5 ms·

I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up

28 points by frankish 2y ago

insane_dreamer 2y ago
This is by the CTO of the VA. Very HN relevant. Should not be flagged (can we please stop the mass "flag if this offends my Elon-ist sensibilities"?)
asacrowflies 2y ago
"People in charge of regulating computers should know how computers work. They should even be good at computers." While I agree with this statement.... Elon and Dodge are "good at computers" now? Lol
- klysm 2y ago
  The timing of this with Elon's SQL comment on X is especially comedic
myvoiceismypass 2y ago
The problems the author described encountering in their decades of government don't seem to aline with what DOGE is addressing / doing right now.
bkfunk 2y ago
If you have termites, you don’t just light the house on fire. So many tech people try to solve all the problems of Gov tech in the executive branch, which is intentionally slow and conservative. And yet, watch any Congressional hearing about a tech topic, and it’s painfully obvious that Congress has very little expertise in tech issues on staff. Instead of going 12 rounds with OIRA about the PRA (which I hate as much as the author does), what if we…changed it? The Judiciary also has no idea how to think about tech issues. Don’t blame the executive branch for the perverse constraints and incentives created by the Legislative and Judicial.
- mezzie2 2y ago
  I've been wondering for a while now why we aren't pushing for more technologists in office. I know most of us don't feel ourselves to be temperamentally suited, but it seems sorely needed. Maybe some of the recent grads who find themselves in a losing tech job market can pivot.
  - omnivore 2y ago
    it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.
    - mezzie2 2y ago
      I think it'd be best to start with getting people to run for local, non-partisan offices. School board, etc. You're right that trying for anything higher than that is going to run into life ruining amounts of interference from existing interests, but I think it could be done at the lowest levels first. > the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills. Which is one thing that makes me think of recent graduates. Recently retired people/people in tech who've FIREd also might be viable. People who either can't get a high paying tech job or who had them and are past that stage in life - politics is better than service sector work (for the recent grads) and the retired wouldn't depend on the money. Skillswise, there are more people going into CS who don't have a passion or intuition for technology - we pushed a lot of people into CS and STEM in general over the last decade or so who wouldn't have pursued it in the 90s-2010s. I bet there are lots of C students who could do a better job at understanding tech than our current leaders and a better job at communicating with non-technical people/schmoozing than most of the talented techies. > at least advising these people I think they need to hold office. Advising isn't going to cut it - the incentives for our current politicians to listen to this group aren't there. The only incentive lever we have any hope at pulling (outside of radical system change) is threatening their seats.
taurknaut 2y ago
[flagged]
thisisnotauser 2y ago
I do federal work and this is 100% correct. As a serious question, why couldn't a different administration accomplish this? Obama's United States Digital Service, which the author worked for, did not practice the broad authorities to rewrite the federal service that the current administration is exercising. This suggests to me that a healthy democracy is perhaps subject to some kind of a "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy," wherein the assumption that rules should be respected somehow becomes a bad assumption when an organization gets large. I've read a lot about the meaningless work at FAANGs that don't appear to tie to any bottom line, to the effect of "most employees at FAANGs seem to do nothing useful." In contrast, all federal work draws its authority to exist at all from Congressional direction, so there's always a clear connection to a "why" in the federal government for literally every role, and one that the person in that role seems to always be very aware of. None the less, federal work gets similarly mired in seeming ineffectuality where day-to-day action is so tied up in internal "red tape" the positive impact gets lost, like the 300k lives noted in the article. Government folks can always draw a straight line from their role to the impact on the public, but too often can't seem to get the authority to take any actions that move them along that line because of organizationally-imposed rules. Which is all to ask my real question: is this "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy" an inherent feature of large organizations? How do we overcome it?
- dv_dt 2y ago
  It is yet to be seen what the current administration is actually accomplishing. Tearing down administrative capacity without regard to leaving chaos and shortfalls is a lot easier than reform
  - thisisnotauser 2y ago
    Unfortunately true, and perhaps answers my question: meaningful improvement is hard, maybe even impossible. Meaningless harm is easy. But that answer doesn't really solve the inherent problem that more rapid improvement is necessary, maybe even critically so. To paraphrase JFK, is the issue here that an institution that makes meaningful improvement impossible perhaps also makes meaningless harm inevitable?
stfp 2y ago
This makes fun at a dept of labor website for listing abilities: > It tells veterans their primary skills are that they can "communicate by speaking" and "use [their] arms and/or legs together while sitting, standing, or lying down." Thanks for your service. If you don't believe me, look for yourself. But to me it’s clear why these abilities are listed: veterans with disabilities. The author not getting that is just… do you ever stop and think? The author is also complaining that it took two years to get approval to use the cloud and using that to show that the govt is too slow. That’s a crazy take to me, there are countless large and small companies where this did and is taking longer.
- redserk 2y ago
  Unfortunately there a number of people who fail to take a moment and understand the “why” behind a problem or process. I’ve enjoyed being on teams and organizations that have tried to focus on the “why” instead of jumping to conclusions because meaningful changes ended up getting implemented and future changes are a lot easier as a result of process change. The author’s jump to conclusions just wastes everyone’s time and money.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Engineers are particularly prone to failing to understand the "why" when it falls outside of their technological area of expertise.
