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Getting IT Talent In Government Will Take Culture Change, Says Google Engineer
dcblogs writes: Mikey Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google, who was appointed Monday by the White House as the deputy federal CIO, will lead efforts to improve U.S. Websites. Dickerson, who worked on the Healthcare.gov rescue last year, said that one issue the government needs to fix is its culture. In describing his experience on the Healthcare.gov effort, he said the workplace was "not one that is optimized to get good work out of engineers." It was a shirt-and-tie environment, and while Dickerson said cultural issues may sound superficial, they are still real. "You don't have to think that the engineers are the creative snowflakes and rock stars that they think they are, you don't have to agree with any of that," Dickerson said in a recent conference presentation posted online. "I'm just telling you that's how they think of themselves, and if you want access to more of them, finding a way to deal with that helps a lot." Engineers want to make a difference, Dickerson said, and he has collected the names of more than 140 engineers who would be willing to take unpaid leave from their jobs to work on a meaningful project.
It's the rules, the bureaucracy and the paperwork
I dunno, doesn't fit the engineers I know. Maybe he's been at Google too long...
"Finding a way to deal"...how do you feel coders? Does being labled a delicate "snowflake" make you even want to bother with reading the rest of what he has to day? And who are these masochists that would work for nothing? Let me guess...
yep he is a douche.
I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to dressing well, or to reasonable dress codes. They're mostly opposed to stupid dress codes that make them uncomfortable while working for no good reason. Reasonable dress for a meeting with outside customers is different from that for a group of engineers banging out a solution to a code problem, and what's reasonable when you've hauled someone in on their day off to deal with an emergency isn't the same as what they'd wear during a normal workday. Management tends to lose sight of all this because they've got much different jobs from the engineers and the dress norms for them are going to be different from those for engineers because the routine situations are going to be different.
but a salary change.
I have long hair, a beard, wear t-shirt and shorts to work, come and go as I please (for the most part), etc. Of course I make 2/3 of what corporate sysadmins make. But considering I get more than a month of vacation, it's an adequate tradeoff for all the perks. Government has IT talent, although not in the IRS' desktop support division.
Actually Mikey gives four reasons for the healthcare.gov problems, but the summary just focuses on the last one, probably because it sounds funny:
The original points (as summed up by me in a few words) were (1) Fragmentation of implementation, (2) Lack of monitoring of system, (3) Lack of experience by the companies building it, and (4) workplace culture clash.
Which culture?
Are we talking in macro terms, as in our overall culture, the culture of the United States?
OR
The again macro culture of government workers? Where performance doesn't matter all that much and you are at the mercy of a rarely talented middle management layer that swallows 90% of the work force?
OR
The culture of the average IT worker used to working from the basement in Mom's house?
Good luck on changing any of them..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Need to cut down on the contractors and subcontractors in GOV IT.
They add lot's of over head and can make it hard to get work done as people need to work though layers and layers of contractors and subcontractors to get info from one team to an other team.
Sure, no problem!
All you have to do to create the environment for IT talent to want to work in government is to get rid of a culture of more importance on process than outcome, a culture of not getting fired even if you don't do any useful work, and power and advancement based more on perception and political maneuvering in front of people who don't know talent when they see it, instead of results. Oh, and constant interference by politicians who can't be bothered to appreciate what your work required, but are happy to use it as a tool for their own means.
I'm sure all that will be easy!
Moron does not know what's he talking about. There are plenty of places in government where proper geeks work. Examples: NSA and NIH. All what it takes is the ability of the agency in question to pay market rates, e.g. "title 42" and such (both big Ns can do that).
In my experience the pay rate was well under what private companies pay, and for some one who is worth their salt they would jump at a private company that is going to pay them 30% more + stocks and better medical benefits. Hiring some one for a position takes 2-3 times as long to process paperwork, and if they have not been offered another position with a private company, the laugh at the offered salary.
Here's a photo taken today of the President at Martha's Vineyard. It's not exactly a job you can walk away from: http://bit.ly/1oJyAfo
That really has nothing to do with it..
The problem becomes you have politicians and others in government that shoot for a website like Healthcare.com but those morons are not tech savvy, and they refuse to give the money out that's needed to make sure the site is built right the first time, add a complete lack of keeping up-to-date with the times, again because its costs money.
