dnesting

Government is not a place where modern collaboration tools thrive. This has less to do with "broken IT" (though that's part of it) and more to do with the government's unique legal, oversight, and compliance burdens, and a lack of modern collaboration tools that can accommodate them.

The projects in which we are most successful are also not projects where people can easily contribute remotely. Some agency teams allow remote work but the jury's still out in my opinion as to whether these people are as effective as others.

The projects in which we are most successful are those where we have been able to quickly bring a lot of relevant experience to the table, not just knowledge and skill.

This was written not long after USDS was founded, and I recall thinking even then that many of his comparisons were not entirely accurate. The comments you read here are going to be more complete and up to date.

There exist people that are happy to take a personal statement and attribute it to the author's employer to score political points at the author's expense. When I use this disclaimer it's chiefly for my own benefit.

Hi, really sorry that you feel this way. Delays on the order of a few weeks aren't unexpected at this point, but we shouldn't have people that have been waiting for a response of some kind for much longer than that. We're still growing the team (including those doing the recruiting and hiring) and we appreciate everyone's patience.

We can follow up with you to let you know where you are in the process, but we'd need some sort of identifying information in order to do that.

I'm really sorry about your experience. In many ways we're still a fledgling startup. We don't trust the regular federal government's hiring process, which means we have to build our own from scratch, so we have our own recruiters, coordinators, and when we aren't fighting fires or developing software, we're the ones actually doing the interviews. The process was maddeningly slow for a while but it's improving.

The broader USDS family is focused on delivering better services. But one area we're starting to focus more on is policy itself. One thing that struck me about the federal government is just how little internal harmony there exists between agencies. Just because the NSA does or says something doesn't mean everyone here agrees with them or even really has to support them. Because the USDS HQ team is located in the White House (and OMB), there exists the ability to engage directly with decision-makers and influence policy and (at least sometimes) the behavior of agencies.

Yes, the USDS HQ team is part of the White House which means you have to be a US citizen. 18F is part of GSA and they have more flexibility in hiring. Agency Digital Service teams are being hired directly into various agencies, and each agency will have its own citizenship requirements I think.

If I (as a software engineer) want to improve the way IT works in the government, can you suggest a better use for my time and skills?

Why do you put it that way? Everyone serving in military takes home a paycheck, but that doesn't make them mercinaries.

The top tech talent that we aim to attract to USDS often can make far more than these salaries staying in the private sector, so appealing to a sense of civic duty and offering short-term engagements is what we have to do to recruit.

It is an explicit goal to create lasting Digital Service teams in every federal agency specifically to ensure longer projects (those that actually involve (re)building something) have long-term support. Generally the short-term engagements USDS has are either to help agencies put a fire out, or to provide recommendations that the agency can then choose to implement with their own people.

The simple answer here is that government agencies are funded by congressional appropriations and salaries are regulated. The "government" may be rich, but that doesn't imply that it's easy to pay people market rates, and even if it were, there's a finite budget out of which to pay them that could instead be used to hire more people.

In many ways I'm actually glad this situation exists: it has the effect of filtering out people that care more about their market worth than the mission.

Don't assume that every piece of dysfunction you see can't be fixed. Many of these systems are mind-bogglingly complex and can't be replaced in one go. It seems entirely reasonable to me for a system undergoing modernization to have a modern piece interacting with the user feeding an old paper-based process behind it. That's obviously not the desired end goal but it seems like a perfectly reasonable intermediate one.

We're pushing for short-term engagements for a variety of reasons, but the big one is that the people that we want to attract most are people that already have nice jobs at companies with great pay and perks. It's hard enticing them to leave all of that to come work for government, but it's easier to entice someone to take a leave of absence to do it for 3 or 6 months. Many of the people joining as engineers fall into this category.