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White House Wants To Borrow Tech Workers From Google and Amazon, Says Report (cnet.com)
"According to CNET, TechCrunch and others, the Trump administration reportedly wants tech giants to make it easy for workers to take leaves of absence to help the government modernize," writes Slashdot reader kimanaw. From a report: White House officials on Monday planned to meet with tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM, to discuss ways to make it easier for employees to take leaves of absence to help with government projects, according to The Washington Post. The administration reportedly hopes tech industry workers will be able to help modernize state and federal agencies and tackle challenges such as upgrading the veterans' health care system. Attracting tech talent may prove difficult for the Trump administration, which hasn't always seen eye to eye with Silicon Valley on issues such as the president's ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries. However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside." "This event on Monday is not just about our efforts, it's about our successor, and their successor after that," said one unnamed official, according to the Post. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
Or.. they could just pay the corporations to use their workers? Say like.. contract work? You know.. how capitalism work, and not, dare I say it.. communism?
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Funny,
I remember in school learning how evil it was to black list actors based on their political views. So now IT and Hollywood brag about black listing based on political views.
Interesting.
Trump administration reportedly wants tech giants to make it easy for workers to take leaves of absence to help the government modernize
The easy way to do this is to pay the workers you want to utilize wages and benefits competitive with the private sector. This might require raising taxes to cover the cost. I cannot imagine the tech companies have much incentive to loan out any workers who are any good. I'm also dubious a lot of tech workers will be super enthusiastic about working on highly bureaucratic and low paying and likely boring government IT plumbing projects unless the government is willing to back up a dump truck of money. Even then it's not clear they would get the best and brightest.
However, White House officials believe tech workers are willing to "put politics aside."
HAHAHAHAHAAAA.... For this administration? I doubt they'll get any sort of wide spread enthusiasm as long as Trump is in office. I think it would be a tough sell for any administration but this one in particular seems rather unlikely.
>> administration reportedly hopes tech industry workers will be able to help modernize state and federal agencies and tackle challenges such as upgrading the veterans' health care system
The point of government IT contracts isn't to fix or improve anything, but to extract hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from government coffers without providing anything tangible or useful. See also: IBM, Oracle and/or Epic.
You know a few technical guys and a decent manager and want to bid on a contract? Not so fast!
1. First you must figure out what contract vehicle it's on.
2. Then you must spend money getting onto that vehicle by bidding.
3. Then you must bid to get that contract.
All the while going up against incumbents that have better contacts and decades of experience wording things just right, with the particular jargon needed to win in the government space.
Oh and as a small company, you will also need to find some way to game the 8A system so that you aren't overlooked as a small business for purely political reasons beyond the agency's control.
Simple suggestion:
1. Abolish these processes and replace with a bond.
2. If your bid is unrealistic and plain bullshit, you get sent to arbitration to decide on whether the contract office sends the bond to the Treasury or not.
3. If you appeal for bullshit reasons, see #2.
Trump doesn't pay contractors, though...
Why not pay market competitive rates and not be a toxic, obsolescent, career-killing place to work?
"Oh no, we wouldn't want to do that. Let's just borrow some villeins from their lords Google and Amazon." Who BTW are really onboard with the whole divisive racism, hate and fearmongering agenda. This is what they really think about you.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Idiots. You are working for the Country, the American people, not for Trump.
When Trump accepts that reality then I will too.
We are not talking about working on his campaign, we are talking about working on the software infrastructure for the nation.
So what? If it is important to the richest nation on earth then the richest nation on earth can damn well pay market rates for it. Buy fewer bombers if they need to find the money in the budget. The military is ridiculously over funded as it is.
So you are a denier of reality, politics trumps the truth in your mind. Good to know.
Denier of reality? Quite the opposite. I'm WELL aware that our current president likes to think we all work for him and that he doesn't work for us. How is it that you missed that fact? Once he actually starts working for the American people (ALL of them) then we can have this discussion about my motivations.
Wow, you truly are an idiot. The administration is not asking for free labor. They are asking for employees to be able to take a leave of absence rather than having to quit their jobs and hope to get rehired later.