The one thing I didn't see or read over Dickersons speech/comments was the lack of security surrounding the governments websites! "Fixing" the culture really isn't going to do you a whole a a lot of good when you have debouched security. And the employees themselves have no motivation to do a good job their just there to more or less collect a pay check, that's not all of them, but this is government and it seems 80% of their employees are village-idiots to begin with.
Maybe the Prez could take some time off from his busy vacation schedule and work on some meaningful projects as well.
Nah, he's too busy backpedaling on his earlier taking credit for removing all US troops from Iraq and calling ISIS "the jayvee". Now it's all Maliki's fault.
Great how that reset with Russia worked out, too.
And NOW we find out, "Don't do stupid shit" is really nothing more than an empty soundbite.
Yay HOPENCHANGE!!!
You don't have to be intelligent/reasonable to control intelligent/reasonable people, you just have to convince them that you are. You can go on being a clueless dipshit in all other respects.
Jeez, you'd think that the President of the US would have a staff member who coukld order his pizzas for him.
They're not the same thing.
... And process this literally. What he is suggesting is that engineers need to have more control over projects and feel that their contributions make a difference.
The insulting language I believe was put in to get the arrogant incompetent government drones to pay attention to it. See, we can do insulting too.
But strip out the insulting back and forth and see the literal message. He's suggesting that engineers be given some control and leeway to manage projects. He's also suggesting that those projects will be more successful if the engineers are allowed to control the direction of them to some extent.
Now, who here disagrees that that would be a bad idea? It is precisely the lack of that that makes those sorts of jobs intolerable. You're often dealing with a badly designed system that wants to be upgraded into an even more badly designed system and you're being judged on how well this badly designed system works.
On top of that, the system whether well or poorly designed isn't doing anything interesting or often even useful.
So yeah, I think the stuffed shirts have every reason to express their needs in a vague sense. Because they don't actually know what they want specifically. But the actual implementation and specific design should be handled by the engineers with a great deal of flexibility.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why do you think they are there? Some of it is simple graft, but plenty is because the government can't actually hire people to do the job at the rates they're paying.
That's great. I wouldn't call him a douche, at least a douche serves a purpose. Exactly who the fuck thinks of themselves a creative snowflake or a rockstar? It sure as fuck isn't any engineer worth their chops that I've known. It's usually some middle-managing do-nothing gladhanding their way to the top on the backs of good designers, engineers and architects that they label "creative snowflakes" and "rockstars" (usually preceded by the word "my").
Would anybody want a handful of these so-called "rock stars" on their team? Imagine a thousand people who all think they're the best at what they do, all working on the same project. Each one unique and just a certain that their way of doing things is the best and only way!
Yeah, he should go help ex-Prez Bush clear some of that brush that took up most of his 8 years in the WH!
I think he should spend the rest of his presidency building a time machine to stop God from telling Bush Jr to invade Iraq.
The thing is, the government does things by contracting out, not in-house, and because of reasons of fiscal economy, must go with cheaper bidders. And even when they put it in their contracts that they get the lowest price, they get despised for such contracts being enforced.
Let's face it, there's too many people in the Corporate World who think cheating the government and taxpayers is the way to go.
There's a reason bureaucracy has become a dirty word. Because those who shape the way we think want us to believe that way.
Well, in many cases if you got rid of contractors, all that would be left would be managers and interns. Depending on the location, the pay may not be great as a contractor, but it's probably a little better than the equivalent position if you were a govt employee. On the other hand, it's easier for the contract company/govt managers to fire you than it would if the person was a govt employee.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
And you lose.
Sorry, but any time a statement is made about the current president being evil/lazy/bad or whatever, if you bring up Bush at this point, you lose. Yes, Bush was a terrible president, that doesn't justify it for Obama.
Nice. I can see you have about zero useful experience in working for government. Good move with the stereotypes and right-wing propaganda though. I'm surprised you didn't mention unions in there somewhere. You missed that one on the checklist.
The whole process over outcome thing is probably your closest point. That happens because if you DON'T do that and anything news-worthy happens then you and everybody anywhere near you will be roasted in the media for being secretive and not "accountable" (whatever that means to people who don't understand what you do anyway). The public wants lots of records so they can come in and find the waste and abuse that they just KNOW all these un-elected people are committing every second of every day (when it's actually the elected ones that they put in office who are the problem.)