- volkk 2y ago
  > But to me it’s clear why these abilities are listed: veterans with disabilities. The author not getting that is just… do you ever stop and think? at what point do you stop treating people like they're not utter idiots though? the JD is a rotary drill operator. do you really need to list that you need finger and arm movement for this job? And, it's not solely for veterans with disabilities, it's for all veterans. > The author is also complaining that it took two years to get approval to use the cloud and using that to show that the govt is too slow. That’s a crazy take to me, there are countless large and small companies where this did and is taking longer. just because this happens elsewhere, doesn't mean that's excusable. also, author worked for the VA which is a lot more consequential for people than some rando corpo taking a long time to get a domain they want.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
djray 2y ago
The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating your job was categorically does no fucking good, and neither does writing about it after the fact. You may think you're fighting the good fight, but this isn't a grassroots protest if the only people you were complaining to were your manager and/or your colleagues. Yes, inefficiency and bureaucracy suck. No, the answer is not to scrap it all without knowing what the hell you're doing and "just wing it", which is exactly what Musk and co are doing. Strangely enough, the solution is probably a compromise. Compromise takes two sides actually talking to each other, with people familiar with the matter present, and an acceptance that the goal is to make the process better without negatively impacting important things like security, safety and data integrity. Please forgive the tone of this message, but I can't help wonder how many thousands of people are going to die because of the effective abolishment of USAID and other programmes.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  If it's your first time hearing about it you haven't been paying attention. The healthcare.gov debacle was headline news, and the USDS that DOGE subsumed was established to address these problems but was ineffectual. The American people voted for effects, for better or worse.
- marcus0x62 2y ago
  > The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. If this is the first time you’ve heard of inefficiencies of this kind, you’re in a filter bubble.
  - djray 2y ago
    To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.
mezzie2 2y ago
I think one thinking error that people like the author make is that they assume these problems are inherent to and limited to government rather than being inherent to any organization of a certain size and complexity. (Big Tech is an interesting exception because those companies can demand a certain level of tech savvy culturally). I've worked in large academic institutions and currently work in a giant private corporate behemoth and see a lot of the same issues. I think what it comes down to is a couple of things: * For a lot of people, status means not having to learn or update/change anything about yourself or your way of working. We (where I work) franchise, and I see so many business owners who can't be bothered to learn email, how to log in to a computer system, etc. They shouldn't have to, they think. They're too important! In academia, this is professors in their 70s who don't want to change their teaching style or administrators who think it's the 1980s. In government, I'd expect this to be the bureaucrats who've been in their positions for 20-30+ years. Because these people have status (be that capital or tenure), the culture of the organizations leans towards pleasing them, and people who ask them to learn are stonewalled or exited. * Related to this, people care most about what's in front of them. The veterans dying/students who have issues/clients who aren't served well are more abstract than John who doesn't want to learn and will make your life hell if you try to make him. * In terms of resistance from the less entrenched, I think it's worth noting that for the most part, changes in the modern American workforce (especially rapid ones) very, very rarely favor the worker. Sudden changes usually mean more work for less pay, layoffs, etc. For example, my own company just switched the bonus system in what is clearly an attempt to pay people less in bonuses. The only counter-example I can think of recently is the rise of WFH, but that's already being rolled back. Changes = good for management/owners, bad for workers. This means people are going to be resistant to all change because they've learned it means bad things for them. In small enough organizations, this can be somewhat mitigated by the leaders having a personal relationship with their worker bees, but in big orgs that doesn't happen. I also think there's a fundamental tension between the type of person you need to be in order to implement and understand systematic changes and the type of person that makes a good factory/retail/service worker. There's a lot of people at the top of society who want obedient, uncurious workers and then are shocked when there are negatives to a population filled with those kind of people. We (as a society) have completely failed in educating our population for the digital age because a lot of people make money off the general populace's ignorance, but that does mean that the general populace can't administer in a digital society.
omnivore 2y ago
I think there's a big difference between -- hall monitors making stuff impossible and what we're seeing now. USDS part of the executive branch made things more difficult, but if you'd given those folks even half the runway these doofuses have right now, imagine the sort of good they could've done.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Streamlining government processes to be more efficient: Worthy goal, and _maybe_ Elon in a former life would have been the right person to spearhead this. But that's not what's happening now. They're not streamlining, they -- and by that I mean Elon's engineers -- are "uncovering fraud", "rooting out corruption", and "getting rid of DEI" -- none of which have anything to do with efficiency and red tape. Oh, and coincidentally, the fraud and corruption all happens to be centered at agencies which Trump and Elon have a beef with (maybe because DEI==corruption?) Yes, we need more technologists in government. Also, technologists should take care of _technology_, not _purges_.

