I really wanted to work for the digital service and my experience applying was horrendous. The recruiter scheduled an appointment to call me and didn't at the scheduled time. She followed up weeks later and I finally got my phone screen. Phone interview went well, she said we would schedule another interview. The followup from her didn't happen until another month later. Then I had a technical interview where the interviewer talked over me and asked whether I would use a list or an array for a particular data structure, to which I replied I use Ruby & Python so I don't know what you're asking because it would be a question of semantics, to which he finally clarified he meant a linked list and chided me for not "knowing the difference between the properties of a linked list and an array." How can you expect me to know the difference between two data structures if you're using unclear shorthand to refer to one of them? And the interviewer was an ex-Google engineer so I imagine he had some familiarity with Python (where a "List" is what many languages refer to as an array) since it's an official Google language.

And then of course I didn't get the job (and no feedback on why). The whole thing was maddening, took 3 months total just to get railroaded by an aggressive and imprecise technical interviewer. It sounds like great work though, wish them the best of luck. Wish I could work on their projects.

Hi Andrew. I'm really sorry that you went through that. We know and acknowledge that our hiring process isn't perfect - I can't count the number of conversations where we at USDS share stories about how we personally were in some limbo before interviews or what we had to do to get drug tested or how we were super confused.

This of course is no excuse - there is a lot of work to be done and we are working on it.

I appreciate the apology but the really disappointing thing is talking to your recruiters who say it's hard to get good technologists into government and then looking at your process that seems to exacerbate the problem.

> I appreciate the apology but the really disappointing thing is talking to your recruiters who say it's hard to get good technologists into government and then looking at your process that seems to exacerbate the problem.

Not even the worst of the descriptions of experience with USDS hiring I've seen could possibly be reasonable viewed as exacerbating the problem (mitigating it less than an ideal process would, sure; but to be exacerbating, it would have to be worse than the average non-USDS public sector hiring process.)

I agree with you. I misspoke above. They are not exacerbating the problem but their hiring process could be an impediment to reaching their goals.

Every public-facing process a business has is part of the marketing process. If people are left with a story of how dealing with the business was a bad experience, that will affect the business's reputation. When stories like yours are common the pool of potential talent is reduced as people are put off applying in the first place. The recruiting process at the USDS is exacerbating the problem because it means that fewer candidates will apply for jobs there.

wait what? you have to get drug tested??

Seriously. Good software developers have other employment options that don't involve being treated like a criminal and having someone watch you urinate.

It definitely would. "Okay, that's the fourth and final interview; you're hired, salary is within our range, now give us your urine so we can see if you're a heroin addict" is typically not how I like to start major employee/employer trust relationships.

It's certainly not personal. I just think it's bad policy for all but the most safety-critical occupations, and choose to avoid employers who insist on collecting my bodily fluids or health history.

> Piss test would turn you off of a job? Seriously? You know that is bureaucratic policy 95% of the time and not personal?

Right, its a bureaucratic policy providing a firm and strongly negative indication of the employing entity's respect for its actual and potential employees.

EDIT: To be fair to USDS, one could argue that the policy with regard to Executive Office of the President staff is an externally imposed (its statutory, not executive order, as I understand) aspect of the kind of government culture that USDS is intended in many ways to be a leading wedge for changing, at least as it applies to the IT space, so it may be worthy of some more generous consideration than would generally be the case, but its still a negative indicator.

Most of the best coders I know would fail a drug test. It's just plain stupid. Even though I would pass one, I would never work for a company that does it.

"just a sweeping policy"

The USDS is suppose to be addressing the idiotic "seeping policies" that allow bureaucratic thinking to drive away those interested in working to use technology to improve performance.

That they didn't bother to fix this obviously silly bureaucratic rule that disrespects people is an very valid piece of data that you will find many less blatantly disrespectful bureaucratic rules stymying your attempt to do your work.

It might be they did a decent job fixing the many many problems with how much of government IT has been done but just failed on this one very visible and thus any marketer would tell you very important to address issue. But I doubt it. Most likely if they failed to even deal with this, the situation is pretty bad in many other ways.

USDS has done some nice things, according to stories I have read, but it seems it is just this appendage to the bureaucracy that is given some leeway due to powerful allies in the bureaucracy. This has always been the case in government and lots of good IT stuff has been done by those given power to avoid the normal IT processes by powerful allies.

But the other success isn't about an improved system it is about typical power politics in a bureaucracy. Things like sticking to bad policy that is driven by command and control thinking treating workers like drones such as polygraphs or drug testing for office workers is a sign that even the core thinking around the management system is extremely poor. In that case the management system will constantly be imposing idiotic rules on you that can be ignore only due to a powerful ally preventing enforcement (or just the incompetence of the bureaucracy to enforce the rules it set in place).

I'd easily pass a drug test, and whatever technical interviews. And there's not a chance in hell I'd piss in a cup for any employer.

It's demeaning, and I simply will not do it.

I think this is one of those east coast vs west coast business mindsets. West coast businesses for the most part don't even think about drug testing while east coast ones can't imagine why you wouldn't drug test.

I have never been drug tested. I've worked since 1990 on the East Coast. It's never even been mentioned to me, except the one time that I looked into the FBI and discovered that they can't afford me.

