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.

Comments

Engineers do dress well

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Re:It's more than the tie

[sg_oneill]

Its more than just the ties. I work in a government science department that does really amazing and meaningful work tracking animal populations, building climate and weather models to assist firefighters and policy makers (protip: We're in trouble, regardless of what the crusading economists seem to think ) , and coordinating a vast network of parks and wildlife reserves. This is *really* enjoyable work and 1000 times more rewarding than "Yet another corporate intranet for 'sell-cyanide-to-kids-dot-com".

But hand in hand with that is an insane bureacracy. Recently I was asked to make some changes to software to throttle back satelite data rates from remote weather stations in the australian outback from every 2 minutes to every 15 minutes. The satelite data was insanely expensive and the modelling isn't fine tuned enough to warrant data points every 2 minutes (This is for predicting fire behavior during fire-season bushfires) even if we wanted it to be. So we set up the changes and tested it, and waited for the new firmware to be pushed out to the new sites. But no, its a government, anything "simple" is suspicious, so instead it must go through user acceptance testing , a layer of consultants , various committees and of course the various sub-departments must engage in their customary fight over who pays for it. It was 2 hours work and it will save $10K a month easily. But six months later its STILL not even at user acceptance testing whilst the beancounters fight over budget.

Its amazingly demoralizing.