Oh, and while you're worried about outcomes, how about this: we need a public that stops demanding 100% success at absolutely everything. See, in actual government jobs for the most part innovation is hard because it doesn't carry any rewards but carries loads of potential badness. Some states have passed laws to provide financial and non-financial rewards for people who do useful things, but any time anybody actually gives one out it gets blasted in the media, so for the most part nobody bothers. On the other hand, if you try something innovative and it doesn't work you'll hear all about THAT too, complete with a hyperactive accounting of how much money you spent doing it, so once again the people are getting exactly what they demand. Maybe they don't know they're demanding it, but that's what they're doing. I'm not talking about healthcare.gov type failures, which were mostly private sector at it's best as usual because outsourcing, I'm just talking about regular "hey, I have an idea of something we should try" kind of stuff. If that "something" doesn't come with an almost 100% success guarantee you're going to have trouble because the price of failure in government is actually pretty high for most un-elected types and the reward for success is nonexistent.
So yeah, culture has to change. Specifically, the culture of the public who demands the impossible. In the private sector your every last move isn't subject to some public inquiry and guess what? Sometimes you try stuff that doesn't work and it's OK because others of those things are out of the park successes.
"You don't have to think that the engineers are [...] creative snowflakes [... but] that's how they think of themselves."
and
"Dickerson [...] has collected the names of more than 140 engineers."
Are the names in a binder?
failure in government is actually pretty high for most un-elected types and the reward for success is nonexistent.
kind of like those who sit in ATC rooms and make sure the airliners don't collide?
mfwright@batnet.com
There is a reason for a separation of powers and a separation of technologies in the Military. In order for the Army and Air Force to work together, they do not need complete and full access to each others information and systems. They only need enough information shared to get the job done.
The same reasoning is true with how the Federal Government was defined, with separate branches and separate powers. This separation is to protect from a single power having the ability to take over Government.
Where you may not see the connection is that full control over all military could result in a coup, so rules are in place to prevent that. Including restricting the President from having total control.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Can you do what they can do? No? So then, how about a nice plate of shut the fuck up, then?
Government doesn't get good techies because they don't pay enough, have a lousy working environment, and don't have ANY of the perks of the private sector that techies prize, like working from home (HA!) flex-time, or flex-spending accounts. Workplaces are static (you can fight for the "best office" after 10-15 years of seniority, but will toil in an ill-lit cube farm until the,) schedules are inflexible, and benefits are one-size fits all.
I saw an advertisement for my job (basically to the letter) working for a "state" organization here... The Teachers retirement fund (it's a pension fund for the teacher's union, operated by the state under state employment rules.) What I make is irrelevant, but suffice it to say, their "max" was 40% less than I make today, and just over 50% less than what "the market will bear."
That's your ballgame.
Who did what now?
wipe the jizz off your chin please.
Not to pick in the government worker, but:
They add lot's of over head
Say you got an an L-O-T,
followed by apostrophe-S -
now, what does that mean?
You would not use "lot's" in this case,
as a plural -
it's a possessive.
What's a possessive?
Well, it's the adding of an apostrophe-S to a
word to show possession or ownership.
I've known "rock star" coders. If you don't want someone like Vint Cerf or W. Richard Stevens or Kirk McKusick or Eric Allman or Mike Karels or Dennis Ritchie or Sam Leffler on your team, then you are a freaking idiot.
And if you haven't heard it before, then you've probably never done a startup in Silicon Valley: Talent attracts talent.
Mediocrity helps to keep governments stable. Why ruin a good thing?
we need a mod to Godwin's law about the obama cum-lappers who "blame Bush". It's getting really lame...
I wish he would take a permanent vacation away from the office. This way he can't do anymore harm to the nation.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yes, great solution. Seeing as agencies take a year+ to hire a new gov hire, it will really help to get things rolling. Instead of a contractor that can be brought in that day and fired at an instant.
Why don't you just tell slashdot to do the spelling check for you. Chrome does hi-light errors though.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"The soft bigotry of low expectations" for the win!
... and I've known some who just didn't want to.
Personally, when I worked at a university, I kept a shirt and tie hanging in my cubicle for when I had meetings. As I never wore jeans in, when given 5 min warning, I was prepared.
Unfortunately, one day, I was dealing with server problems with our team lead, and my (new) manager came in and insisted we had to go to a meeting. I said I needed to grab my shirt & tie, but he insisted we were already late.