I've never been drug tested for a job in this industry since moving to the East Coast

The stupid part is that drug tests would reject a large percentage of really good programmers, and they are neither abundant nor cheap. That's a big cost for such a vague benefit.

Even better: at some of these employers, being treated therapeutically by a doctor with a DEA scheduled medicine forces you to take the urine test, fail it, and then inevitably listen to someone from HR ask you questions about your health history in order to ascertain if you really need to be taking the medicine. It's intrusive, infantilizing, and just not worth it when there are so many better employers out there.

I doubt people without a brain would get much out of drugs.

So now it's my urine and substantial pieces of my health history, including a pretty good drug-directed guess of what the actual underlying health condition is. Hope it's not an expensive one to insure. Oh, I'll write the doctor's number down too. I'll just fill out the HIPAA authorization form granting my potential employer access to my medical history. Good thing the practice's name doesn't include "behavioral health" anywhere in it.

Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?

>I'll just fill out the HIPAA authorization form granting my potential employer access to my medical history

If I saw an auth form for any medical records release I would nope the fuck out too. That doesn't sound typical or correct. I have only seen releases for the results of the test which yes, if come back positive and you have proof of legal use will indicate you've been getting treatment based on someone's guess. However, it should stop there. If someone from HR starts asking medical questions about why you are getting treatment, that sounds like it's crossing a serious line and I'd be looking into whether that's legal or not. That sounds like a company that is hiring some shitty people, never mind whether they are good or not because they have a drug testing policy.

>Why bother with this nonsense when there are so many better employment options?

You want to work in a specific industry

The issue is that virtually all practices will refuse to disclose any medical information to third parties without explicit written authorization.

I'm certain a lot of this behavior is illegal, but people who don't know or choose to ignore the law are everywhere, and litigation is expensive and time-consuming. I just want to build stuff, so I take these sorts of policies as a warning sign and look elsewhere.

I am generally against drug tests but I'd deal with one for USDS because I believe in the mission. Also let's say you're a recreational marijuana user, all you'd have to do is stop smoking for a month or so to pass a single test.

Premise: it is good, to the point of being legally enforced, to keep an individual's medical history private, except when necessary for medical treatment.

Conflict: an employer demands bodily fluids, revealing medications one is taking.

In most cases, the demand for the private medical history is unnecessary, stupid, and illegal.

It all comes down to insurance, liability and money.

My father always refused any position that demanded a drug test, even at points in his life where I am virtually certain he would have passed.

I likewise would pass, but would be turned off by the demand. I do not know if I would be sufficiently turned off to turn down an otherwise desirable job - it hasn't come up.

Why should anyone not operating heavy machinery have to be subject to such a test? I'm with the other poster in that I will never take a job that requires such a test purely on principle. If a job requires such a poor heuristic for gaining employment, how is it going to be actually working for them? My guess would be a steaming pile of incompetence raining from above. I have much better prospects as a technologist elsewhere.

I don't believe you do for 18F, but you do for the US Digital Service, as its a part (or operates under the authority) of the executive office of the President.

Not to be a jerk but I'm going to sound like a jerk, but know it is from a position of love: linked lists and arrays are both fundamental data structures.

At the very least you now learned about them. I want you to read this: http://mikerowe.com/2015/08/otw-rejection/

And let me relate to you: I get turned down for jobs all the time. It is not because of capricious reasons that I wish were the case, but it's because of me not knowing something. Yes, it's maddening because they throw out good candidates along with the bad to minimize risk to them. The same facts happen to me and you, but try to have the perspective on them be as positive as you can.

It sounds like he knew what a linked list was, but he was confused by the interviewer referring to it as a "list".

Well, the appropriate response is to politely ask for clarification. Sometimes asking a dumb question is a useful way to see how someone treats someone less experienced. I find treating interviewers with deep respect no matter how dumb they sound generally puts me in the drivers seat going forward.

If someone mentions array and list as alternatives in a generic CS context (not language specific), one generally familiar with the field should be aware of the concepts being referenced (one might reasonably ask to verify that the latter was a referenced to a singly-linked list, since while that's by far the most likely meaning in a generic context where it would be paired with an array, there are some other possibilities.)

That's not to say that failing to know that terminology should automatically result in rejection, but understanding that is not an unreasonable expectation when hiring something other than a narrow-focus language-specific code grinder.

I agree that the question needs improvement, it admits too much confusion unless there's a context. List is an ADT in Java and OCaml and some of the literature, an implementation in Python, C++ etc. Linked-list would have avoided that, although possibly suggests an answer.

Having said that, I'd be minded to look dimly on a candidate who tried to sidestep that question with 'but I use Python and they're the same there, so it's just a question of semantics' and did not try to clarify the question with me.

That's exactly it.

The most maddening part of seeing companies throwing good candidates out along with the bad is that it's actively harmful for getting good candidates. You're doing more interviews, which means more opportunities for a bad candidate to somehow slip through your filter.

It's a principle-agent problem - having a strict filter gives the interviewer a way to deflect blame when they hire a bad candidate. This is at the expense of the company both through additional bad hires and through extra time and money spent interviewing.

java.util.ArrayList

System.Collections.Generic.List<T> is an array.

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.

> And the interviewer was an ex-Google engineer so I imagine he had some familiarity with Python since it's an official Google language.