28 points by frankish 2y ago

This is by the CTO of the VA. Very HN relevant. Should not be flagged (can we please stop the mass "flag if this offends my Elon-ist sensibilities"?)

asacrowflies 2y ago

"People in charge of regulating computers should know how computers work. They should even be good at computers." While I agree with this statement.... Elon and Dodge are "good at computers" now? Lol

klysm 2y ago
The timing of this with Elon's SQL comment on X is especially comedic

myvoiceismypass 2y ago

The problems the author described encountering in their decades of government don't seem to aline with what DOGE is addressing / doing right now.

bkfunk 2y ago

If you have termites, you don’t just light the house on fire. So many tech people try to solve all the problems of Gov tech in the executive branch, which is intentionally slow and conservative. And yet, watch any Congressional hearing about a tech topic, and it’s painfully obvious that Congress has very little expertise in tech issues on staff. Instead of going 12 rounds with OIRA about the PRA (which I hate as much as the author does), what if we…changed it? The Judiciary also has no idea how to think about tech issues. Don’t blame the executive branch for the perverse constraints and incentives created by the Legislative and Judicial.

mezzie2 2y ago
I've been wondering for a while now why we aren't pushing for more technologists in office. I know most of us don't feel ourselves to be temperamentally suited, but it seems sorely needed. Maybe some of the recent grads who find themselves in a losing tech job market can pivot.
- omnivore 2y ago
  it's expensive, the risks of losing are big and they dig into your whole life and basically ruin it. But agreed more people should be in these roles or at least advising these people, but the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills.
  - mezzie2 2y ago
    I think it'd be best to start with getting people to run for local, non-partisan offices. School board, etc. You're right that trying for anything higher than that is going to run into life ruining amounts of interference from existing interests, but I think it could be done at the lowest levels first. > the money is bad and it requires a different set of skills. Which is one thing that makes me think of recent graduates. Recently retired people/people in tech who've FIREd also might be viable. People who either can't get a high paying tech job or who had them and are past that stage in life - politics is better than service sector work (for the recent grads) and the retired wouldn't depend on the money. Skillswise, there are more people going into CS who don't have a passion or intuition for technology - we pushed a lot of people into CS and STEM in general over the last decade or so who wouldn't have pursued it in the 90s-2010s. I bet there are lots of C students who could do a better job at understanding tech than our current leaders and a better job at communicating with non-technical people/schmoozing than most of the talented techies. > at least advising these people I think they need to hold office. Advising isn't going to cut it - the incentives for our current politicians to listen to this group aren't there. The only incentive lever we have any hope at pulling (outside of radical system change) is threatening their seats.