It seems that the executive director (3 levels above my boss) had decided that we were going to have an 'introduce the different groups within the IT department to each other', and the chairs were set up as rings of concentric circles ... and all of the free chairs were in the middle ... so I'm wearing a t-shirt that says "some people are alive simply because it's illegal to kill them".
Then they started cracking down on the dress code. Of course, the memo from the executive director on this "interpretation of the dress code" included no logos, so the staff shirts were actually not compliant with his interpretation. It also said "shirt with a collar", without qualifying "dress collar" (so therefore, my crew-necked t-shirt was compliant). They also insisted on 'no large text', without defining a specific letter height. (I hung up my White Zombie "More Human than Human" shirt to show that the "some people..." shirt had medium-sized letters.)
I was later fired ... it had to go before the unemployment office as they claimed I quit , but refused to make a formal statement (where I could've then sued for libel ... of course, I likely also had a case for "constructive dismissal" anyway, as my project manager had been told to harrass me 'til I quit)
But ... as my job was all about problem solving, I found a number of ways to comply with the wording of the 'interpretation' of the dress code:
If I had it to do all over again ... I'd have tried to find a priest's collar. Or a dickie. I mean, hell, I worked in a locked room -- it's not like anyone saw me except for when I went to meetings, lunch, or the bathroom.
So instead, I work at NASA ... about the only government agency (unless you're at HQ) that prefers you to *not* wear a tie (I was threatened with bodily harm by a small, 60+ year old woman if I continued wearing one to work). Unfortunately, a while back my employer got bought out by a military contractor, and they started pushing down dress codes on us ... so I've been trying to get a definition of exactly what a "graphical t-shirt" is. My co-workers all just ignore it, but I'm doing my best to point out what a pointless, stupid rule it is w/ ASCII art and stylized text.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
> Well, in many cases if you got rid of contractors, all that would be left would be managers and interns.
Duh. That's his point - hire developers as permanent employees. The whole outsourcing of government work (not just IT, but all departments) since Clinton left office has just been a hand-over of cash to the owners of contracting companies. Once they get entrenched the contractors are just as permanent as regular employees because they've got institutional knowledge but now with the additional costs of contractor management. You get the worst of both worlds - low-paid employees but high costs.
The precious snowflakes aren't the good engineers; they're the ones that HR schedules to interview. Oh my god are there a lot of them.
I was working, in IT, for the federal government until about a year ago.
From what I saw: any special project, like that website, is going to be done by contractors, not staff employees.
IMO: there is a lot of corrupt politics involved in getting those contracts.
I believe the primary obstacle is that the gov't [particularly the federal gov't] loathes actually hiring people. they want to outsource everything, because of the mantra "private industry steals the best". and then to make sure only the crappiest companies bid on the project, make everyone submit hundreds of pages of mostly useless paperwork, and then pick the lowest bidder, regardless of ability to actually perform the work. Then, when the lowest bidder fails, award the contract to a close friend's company, and whatever price they suggest, because "it has to get done by yesterday".
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I've worked for the government in a scientific job, with a lot of IT folks. It was probably the most relaxed atmosphere I've worked in. No expectation to dress better than business casual. No expectation to work overtime. No expectation to really get anything done.
It's that last one that's really the killer. If you're not focused on getting projects done, first and foremost, then you're not going to attract good people.
A good engineer isn't necessary when the jobs at a government office survive only by making the right political and budgetary statements at precisely the right times. With very few exceptions, technical success or failure just doesn't have much influence on your career in the government.
Lastly, 140 engineers will make no difference. The federal government is huge. The office I worked in was a backwater, nearly forgotten location. We had a staff of 5000 people, about half of them engineers and scientists. There are thousands of engineers in the government right now who would love to work on meaningful projects. It's not a lack of talent or manpower that keeps those projects from happening.
That is because they can't manage it properly. Only to be replaced by a problem that needs to be managed even better.
nosig today
I've worked in a shirt/tie straightjacket workplace. Remember the movie 'Office Space' where they use a cubicle as a storage locker? That was there too. And I had a boss dumber than a sack of bricks. And very little development work was going on. And after I left they tried to hire me back.
30 years ago the A student graduates went into private industry and the B students went into government.
What has evolved is that the B students hire companies that employ the A students for consulting and doing any real work.