Be careful of such assumptions. Google has a lot of languages that they use, and it's not inconceivable that someone that worked at Google might be mainly a Java engineer, without much exposure to Python -- in which case list vs array is a pretty meaningful question from their perspective.

Good point. Though if that's the case then the question is why schedule a Java dev to interview a Ruby/Python/Javascript dev?

Not meaningful in Java.

java.util.List is an interface; java.util.ArrayList is the most commonly used implementation.

java.util.LinkedList also implements that interface. ArrayList has the same semantics under the hood as an array (fast insertion at arbitrary places, fast random access, slow extension), and any Java programmer who's remotely familiar with data structures should know the difference between the two. Especially when LinkedLists are so commonly used under the hood in e.g. the java.util.Queue family.

Yes, of course. But if someone - especially a java programmer - asked me "list or array?", I would regard them amateur. In most of today's popular programming languages, list != linkedlist.

Of course, the proper response to a dumb interview question like this is "You mean linked list or array, right?" Because a reasonably seasoned programmer should recognize this poor choice of terminology for what it is.

java.until.ArrayList says that question makes no sense, unless the question was really about the extra overhead and API of the list wrapper object.

That's what I was thinking, too. But perhaps it's because of C++, where std::list is actually a linked list.

at least you got a call back, ive been waiting for weeks to hear back to my initial contact. this kind of makes me want to not answer the phone if they do in fact ever call.

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.

If you don't mind me asking - why is the process so bad for you guys right now that many folks are complaining?

Also, your response sounds extremely canned, not gonna lie. Why not just say "Sorry about that, pm me your name and I'll look into it and fix the other dozen folks while I'm at it."? I see emails like yours all the time from middle management who don't quite know how to manage, but have such a large audience that they feel obligated to act "professional". It's a "human" issue, so just write a response like a human :).

18Fer here: Our team talent is tiny - I think three or four people. The amount of people in the pipeline is massive. They're inventing, and reinventing, processes left and right to improve. Also, at some point we have to hand off to GSA's hiring group for final paperwork, and we have less control over that process.

Also, we believe it's important to have the team you might work with do the interviewing, not just HR. Which unfortunately means we're often the problem - a fire with a client and suddenly you're down an interviewer, and we're not quite big enough to gracefully rebound and find a new one last minute.

All of which to say: not excuses, but hopefully gives you insight into some of our scaling troubles.

Thanks for the answer!

It doesn't sound like it's entirely your tream's fault, then. Not having enough time because of fires and such often screams to me of bad management towards the middle/top. And considering who you work for, that makes sense.

I wouldn't even say it's bad management. Emergencies do happen sometimes, and when that happens it sometimes has a bigger impact than "people can't buy pants on the internet right now."

Sounds like the typical technical interview.

Yes I would say it's typical. But they also say their challenge is getting good technologists into government. So if they believe they have difficulty hiring (which is their public stance) why not adopt a more candidate friendly process? And I'm not saying I necessarily would have gotten the job otherwise, who knows, but I do feel like they wasted a lot of time, strung things out over months and then didn't give me a good opportunity to show them my abilities.

Agree with you. Government work has not been very popular with programmers. Working for "the man" is not something that is generally sought after. Ideals are strong in this young industry. Dunno if they should try and work as a startup. They are a not a business, nor can they operate like one.

asked whether I would use a list or an array for a particular data structure...the interviewer was an ex-Google engineer

It was a computer science question, not a programming question. If a particular tool doesn't implement one of the fundamental data types that is an interesting point you can talk about.

But the question sounds like the interviewer wanted to make sure you understood the time-complexity difference between the two.

If you've never done that style of interview it is important to realize that the goal is quite different to making sure you understand a language's syntax.

Except, if you want to ask a question about CS Data Types, you really do need to be clear in your terminology.

I just turned to the two most relevant books that I had on my shelf. Neither Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, nor SedgewiCk's Algorithms in C refer to a list without a qualifier. Knuth speaks of Linear Lists, and then goes into a description of Linked lists, doubly linked list and circular linked lists, and Sedgewick refers exclusively to Linked lists.

If I went to an interview for a Java role, and was asked to choose between a list and an array I would assume they meant java.util.List, if it was a Scala role I'd assume scala.collection.immutable.List; I think it's entirely reasonable for a Ruby+Python dev to be confused about what set of terms the interviewer is drawing from.

If you want to ask a generic CS question, then preface it appropriately, and be precise about your terminology.

It actually was a programming question, it was in the context of discussing how I would build a redis-like caching service.

(Member of USDS) - I'm sorry we gave you a bad experience. It is not something I want to have happen to anyone.

If anyone asking "why is it so bad" actually genuinely wanted an answer, here is part of one: There's some finite amount of process change that we can absorb per unit time. We have tended not to prioritize process improvements that would reduce the risk of an individual getting a bad experience, in favor of ones that will increase the total yield of qualified hires. We know we are paying a price for this, so we keep an eye on places like HN to see how high it is.

Also check out 18F [1], which focuses on pushing forward how tech and the government work together. They run a 12-month Presidential Innovation Fellows program [2] which works more intensely on innovating with specific groups within the federal government. USDS is more focused on modernizing and ensuring some basic technical functionality of a lot of the core aspects of the government (which is incredibly important and impactful, but is less about innovation -- see a comparison here [3]).