taurknaut 2y ago

[flagged]

thisisnotauser 2y ago

I do federal work and this is 100% correct. As a serious question, why couldn't a different administration accomplish this? Obama's United States Digital Service, which the author worked for, did not practice the broad authorities to rewrite the federal service that the current administration is exercising. This suggests to me that a healthy democracy is perhaps subject to some kind of a "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy," wherein the assumption that rules should be respected somehow becomes a bad assumption when an organization gets large. I've read a lot about the meaningless work at FAANGs that don't appear to tie to any bottom line, to the effect of "most employees at FAANGs seem to do nothing useful." In contrast, all federal work draws its authority to exist at all from Congressional direction, so there's always a clear connection to a "why" in the federal government for literally every role, and one that the person in that role seems to always be very aware of. None the less, federal work gets similarly mired in seeming ineffectuality where day-to-day action is so tied up in internal "red tape" the positive impact gets lost, like the 300k lives noted in the article. Government folks can always draw a straight line from their role to the impact on the public, but too often can't seem to get the authority to take any actions that move them along that line because of organizationally-imposed rules. Which is all to ask my real question: is this "Chesterton's Fence Fallacy" an inherent feature of large organizations? How do we overcome it?

dv_dt 2y ago
It is yet to be seen what the current administration is actually accomplishing. Tearing down administrative capacity without regard to leaving chaos and shortfalls is a lot easier than reform
- thisisnotauser 2y ago
  Unfortunately true, and perhaps answers my question: meaningful improvement is hard, maybe even impossible. Meaningless harm is easy. But that answer doesn't really solve the inherent problem that more rapid improvement is necessary, maybe even critically so. To paraphrase JFK, is the issue here that an institution that makes meaningful improvement impossible perhaps also makes meaningless harm inevitable?

stfp 2y ago

This makes fun at a dept of labor website for listing abilities: > It tells veterans their primary skills are that they can "communicate by speaking" and "use [their] arms and/or legs together while sitting, standing, or lying down." Thanks for your service. If you don't believe me, look for yourself. But to me it’s clear why these abilities are listed: veterans with disabilities. The author not getting that is just… do you ever stop and think? The author is also complaining that it took two years to get approval to use the cloud and using that to show that the govt is too slow. That’s a crazy take to me, there are countless large and small companies where this did and is taking longer.

redserk 2y ago
Unfortunately there a number of people who fail to take a moment and understand the “why” behind a problem or process. I’ve enjoyed being on teams and organizations that have tried to focus on the “why” instead of jumping to conclusions because meaningful changes ended up getting implemented and future changes are a lot easier as a result of process change. The author’s jump to conclusions just wastes everyone’s time and money.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Engineers are particularly prone to failing to understand the "why" when it falls outside of their technological area of expertise.
volkk 2y ago
> But to me it’s clear why these abilities are listed: veterans with disabilities. The author not getting that is just… do you ever stop and think? at what point do you stop treating people like they're not utter idiots though? the JD is a rotary drill operator. do you really need to list that you need finger and arm movement for this job? And, it's not solely for veterans with disabilities, it's for all veterans. > The author is also complaining that it took two years to get approval to use the cloud and using that to show that the govt is too slow. That’s a crazy take to me, there are countless large and small companies where this did and is taking longer. just because this happens elsewhere, doesn't mean that's excusable. also, author worked for the VA which is a lot more consequential for people than some rando corpo taking a long time to get a domain they want.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