If any project fails the B students always have a scapegoat in the companies they hire.
Cost overruns and failed projects do nothing to harm the B students careers. And the bigger a mess any project turns into the more money the companies employing the A students make.
That too. and the NRC or folks that design Interstate bridges. But I think he might be talking about local gov. I know in my area there is a local radio wingbat that loves to rake any minor mistake that the local governments make over his personal coal BBQ just to flame the outrage (the outrage, I say!) of underpaid professionals working in a very aggravating environment for not getting everything exactly right each time. FSM knows we don't in the commercial world.
73 de w7com
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Dont care about others doing some projects. If they fuck up, there is already someone to blame.
Are the slacking of the old timers, the dick measuring contests, and the senseless games of power. You got to live with that, and you enjoy the perks.
lol you're a retard
I believe the primary obstacle is that the gov't [particularly the federal gov't] loathes actually hiring people. they want to outsource everything, because of the mantra "private industry steals the best". and then to make sure only the crappiest companies bid on the project, make everyone submit hundreds of pages of mostly useless paperwork, and then pick the lowest bidder, regardless of ability to actually perform the work. Then, when the lowest bidder fails, award the contract to a close friend's company, and whatever price they suggest, because "it has to get done by yesterday".
THIS! This IS exactly what happens, and the laws, processes, and people that are in place are so broken it is impossible to get anything meaningful accomplished. It's ALL WASTED. The Time, Money, and Talent are spent on chasing down paperwork that was submitted properly 2 months ago that one bottle-necked individual couldn't bother to take 5 seconds to sign because they had to take a 2 week long vacation with nobody as an alternate point of contact or delegate of responsibility. Now you have to resubmit all that paperwork AGAIN because since the first submission the form has changed. They added a box to account for pink slippers instead of "light red" slippers, but that's only after not being told by anyone the form changed. If you're lucky, you might get that stuff in before you run into other issues that prevent even more actual work, but somehow create even greater paperwork. Often you end up putting in a year and a half effort into getting granted extensions for 6 months.
That's great. I wouldn't call him a douche, at least a douche serves a purpose. Exactly who the fuck thinks of themselves a creative snowflake or a rockstar? It sure as fuck isn't any engineer worth their chops that I've known. It's usually some middle-managing do-nothing gladhanding their way to the top on the backs of good designers, engineers and architects that they label "creative snowflakes" and "rockstars" (usually preceded by the word "my").
Would anybody want a handful of these so-called "rock stars" on their team? Imagine a thousand people who all think they're the best at what they do, all working on the same project. Each one unique and just a certain that their way of doing things is the best and only way!
You don't get it. This is how other non-IT people view *you*. You're post exemplifies what he is trying to communicate.
We're still dealing with shit bush set in motion so while he is enjoying his retirement and not being tried for war crimes, bringing him up is legit.
At least ww2 actually ended with a surrender and Hitler committed suicide.
I have been in the industry for 12 years and I have never had anyone on any of my teams that thought of themselves as "rockstars" or "creative snowflakes." I don't know what the guy in the article is talking about. Seems like he is focusing on the wrong problem.
Insightful "Google Engineer" is insightful.
Just because someone worked at Google doesn't mean they're qualified to be in leadership in the Federal gov't. In fact, it makes them less qualified as they're still beholden to their previous employer. Getting good work out of engineers is not about letting them t-shirts and flip-flops to work, nor is it about calling them "snowflakes" or any of that nonsense. It's about paying them well and treating them like professionals and not spoiled man-children who will work for free soda and pizza.
I was going to state this in a slightly less cynical way (the lowest bidder doesn't always win) but it is true that if you hire a government contractor, you get an expert in government contracting, which is different than being an industry leader or a subject matter expert. There is a lot of paperwork, regulatory compliance, and face-to-face networking involved in working successfully with the Government, and navigating it requires a certain amount of expertise and overhead in itself. I say that as a (mostly content) employee of a large defense company.That said, I don't think that is a unique problem. Lots of industries (healthcare, civil engineering, maybe finance) have to spend a lot of time and money on regulatory compliance. Maybe not web development, though.
Yes, there is probably some tie in with the need for a dress code like shirt and tie and over bureaucracy.
However, this article is full of real and very practical issues. Yet, what gets touted in the headline? Engineers don't want to dress up. Yep, that is why healthcare.gov flopped. Engineers wanted to wear shorts to work. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that makes us look?