[1] https://18f.gsa.gov/

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows

[3] http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...

18F uses the same hiring pipeline -- applying through https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... will get you considered for both!

Yep, and we have some extra 18F-specific information here:

https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/how-to-apply/

Make sure you have got a plan for 4 months as you work your way through this hiring pipeline. In other words, if you want to change jobs in December, and start working at 18F, you should be applying right now.

It is an extremely lengthy process, unfortunately.

18F also has a big office in SF (near Civic Center) and accommodates remote work, which is awesome.

They also have a Chicago office.

We have several "offices" (NYC too), and many people who work from home all over.

Came here to say the same thing. Know a few people who work there and they are doing some cool things.

I love how they work in the public and really advocate open source. One cool project is their analytics reporter: https://github.com/18F/analytics-reporter

At the risk of being self-promotional, there's another part of the rebel alliance of which USDS and 18F are the main players, and that is better technology contractors. ("Better" meaning, engineering practices and outcomes that the audience of this site would recognize.) There's Nava, and the company I co-founded, Ad Hoc. Greg and I were on the original HealthCare.gov rescue squad with Mikey et. al. We're still working on HealthCare.gov, but instead of helping to prop up the bad old code (which was necessary work to save the site and help actual people), we're rebuilding parts of the site from scratch, using things like Go, AWS, Angular. During the last open enrollment period over the winter, our code (healthcare.gov/see-plans/) had 100% uptime, served ~ half a billion page views, and had a mean response time of well under 100ms. (And _no_ garbage hiding in the 99th percentile.)

One thing I'll say about government work -- you're not really breaking new ground, from a technology perspective. (Unless you're at DARPA I suppose.) Don't come into thinking you're going to innovate in some bleeding-edge area. But government was left so far behind the consumer technology curve that basic, competently-executed, well-designed software that's fast is an _enormous_ leap forward. 2008-era web tech is sorely needed across government. In a way, that is the innovation: dependable software that reliably delivers services to people for whose user-experience has never been put on the same playing field as consumer online services.

If you're interested in being part of the rebel alliance, and for whatever reason USDS or 18F aren't right for you, consider contracting. There's enormous opportunity to make real change and see your code help others. Believe me, small teams can have a big impact on government, even from outside government. If you want to know more about Ad Hoc, get in touch (http://adhocteam.us/). We also have projects with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and state Medicaid programs.

I never thought I'd be a government contractor. I did the startup thing, and just happened to get roped into the HealthCare.gov rescue. I can tell you it's sometimes frustrating, but always satisfying work. And there are several avenues in.

There is so much truth to government being left in the dust technologically. When I was in the NSA, I built a bunch of programs that saved a dramatic amount of time by automating a lot of message passing, formatting, etc. When I made my first application, I didn't even know what a database was, so I built it using a bunch of interconnected perl applications using the Tie::File library on flatfiles and operating on them as arrays. With such little knowledge about creating applications, I was still able to have a major impact on people's workflows, showing how even the barest use of technology was extremely impactful.

A big part of why certain organizations fail on the technology side comes from how they perceive the use of systems on their network. For instance, in the NSA example, I asked if I could make programs to make things easier (having never made an application in my life) and the grizzled old veteran analyst handed me the Perl Cookbook and said "Go to town.". Compare that with my CIA contracting job where I was explicitly told not to program, programmed anyway, and proved that we could effectively make programs in-house instead of waiting for months on a separate contract to fulfill our needs. That programs savings to taxpayers dollars, by the way? About $10 million.

We do take for granted that we can do something like type `npm install` and programs magically get pulled from disparate parts of the internet and work. On government networks, you have to work with code that's been vetted over a 3-6 month process, leaving you with the baseline items (the node binary, for instance) but requiring you to rebuild the modules you need. I'm of course referencing networks that are completely air-gapped from the internet, that is.

Agreed! Thank you for a much improved plan compare :) I do think there's room for innovation-- we just have to implement reliable software first.

Piling on: If you're interested in being an early employee at a growth startup working with the government, check out Nava! (I work for Nava)

Our hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10001189

Do the contractors offer senior engineer pay (10+ years experience) that is more competitive with private sector? The direct employment jobs max out at mid-level engineer wages.

I'd say we're on par with the private sector.

Ad Hoc and Nava are both awesome groups of people!

You call yourself the Rebel Alliance, but you helped the government on a massive, expensive, intrusive, extra-legal project which almost nobody wants and has benefitted very few outside of the government and its cronies?

You ain't part of no Rebel Alliance, man. You're full Empire, and you helped build a Death Star.

As Sam alludes to, many YC alums have joined the government in some capacity—healthcare.gov, US Digital Service, Nava, Presidential Innovation Fellows—and are on HN.

Jason Shen from YC S11 recently wrote about the concept of a "Tour of Duty": http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-d...

If anybody has questions, feel free to ask and I'm sure one of the alumni will reply!

Why doesn't the government allocate more funding to pay skilled technical workers at least close-to-market wages for the crucial work they are doing in bringing government organizations and systems into the 21st century?

There's plenty of funding, but salaries are capped by law: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...

So Congress would have to pass a law to fix that particular problem.

That problem was solved decades ago by government contracting. See above, the healthcare.gov folks formed contracting companies so they could go back to work for the govt at double the salary.