Yes they are asking for a discount on labor. If they were willing to pay market rates then they wouldn't have to go begging the private sector for talent. Hell they could just hire the company to do the work if they need the person or win the person away from the private sector outright by paying them competitively. There is no point to such a discussion unless they are trying to get labor at a discount.
Try to take off your political lens for a moment and at least read the summary: "discuss ways to make it easier for employees to take leaves of absence to help with government projects"
Grow up and learn to read what that really means. Politics is ALWAYS involved and to think otherwise is dangerously naive.
The myth that the private sector is made up of wonderfully efficient and capable people is easily disproved. Look at your private sector coworkers, and consider the private sector coworkers you've had in the past. Most likely they were not all paragons of efficiency and virtue.
Still, it's likely that they are able to adapt to change more readily than their government sector counterparts, but it's not because they're fundamentally better; they just operate under less restrictive rules and expectations.
Now it can be a good to bring in outside expertise, but the idea that bringing in private sector people will magically fix things is naive, because that expertise will operate under all the same constraints as their government employee counterparts except one: contributing to politicians who oversee the program. That's why privatization's track record of making government cheap and efficient is so un-magical.
It can be a good thing to bring in outside experts and contractors, or it can be a bad one, depending on your plan. If your plan is to shove money at them and sit back while they solve your problems, well that's a bad plan. All things equal a vendor would rather your problems be interminable and expensive, and if he has to give you a job after you retire from public office, that's a small price to pay.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What great things has Trump done exactly?
Fiscal? The deficit is larger than ever.
Economy? Stockmarket is down.
He mostly accomplished tax cuts for his buddies, cruel treatment of children, discrediting the US internationally, cozying up to all sorts of dictators and other authoritarians, and he's made DC even more corrupt than it was before. Really great things he has accomplished.
...compared to most government/civil-service workers? In that light, hell yes they're paragons of efficiency and virtue. :/
I'm curious how you know this. I worked in the private sector for decades, but at least half that work was for public sector agencies (well over a hundred in all) at all levels of government and in every part of the country except Alaska. I'd say on average public employees are about the same as private sector employees, but the variance is greater.
That's because on one hand you've got rules that makes it hard to get rid of underperformers. But the other hand, you get people who are genuinely dedicated to the mission of their agency in a way that would be downright bizarre in a private sector employee. These are the kind of people who are really bullish about promoting the state's agricultural products, or getting the next generation into hunting and fishing. I once had a trip to the CDC's Fort Collins office when news of a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Africa came through. It was like being in a suit-up scene in some cheesy action movie because those guys were going to war -- with a virus that made you bleed out of your eyeballs.
The work of those kinds of employees goes largely unnoticed. When we had the Boston Marathon bombing up here, two bombs went off in the middle of crowds and 267 people were hurt, 14 requiring amputations, but only 3 died. First responders justifiably got a lot of credit for that, but the low death rate was also the result of planners having a procedure in place which rapidly activated trauma teams at 27 hospitals, so that on average each hospital had to triage on average fewer than ten patients. Imagine if they'd all gone to the nearest hospital instead. As far as I know whoever prevented that from happening never got any media pats on the back.
The kind of government employees that make those kinds of things happen are found everywhere, and everywhere they're weighed down by deadwood coworkers and bosses. The problem is worse, however, in places where the public is fatalistic about bad government employees. Texas is the worst I've seen. One of the hardware vendors we sometimes worked with landed a bunch of contracts there by procuring prostitutes for public officials. But even in Texas there's a core of good people who make things work; they're just not the ones getting blow jobs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Or.. they could just pay the corporations to use their workers? Say like.. contract work? You know.. how capitalism work, and not, dare I say it.. communism?
So the question is... why isn't Trump pushing for a way to make it easier to temporarily hire engineers from Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, instead of having NASA hand out contracts to those companies? Or perhaps maybe grab some workers directly from Halliburton, instead of signing a contract that goes through their entire company?
Short answer -- because he personally has a beef with Amazon and Google, seeing that their corporate culture is hostile to his agenda. So in one stroke he seeks to find a way to forgo handing out lucrative government contracts to those companies, while simultaneously weakening them by leeching away talent.