How about point 3. The biggest point of all. The companies hired to do it had no experience in it. You know, like how business people think you know Java.... therefore you can build anything as long as it has the word Java in it as opposed to recognizing the immense industry specific knowledge and general talent. How about highlighting that part.
Or how about point 1. The dozens of different vendors and products. There's a discussion there on standards, training on each product, specialization, staff levels...
Yep, all good points that would really get the most out of engineers. But hey, why emphasize those important things, when we can worry about shirt and ties.
It does make me wonder if the reason IT is so poorly managed has more to do with how IT people and engineers represent themselves.
If what management hears is we don't want a dress code instead of all the other valid points... real issues are not going to be addressed.
At the agency I work, the current manager of my department hired several employees that aren't actually qualified to do their jobs. In some of those cases, the job requirements were altered slightly to get them past HR. So now we have these inexperienced, unqualified, entry-level employees trying to do complicated non-entry-level jobs. These are jobs that people usually have to work their way up to and were just handed to these people because of the leanings of the manager's politics.
To paraphrase an old joke - there is a rock star/precious snowflake on every development team, and if you dont know who it is, that means its you.
And you lose.
Sorry, but any time a statement is made about the current president being evil/lazy/bad or whatever, if you bring up Bush at this point, you lose. Yes, Bush was a terrible president, that doesn't justify it for Obama.
You would like to create a new Godwin's law for GWB? Pardon me while I ignore you. You would like to put Bush's entire career down the memory hole, wouldn't you? That would conveniently help you avoid the difficult problem of dealing with facts, like his "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.
Bush got us in to the Iraq war, the worst American policy disaster in the 21st century. We lost $3 trillion (according to Nobel laureate economist George Stiglitz), 4,000 American lives, between 150,000 and 650,000 Iraqi lives (which you don't care about), destroyed the economy, and turned the country over to an Islamic movement which is even worse than Saddam Hussein.
GWB signed off on a policy of torturing prisoners, even if they turned out to be innocent cab drivers. His interrogators literally used the same interrogation methods that the North Korean Communists used on American prisoners, according to testimony by the interrogation instructors before Congress. So GWB was actually using Communist torture. I knew Communists who turned against Stalin when they had to face the facts. They had more integrity than the Bushies.
GWB became dictator of Iraq, able to set up the military and economy any way he wanted. We saw what the world is like when we give the Republicans a free hand. The first thing they did was turn over the management to Republican party hacks, who took a well-running economy and couldn't keep the electricity running. The second thing GWB did was reach out to the thugs and murderers in each minority, arm them, and let them kill everybody else. Under Republican rule, we can have that here too.
Remind me again why we went to Iraq in the first place. After Bush's intelligence sources told him exactly where Saddam was hiding his WMDs, and Saddam let the UN inspectors inspect whatever they wanted, and the inspectors reported that they weren't there.
And of course there is GWB's stellar record of military service. When the other stupid right-wing American patriots were rushing to Vietnam to fight (and lose) last century's policy disaster, GWB was rushing in the opposite direction, using his dad's connections to land a safe berth in the Champagne brigade of National Guard (until other priorities came up and he went AWOL).
Obama is another disaster and sellout, but not of GWB's magnitude. At least Obama got through Princeton and Harvard law with his own hard work, not with his father's alumni contributions. At least Obama could speak in full sentences. At least Obama held a job in the private sector for a while, and demonstrated his competence, unlike GWB who never made a living until his dad's friends cut him into a multi-million dollar stadium deal built with taxpayer's money. Unlike GWB, Obama was not an alcoholic until the age of 40 when he found religion and an arranged marriage to a wife who could keep him out of trouble. Unlike GWB, Obama doesn't believe that God speaks to him.
The Iraq war is an impossible mess. Obama is going to come up with a bad solution, whatever he does, because GWB left us with nothing but bad solutions. Tell me again, whey did we go in?
I love the idea of working in government where I can make a big difference but the pay is too low, there are too many rules that go against common sense, and they would expect me to move out East. I have no intention of taking a job that pays me less than i could be making and I don't want to move to an area I despise just so I can lose it all over a technicality or a rule i didn't know existed while I'm surrounded by ineffective people I can't learn anything from in the mean while.