That's not a solution. At all. The contracting companies end up pulling up the ladder so that nobody else can compete in the particular vertical they've managed to commandeer. And then they lose all incentive to work hard. They wind up hiring less and less competent workers and pocketing the difference.

Contractors are a big reason why the US government has the reputation it does today.

How much interaction does the USFS have with Congress? Do you have any idea when we'll start to see more technically-minded and possibly younger representatives in Congress who might make these issues more of a priority?

Pretty sure it's illegal for federal entities to lobby Congress. The Anti-lobbying Act makes it pretty hard, anyway. But folks like you could lobby your reps and senators and attempt to get them to increase federal pay. This is a democracy, after all, and you are the constituent.

It's off topic, but the legal status of lobbying in the US always baffles me. Today I learned It's entirely legal for a company to lobby a congressman, but not a government department. How does that make any sense at all?

A department or agency of the federal government acts within the laws and regulations set by congress and is overseen by the president. Thus, even if you wanted them to do or change something, they could not. Congress on the other hand is set up to listen to and respond to constituents (constitutionally), and thus lobbying congress is entirely legal as that it what you are supposed to do.

Well, the system is designed to make sure companies can dominate and control government departments. So, hey, working according to plan.

I didn't mean lobbying Congress per se, but simply the level of interaction between the two orgs. E.g. does the USFS work on projects to help improve/streamline Congress and do Senate/House reps meet with heads of USDS and 18F.

I'm afraid my net worth isn't high enough for me to have any real say in the way our country operates at the moment. Maybe one day :)

Because paying public employees more is politically unpopular and contracting out is politically popular, both with certain ideological groups and with the firms that actually get the contracting money (and turn around and work to support candidates that support contracting out), and paying government technical workers market salaries would mean the government was better at competing with contracting firms for talent.

Thanks for the shoutout :) glad USDS and 18F are getting the attention they deserve!

Sounds like a revolving door...

OK. Is that bad, in this case?

No. A revolving door refers to government leaders who leave government service and go work for lobbyists. We just go back to the private sector.

He revolving door absolutely refers to working for contractors, like is common in the militsry industrial complex.

If I were to dedicate any time to helping anyone, I feel like my time would be better spent helping the Tor Project than helping the US Government.

I know I'm not alone here, either.

Tor was started at the Naval Research Laboratory. There are smart, hard-working people in government service. The politicians, however, often have monied interests involved in preventing efficiency (pork barrel politics).

Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics:

"woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork."

Ok, how long will that take?

"I can probably have it done in a week."

It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week?

"Yeah, maybe two."

But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.

I share the philosophy, but a) this isn't volunteering, it's a job, and b) massively streamlining service delivery helps a LOT of people.

They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.

There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.

That's totally fair; I've done minimal work around government, and I don't claim to be an expert on this at all. I just know that successful contractors are rewarded disproportionately for their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Also, that was especially the case with healthcare.gov.

It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA. "Helping the US government" in the case of the digital service means things like making it easier for immigrants to apply for a green card by building a web application that replaces paper forms. What the digital service is actually doing is helping US citizens receive government services more efficiently. Which is completely different from "helping the government" the way you phrase it.

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.

> It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA.

Does the US Digital Service hire people who strictly refuse to assist in any way with any of the operations of the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, DEA, or any other oppressive agency?

If so, I'd reconsider, but I don't think they would hire me under those terms. And if they did, they wouldn't appreciate me saying "Fuck off!" if they tried to assign me to one of the projects to prop up one of these agencies?

I can't answer that, you'd have to ask them but everyone I spoke to at the digital service said their work was specifically delivering government services to citizens. I don't think they work with the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS etc. It's not a catchall organization that works with every federal government department.

> I don't think they work with the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS etc.

Just a small note, immigration is DHS.

(Member of USDS) - The answer is no, sorry. We prioritize assignments based on their potential to do the most good for the largest number of people, and do not pressure anybody to work against their conscience. But we can't reconcile rigid individual pre-conceived ideologies with the need to run a coherent and diverse group.

Consider the opposite scenario: should we hire somebody who "strictly refuses to assist in any way with providing government handouts to undeserving moochers?" Such a person would be an obvious liability, given current priorities.

If I hired the first group and not the second, then we'd become an explicitly partisan and ideological operation, that still has to work with a Democrat administration and a Republican Congress. That's a whole new level of pain that I need like a hole in the head.

Fwiw, the US Government is pretty big. And it's not like we all get secret decoder rings and meet up once a year to figure out how to trick the public in the next year.

There's a lot of organizations with a lot of different goals.

Up to you, of course. But I've worked with a lot of good people doing a lot of good work for the people of the world.

Why not boycott the US entirely, then? The American public is also part of the government to the extent that they vote and participate in public debate. And I'm sure most government agencies knew just as much as the rest of the country about what the NSA was up to before Snowden.

Best of luck avoiding roads, sewer, the mail, air traffic control, etc, and all their side effects :)

Paul Syverson (one of the authors of the Tor design paper - https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...) actually came by the GSA about a month ago to talk about privacy. The geeks are listening.

