that the original incompetent team was paid to create the mess in the first place.
There are multiple layers to the woes bedeviling government IT (and government work in general).
The contract award process is indeed broken and often awards contracts to the large fish who fail regularly. Part of that is because 'prior performance' carries signifiant weight, meaning that if you're Lockheed Martin and you've done a 15000 user enterprise resource planning project before you have a leg up on the 50 person IT shop that hasn't, even if said IT shop is far more competent.
But really before you even get to the contract, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the full time government employees making the IT decisions are flat out incompetent. The contractor might have smart people that can do excellent work but if the FTE continually makes bad strategic decisions the best coders in the world are not going to be able to deliver a great system. The original article goes a little bit into that where it talks about how technical people in government don't have the power.
Another problem is that government people are rarely held accountable for their failures. They in turn often don't hold contractors accountable.
Then there's the fact that the government has systematically reduced the amount of full time employee programmers in favor of contractors. That isn't necessarily bad in some ways, but basically it results in the government paying a lot more money to get the same technical expertise. The argument is usually, "Yeah but we don't have to pay for a contractor's benefits." Yet the government is paying 2 or more times the cost of a full-time employee per year for the contractor bill rate.
I think for government IT to truly improvement there needs to be some serious structural changes to the way government work is done from contract awards to employee accountability to the composition of the government work force. It really will need to come from the top, and unfortunately the people at the top usually don't make things like that their priority which is why we're here today.
I read the articles. I am not sure what to think now that I know the reason Obama was reelected was because a bunch of smart people got together and wrote software. Not sure if that is the way the system is supposed to run...
Unfortunately the TIME article is now behind a paywall. However I read it back in February and for those of you with a subscription, I highly recommend reading it.
Having worked at Google I can tell you I have infinite respect for the quality of SREs. They really know the deep dark levels of the system, and take their work seriously, especially given some of the messes they have to clean up. I can't even imagine the shitstorm Mikey Dickerson flew into when he volunteered, but the fact that he was described as the guy who was "actually helpful" is not shocking.
I'm not sure exactly how the Obama administration dragooned the tech companies to send volunteers. However, if Obama and Larry Page did have a convo, I like to think it went something like this:
Obama: Mr. Page, we have a dire situation and we need a team of your best men now.
Larry: What do you need exactly?
Obama: 10 of your SREs to help us fix a production system we can't understand.
Larry: ... you can have 1.
Government will continue to have major problems hiring some of the best people in the tech industry until they stop screening for past use of drugs, even soft drugs like marijuana.
Considering that two states (Washington and Colorado) now make it legal for its citizens to purchase and consume marijuana from the age of 21 onward, it's ludicrous that the federal government can sustain itself by completely excluding the citizens of two states from holding federal jobs.
There are absolutely other structural and cultural problems that prevent government from attracting the best from industry, but an insistence on a drug-free past has already and will continue to be a show stopper until attitudes (and procurement requirements) change.
If you don't hold a clearance weed usage won't really be a problem. And if you do apply for a clearance, past marijuana usage is not necessarily a disqualifier. What they're screening for is substance abuse that might be problematic enough that they could compromise your ability to keep secrets. And they want to see that you don't lie about past use. I know more than one person who has smoked weed in the past and still gained a clearance.
But really I think the absurdly slow and convoluted gov't application/hiring process, lower pay, and paltry starting annual vacation are bigger deterrents to joining government IT.
They're just excluding citizens of those two states with drug usage history.
Unless you really do believe that, because it's legal, all citizens of those states use marijuana. In which case the above still holds true as that's not a correct belief.
Reminds me of a recent remark[1] by an FBI executive about how the federal governments drug testing policy was hampering their ability to get leading cyber-security expects on staff. A policy that very few top technology companies share.
Obviously this isn't the exact situation as described by the article but it still goes to show how out of touch the federal government is with the tech industry and how much catch-up they need to play if they want the best of the best.
"Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform. Don't kid yourself." - Frank Zappa to a bunch of (apparently?) British hippies on "Burnt Weeny Sandwich" some time before or during 1970.
The big problem is that the people in government who spend the money don't actually have to earn it, which means that they don't value it. It's the same way with Trust Fund babies, who suckle off their parents' wealth and spend it all on drugs and partying. Since they didn't have to earn the money, it's meaningless to them.
What happens in government is that the ones who spend it have all this power, they don't value the money, so then it goes to people that give them kickbacks, and then there is no accountability. Except in the government you talk about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars as opposed to millions and tens of millions around here.
The government needs to take up a different way of budgeting their money. Instead of cutting budgets where people can save money, they should be increasing budgets of those people that can save money or spend it wisely. There are so many things wrong with how the government spends money, no wonder people hate paying their taxes, when they see $300M spent on the government website that could have been made in SV for less than 1% of that.
The fact that in government work spending money wisely is not critical the way it is in private sector is a component of the problem. But I think the more fundamental problem it points to is a lack of consequences for poor performance. An agency can waste a lot money but rarely does any experience consequences for it. A department can fail miserably on big initiatives, small initiatives and everything in between but again, rarely does anyone get fired or even disciplined for that. Even in the most high profile government IT failure in US history, no one was asked to resign.
Start creating real accountability for government organizations and the right people can actually rise to the top and the wrong people can get weeded out (rather than waiting until the bad apples retire). People will start paying a lot more attention to their budgets when they're actually held responsible for using them wisely.
> Instead of cutting budgets where people can save money, they should be increasing budgets of those people that can save money or spend it wisely.
While that sounds like a simple solution, it would incentivize people to make ill-advised cuts one year so the budget could be increased next year. Really all that needs to be done to end the end of fiscal year spending spree is to not reduce budgets when an organization doesn't spend all of it in a given year
I must have missed the mention of the big consulting firms that make TONS of money on bad government development practices.
Hiring and promotion are certainly amongst the first things to fix. But you're going to have a tough time retaining decent engineers in a toxic environment, one that has been around for many, many years and is probably impossible to fix.
Yeah the poor environment can be frustrating and demoralizing. Recently I had to deal with an environment where I wasn't allowed to deploy code to the development server myself. I had to copy code to a shared drive and wait for a scheduled job to copy the files up, and it only ran every 15 minutes at best, sometimes an hour.
I had to fight to get that changed but it's just indicative of the serious dysfunction in the organization.
The article brings up the UK's GDS, but it operates in a completely different political environment, where the words "big government" don't have the same menacing undertones they do in the US. The federalist system, combined with a dislike of government spending, renders US government efforts to simplify their citizens online interactions essentially fruitless.
Take applying for driving tests, for example: in the UK, there's one central body that administers them, so one website can cater to all comers (and it's not massively difficult to roll out country-wide changes). The US has 51 different state-run DMVs, each with their own regulations and application processes. The amount of money it would take to centralise that system is enormous, to say nothing of the political wrangling it would take to wrest control of even a small portion of the process from the states.
It's kind of funny. Not sure how badly this guy dresses. I've seen people wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals that look well considered, maybe CEO of a space start-up, and others that look like a hot mess. Ostensibly both parties should find less ways to be insulted, avoid posturing, and avoid visually fatiguing fashion faux pas. No need to spend money, spend a little more time choosing wisely. But not so much time that you want people to have the impression you care but not really and end up with lululemon.