djray 2y ago

The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. Were these concerns raised with the author's state representative? The oversight committee? Why was the press not informed if lives were at risk? Why was pressure not heaped upon senior management and the powers that be to effect actual change years ago when the problems were first observed? Merely griping about how frustrating your job was categorically does no fucking good, and neither does writing about it after the fact. You may think you're fighting the good fight, but this isn't a grassroots protest if the only people you were complaining to were your manager and/or your colleagues. Yes, inefficiency and bureaucracy suck. No, the answer is not to scrap it all without knowing what the hell you're doing and "just wing it", which is exactly what Musk and co are doing. Strangely enough, the solution is probably a compromise. Compromise takes two sides actually talking to each other, with people familiar with the matter present, and an acceptance that the goal is to make the process better without negatively impacting important things like security, safety and data integrity. Please forgive the tone of this message, but I can't help wonder how many thousands of people are going to die because of the effective abolishment of USAID and other programmes.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
If it's your first time hearing about it you haven't been paying attention. The healthcare.gov debacle was headline news, and the USDS that DOGE subsumed was established to address these problems but was ineffectual. The American people voted for effects, for better or worse.
marcus0x62 2y ago
> The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies. If this is the first time you’ve heard of inefficiencies of this kind, you’re in a filter bubble.
- djray 2y ago
  To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.

mezzie2 2y ago

I think one thinking error that people like the author make is that they assume these problems are inherent to and limited to government rather than being inherent to any organization of a certain size and complexity. (Big Tech is an interesting exception because those companies can demand a certain level of tech savvy culturally). I've worked in large academic institutions and currently work in a giant private corporate behemoth and see a lot of the same issues. I think what it comes down to is a couple of things: * For a lot of people, status means not having to learn or update/change anything about yourself or your way of working. We (where I work) franchise, and I see so many business owners who can't be bothered to learn email, how to log in to a computer system, etc. They shouldn't have to, they think. They're too important! In academia, this is professors in their 70s who don't want to change their teaching style or administrators who think it's the 1980s. In government, I'd expect this to be the bureaucrats who've been in their positions for 20-30+ years. Because these people have status (be that capital or tenure), the culture of the organizations leans towards pleasing them, and people who ask them to learn are stonewalled or exited. * Related to this, people care most about what's in front of them. The veterans dying/students who have issues/clients who aren't served well are more abstract than John who doesn't want to learn and will make your life hell if you try to make him. * In terms of resistance from the less entrenched, I think it's worth noting that for the most part, changes in the modern American workforce (especially rapid ones) very, very rarely favor the worker. Sudden changes usually mean more work for less pay, layoffs, etc. For example, my own company just switched the bonus system in what is clearly an attempt to pay people less in bonuses. The only counter-example I can think of recently is the rise of WFH, but that's already being rolled back. Changes = good for management/owners, bad for workers. This means people are going to be resistant to all change because they've learned it means bad things for them. In small enough organizations, this can be somewhat mitigated by the leaders having a personal relationship with their worker bees, but in big orgs that doesn't happen. I also think there's a fundamental tension between the type of person you need to be in order to implement and understand systematic changes and the type of person that makes a good factory/retail/service worker. There's a lot of people at the top of society who want obedient, uncurious workers and then are shocked when there are negatives to a population filled with those kind of people. We (as a society) have completely failed in educating our population for the digital age because a lot of people make money off the general populace's ignorance, but that does mean that the general populace can't administer in a digital society.

omnivore 2y ago

I think there's a big difference between -- hall monitors making stuff impossible and what we're seeing now. USDS part of the executive branch made things more difficult, but if you'd given those folks even half the runway these doofuses have right now, imagine the sort of good they could've done.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Streamlining government processes to be more efficient: Worthy goal, and _maybe_ Elon in a former life would have been the right person to spearhead this. But that's not what's happening now. They're not streamlining, they -- and by that I mean Elon's engineers -- are "uncovering fraud", "rooting out corruption", and "getting rid of DEI" -- none of which have anything to do with efficiency and red tape. Oh, and coincidentally, the fraud and corruption all happens to be centered at agencies which Trump and Elon have a beef with (maybe because DEI==corruption?) Yes, we need more technologists in government. Also, technologists should take care of _technology_, not _purges_.