Until they indict James Clapper for perjury and grant Snowden immunity, I refuse to assist the government in any way beyond paying taxes.

http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com

Paying taxes is by far the greatest submission you could do to support the regime. Taking the govertment's money to help social services is far more noble than sending the govt a check that is used to buy spies and bombs.

He didn't understand the question? I find that really hard to swallow.

> As a result, the Committee itself became complicit in an act of public deception.

Good, let's imprison them all for perjury then, not just Clapper.

No, they already knew the answer to the question which he fully understood, and he lied about the program because it was top secret, and they were using a public hearing to try and out the program. They already knew about the program and even so if they wanted to truly find out without breaking national security they could have held a closed door session.

> "They chose to make these statements in public that weren’t accurate," Wyden added. "They could have declined to answer the question in an open hearing. They have declined to answer questions in an open hearing before. At that hearing, he declined to answer other questions."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/mar/11/...

In Citizenfour, Snowden specifically highlights Clapper's testimony as one of the factors that solidified his decision to go public. Clapper not only deceived the American public, he quite literally was one of the reasons the program was ultimately exposed.

And I'm glad it was exposed. Spying on every single one of your citizens' interactions and logging that information indefinitely in secret for later inspection has no place in a free society.

Re: declining to answer, other questions were presented in advance for that very hearing and declined in advance by Clapper – they were not asked, and they were not entered in to the record. See the parent Politifact article for sources. Did declining those questions expose secrets?

Most of what Snowden revealed wasn't illegal and metadata collection has been deemed OK long ago and written about at length previously.

> Did declining those questions expose secrets?

Unsure, but not relevant to the parent argument.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal level ruled that the metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" and is therefore not supported by law, i.e. illegal. This happened on May 7th, 2015 and is public record.

Great, but Clapper testified in 2013.

It was illegal then and it's illegal now. The circuit court didn't say "as of May 7th, 2015 this is illegal"; they said that the NSA exceeded the scope of surveillance authorized by Congress in October of 2001.

That isn't relevant to him having to lie to an open commission about a top secret program they already knew about.

You claimed the metadata collection program was "written about at length" and viewed as "OK". This is evidence from the judicial branch of the US government it is not, in fact, viewed as okay.

I'm wondering about the sources of laws and norms about "oversight". On the one hand, Congress and committees have a subpoena power and individual members have an immunity for what they reveal on the floor. On the other hand, the Executive manages to enforce security clearance requirements against individual Congressional staff (not against the members themselves, I believe -- though they get them to follow procedures for information security that are analogous to what a regular government employee would do).

And the committee members seem to have a pretty strong tradition of keeping classified information secret -- but isn't that just a tradition? Couldn't a member just decide that the public ought to know something in particular and hence reveal it? Is it a tactical decision about hoping to achieve better cooperation with witnesses and sources in the long term?

(I'm also wondering where the whole concept and structure of oversight comes from -- I think historically and constitutionally it has to do with the budget power but it seems like it's developed pretty far beyond that.)

So you admit he lied to Congress and the American public, but think it was justified? What do you think would have happened had Clapper told the truth?

There's literally millions of pending green card applications. You don't think good IT would help?

On a much smaller scale, I still remember the thrill of renewing my vehicle registration online, as compared to the slow, slow, slow DMV.

That's a great point, good IT would definitely help. But it doesn't seem like we're making any real movement towards replacing the current bureaucratic mess with well-designed systems. Then again, I didn't know there were alternatives to the DMV until this very moment.

It's a big government. One project at a time... :)

Let me guess- anarchist?

Since when was "anarchist" name-calling?

I have no real response because I have tried to have discussions with your ilk a million times and we will simply never see eye to eye.

It is a label, which combined with "your ilk" is not a productive tone to adopt.

To be fair, howterrible's tone is arguably far worse - he makes accusations that he must want [insert negative extreme not backed by evidence], and goes more in depth as with trying to connect silverstorm with malformed reasoning.

At the least silverstorm phrased it as a question in wait of an answer, which is a lot more civil than the outright hostile attack that aimed more to accuse than to enlighten.

I would disagree with that in the abstract. Delays in workflow can be addressed, or at least surfaced, by better back-end tech and reporting, and 18F's repos are public on GitHub.

The USDS Playbook[1] reminded me a lot of the GDS Design Principles[2] and even shares a few points. I think they also set a feeling for each of the Governments they're related to.

[1] https://playbook.cio.gov/

[2] https://www.gov.uk/design-principles

Sharp eye! We are indeed indebted to the work that the UK has done! They are a couple years more senior (USDS just had it's 1st birthday this Tuesday; GDS is coming up on 3) and while there is much tailoring for each country's unique circumstances, we've certainly benefited from their experience.

We’re over 4 years old now, officially formed in April 2011.

Unfortunately, we just lost the person who put together the team who put all that in place in the UK. I hope his replacement is going to be able to take the baton and run with it.

I've met a lot of the U.S. Digital Service people and it is an amazing organization. I had a list of concerns (how they work with contractors already in place, how things would evolve with a new administration, whether they would get sucked into long term staffing at agencies, etc) and they had addressed all of them.

There are a few negative things as overhang from the rest of government (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose), but those are the reality, and don't diminish the value of the program in any way.

I would strongly recommend looking into USDS to anyone who who wants to make a difference in tech. It is a great place to go in the middle of a longer career at a post IPO company like Google/FB, or are between projects.