We're still dealing with shit bush set in motion so while he is enjoying his retirement and not being tried for war crimes, bringing him up is legit.
At least ww2 actually ended with a surrender and Hitler committed suicide.
GWB wanted to be the Republican Truman. You know, create democracy in our conquered enemies.
It turned out to be harder than GWB (and his handlers) thought it would be.
The irony is that he went to Yale, which has one of the best political science departments in the country, where they teach you how governments are run, and GWB spent it getting drunk with the frat boys instead.
Then he went to Harvard Business School, where they teach you how to manage things, and he spent that getting drunk with the frat boys instead too.
There were very few professors who would flunk George H.W. Bush's son.
Correct. That's by design . . . you can hold a contractor's feet to the fire if they don't produce good results, and "fire" them when the contract comes up for renewal. And contractors are for-profit businesses, just like the rest of the IT sphere, so working in govt IT is not much different than working in IT for a car company or an insurance firm. You build websites (internal and external), you work on enterprise systems, and sometimes you produce cool custom code to solve unique problems.
It's not like working for Microsoft, but I've heard miserable stories from ex-MS employees, so I count myself lucky. Whether you're working for the US Army or the FBI or Health and Human Services, odds are you're doing important work that will affect people you know (or you yourself).
As for corruption: I can't speak for other parts of the US Government, but I've been in the government contracting sphere for decades, I've worked on a number of proposals/recompetes, and I don't see any more "corruption" in winning multi-million-dollar government IT contracts than in any other business arrangements in the "free market". Work generally goes to the lowest reliable bidder with a known track record of producing relevant results. Fly-by-night lowest bidders don't make the cut. "Friends of the civil servants" don't make the cut either because the decisions aren't made by one person, they're made by several people.
Getting governance talent in Google will take a lot more than cultural change
Marionette dances, sings, and lies to the puppet master's desired jigs, songs, and theatre.
Govt needs e-Redtape
Casteism
Must vary by situation. In the two agencies in which I've contracted, the bottleneck wasn't contractors, it was the federal management. Layers upon layers upon ungodly layers of ignorant, micromanaging Federal 'management'.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That, plus when they do actually hire people, it's at 2/3 the going pay. I looked at government jobs during my last search, the pay was pathetic.
It's the lack of any feed back up stairs and who wants to say I work for the IRS. They come out with a plan that doesn't address the problem and their deaf to what the problem really is.
I remember the disaster the last time the FAA up dated their radar stations. I wonder if the flight controller in Miami that kept the whole Eastern Atlantic Ocean in head at night rather than mess with the computer is still there. His buddies got twitchy when he went to the john and they had to pick up for him. It's a good thing its a big sky.
The Health care mess was lack of specifications and standards for inter change of information. The constant changes almost assured that the Alpha test version 0.0.1 wouldn't work.
My hat's off to Mikey for getting the Health Care mess to work at all.
It is the fact that when you contract out to consultants for everything, you are left with no one in house that has any experience, and the few that are, are too busy to do anything but trying to keep the lights on. Also the technical positions are not valued the same way as say policy, in terms of salary, so what is the incentive really.
I would agree with both your statements.
We have fixed 3 applications a year ago, and none of them are yet deployed.
I would also add that technical compensation is not really valued in government, so unless you are really stoked about doing good civil service, there isn't much incentive except maybe a better than average pension that they might take away before you are anywhere close to retirement anyway. On top of that there is a lack of in house talent because everything is done though over priced consultants in a lame attempt to make the government foot print smaller. So it looks like there are only X number of employees, even though the IT budgets are through the roof because of external consultants. The few folks that are left in house don't always get a chance to do very innovative things, because they are too busy doing risk management, keeping the lights on, and the maintaining the status quo...
This is one thing that kind of bugs me about public perception of government staff, particularly technical staff. Every org will have some duds, but most of those I know are highly trained, talented, dedicated and motivated (for the most part, it is hard not to get beaten down), and would like nothing better to work on interesting innovative projects doing good work. However management, money, and politics (not just office) often times interfere with that goal.
Lol, yes.
Add to this a lack of accountability. That exact thing happened a few years ago, they got busted, it was a HUGE scandal. However rather than actually punishing the people responsible (very high up), they change the procurement rules to make them even more difficult and onerous so that "this will never happen again", when all you are doing is making it even more difficult and expensive for those that actually follow the rules... rinse and repeat every few years...