> (requirement for citizenship: so many of the great people I know are non citizens, even if many have green cards; drug testing, which doesn't really serve a meaningful purpose)

As an 18F employee, I can't speak for USDS, but I know 18F can (and does, I think) employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor). I've also never taken a drug test.

> employ non-US citizens who are already authorized to work (we can't sponsor)

Doesn't that just mean permanent residents?

Not necessarily. For example a L-1A visa is a non-immigrant visa for intra-company executive or manager transferees. Spouses of L-1A visas are in L2 status, which allows them to apply for work authorization.

I think work permits and green cards are separate things.

Ah! It probably depends a lot on role. Good to know.

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.

Thanks for the kind words. Yes, we have made progress. Yes, there are still quirks. Yes, there is more to do. Come help!

As a YC alum, while I find some strong similarities between Digital Service and a small growing startup, there are indeed some additional hoops that we go through as a part of the US government and that's part of the tradeoff you get for being able to help government agencies that have huge impact!

Really happy seeing these initiatives and the way the White House is thinking about bringing technology to the government.

I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible.

Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.

You bring up a great point and a big challenge is the way government purchases things. There have been a lot of laws passed to ensure that the gov't buys things in a fair way (as not to just give the contract to a friend) but over time those laws and policies have resulted in an extremely complex and time consuming process that only huge companies can devote the resources to "apply" for a job and win it. Once a law is passed and a policy is in place, it can be very hard to unwind (power of inertia) which is why it can take a crisis like Healthcare.gov to make sweeping changes. Teams like 18f are designed to help the gov't build the right tech in house, skipping the procurement process, and using agile methods and modern tech to build faster and cheaper.

To be clear, 18F is not be "skipping the procurement process" and has released their own Agile BPA which is great. Skipping the procurement process would be the sign of a bad workaround.

A critical part to fixing "the problem" is both creating vehicles for new kinds of companies to access government and reduce the overall risk of government officials purchasing from those companies.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM / Accenture / Whatever" applies in government as well, but the appetite for risk can be even lower than in the private sector, with higher costs of entry.

Top-level butt-coverage from the White House / OSTP and another agency demonstrating that it is possible and creating the contract vehicles to get more agile / lean / innovative businesses in the door goes a long way to solving this problem.

It isn't just taking on risk by trying something new. Even a known better solution can result in assuming risk.

Take a long existing systematic problem which produces 100 bad effects a day (people getting double billed, database errors, what have you). Someone thinks of an improvement to reduce this to 10 bad effects a day instead. A major improvement. But they don't do it.

Why? Because anyone who approves of the new system is now the person responsible for the 10 errors a day. It goes from 100 errors per day because that is just how the system works to 10 errors a day because of Bob two cubes over. Bob ends up being blamed for the 10 errors far more than being congratulated for the 90 that no longer occur.

Additionally, there are people that believe that the private sector spurred by competition can provide a better, cheaper product. Personally, I think that's more a feature of new and small companies without entrenched interests and inertia. As you noted the requirements for government contracts have made their entry into bids harder than larger companies that can afford the large upfront bidding cost in time, effort, lobbying, etc.

In my eyes, it's entirely possible the USDS is and ca be successful because it's new. I think it's (unfortunately) entirely possible that in 10-20 years they will suffer from the same bloat and inertia problems large companies and existing government agencies do. I'm not sure how to combat that, but having a way to revitalize large companies or government agencies without losing too much of the existing internal knowledge and expertise would go a long way towards helping combat this, but I'm not sure what that is. There are probably numerous successful companies that have done this that I'm entirely unaware of, so maybe there is a good amount of information on how to combat this...

GDS are doing a great job on this in the UK by building a platform for small companies to pre-register as government IT suppliers, covering everything from phone systems to cloud hosting and bespoke software. One of the things I really like about the work they're doing is that one of their performance metrics is increasing the number of small businesses getting government contracts.

There's almost no pipeline for "smart software folks with industry experience" into DC right now. "Big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money" as you put it, is realistically the only option available to the decision-makers.

USDS and 18f are trying to change that reality in part by creating that pipeline. It only works if good people are willing to put in the work.

Often the thought isn't "let's give this to a big corporation." Often, the way the proposals and contracts are written, only big companies could reasonably respond.

18F is helping to change that with our Agile BPA!

Because those giant companies have an army of managers and accountants that will be sure to check every box and cross every t. A group of Valley engineers is thoroughly less thorough.

Navy doc here. One project where a huge difference could be made, now, would be if smart people could hold Leidos to task with the new military health care system. It's something like $16 billion dollars and "integrating with the VA proved to be too expensive".

Many thanks to the folks at 18f and the US Digital Service.

How far behind is government IT? I'm trying to get the Navy HPC systems (the cutting edge, right?) to "modernize" to Python 2.7.

Hi Niels. I have contacts within the DoD HPCMP and have run Python 2.7 on several of the heavy machines available on the Army side of the fence. I work for Continuum, which provides both a free and a commercial Python solution that are basically "drag-and-drop" installs on x86 hardware, and when I was at the Army Corps of Engineer Research Lab I worked on an open source tool called HashDist that, among other things, simplifies the deployment of Python stacks on HPC hardware. Feel free to get in touch with me via my contact information at http://aron.ahmadia.net if I can be any help.

Thank you for this feedback! Adding to what Nacin said about our involvement. We have started work in this space, and care deeply about the electronic health record systems at both the DOD and VA, and connecting critical information between the two systems, as well as data exchange with private sector (downtown). Also, major kudos to being a Navy doc who understands what it means to upgrade Python!

Thank you for your service!

There's a ton happening here. From http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/dod-start-its-own-dig...: "The new team is already working to transfer electronic health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs from DOD."

What's new in python 2.7 that requires upgrading ?

I prefer writing python in the least-clever way I can, which doesn't require a lot of language features.

Wearing my python core dev hat: a litany of security fixes, python3 compatibility stuff, useful stdlib modules, dict and set comprehensions, probably more stuff I can't remember.

One change that comes to mind that someone might see as trivial: "{}".format("foo") works in 2.7 and not in 2.6 (in 2.6 it must be "{0}".format("foo")).

> I'm trying to get REDACTED to "modernize" to REDACTED

Loose lips sink ships, doc.

As a general rule, I try to avoid saying things like that unless they're published elsewhere. In this case, they advertise the info. And best of luck getting into these systems without a clearance.

http://centers.hpc.mil/users/COSTQuickRef.html#Python

Can you elaborate on your point for others?

I think the notion is that knowing what software versions a government IT system is using internally will help attackers, for example because they'll know about likely vulnerabilities in those systems. There are definitely some attackers who are interested in, say, government and military healthcare IT systems, because they can use those to get personnel records (or maybe even more nefarious applications).

"Loose lips sink ships" is a World War II campaign slogan to get people who had knowledge of military activities not to talk about what they knew, even things they thought were completely innocuous, because sometimes even a small piece of information was relevant to letting an adversary deduce something important.

In this case it gives an increased false sense of safety in having security by obscurity, which ends up being the worse path.

Did the people that charged $200 million to build healthcare.gov get to keep the money after the project failed? What about the people that allocated that money, do they still have their jobs?

It seems kind of disingenuous to ask engineers to do a "tour of duty" at a substantially reduced rate, when they could instead contract at normal rates and actually deliver working software. If you want to help the government, contract at normal rates and actually deliver high-quality, working software - don't take a pay cut to do it.

Small note: the $200 million dollar figure wasn't for all of healthcare.gov, it was for the _authentication system_.

If you do something and the client doesn't like it, do they get their money back? Of course not.

There's a big difference between not liking something, and it not functioning.

Did he take his own advice? Also regarding the rewrite of HealthCare.gov - I don't know the specifics but aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation? Is it really a fair comparison?

The main problem with the original healthcare.gov was that it was built by contractors under the old contracting model of "fill as many seats with bodies as you can, win the contract, and charge by the hour". That business model creates a perverse economic incentive that doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity, and certainly doesn't do anything to create trust between the federal agency that requires software and the team that ends up building it. I would also say that the hiring bar for contractors, compared to 18F, the USDS, etc, is, frankly, pitiful.

> "fill as many seats with bodies as you can, win the contract, and charge by the hour"

THIS MAN knows what he's talking about. I wish more people would be aware of this.

What's even more perverse? When contracts are awarded based on the above while factoring in "diversity points" - different minorities count for different numbers of points. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out what perversity follows.

Oh, you mean the preference for women, minorities, and veterans? Yeah, that's an interesting issue. It's great in theory, but in practice ends with quite a bit of additional bench stuffing to increase preference. And then to start a company and compete for contracts, even if you're a rockstar engineer who just happens to be white and a man, good luck competing against an 8A. It's hard to complain, because I see the value, but at the same time, UGH.

Quite honestly, it creates a class of "tokens". They nominally have jobs, but their real job (for the sake of the company being awarded the contract) is to simply be a token. Certain minorities count for more than others.

I definitely wouldn't go that far in describing the problem, but yes, there are issues with the model.

The conventional wisdom is that rewrites usually fail:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect

  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

This article has some specifics on the rewrite of healthcare.gov:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/mee...

I too am curious if Sam will take his own advice and do a tour.

I would like to someday. Very busy with YC for the foreseeable future.

too busy to serve your country? when duty calls, we should answer. ;)

generating new companies and helping them bring ideas to light is also an asset to our country/world/society.

> aren't re-writes always way cheaper and far easier than the initial implementation

No, definitely not "always." There are many examples of big enterprise systems being rewritten that take forever and ultimately fail -- to the point where the old system is put back in place.

I suspect there's a fair amount of survivor bias there too; initial implementations that aren't cheap and relatively easy don't tend to survive long enough to get rewritten!

I'm afraid Sam Altman could be the sign of rot setting into YCombinator.

Remember Sam described Ellen Pao as doing a good job when in fact she did a terrible job and had to resign from Reddit.

Now he wants developers to go on a "tour of duty"? Makes a mockery of combat veterans who come back with horrific injuries and mental scars.

If you dig that deep for things to criticize, you'll find them anywhere.

Some of the other comments refer to rewrites where the intention was to expand scope / technology / scale / etc. The Healthcare.gov rewrite was simply to make a functional system. If you have a system that does A, it is absolutely easy (relative to greenfield) to rewrite another system to do A. The problem is that most rewrites don't just set out to do A, but to also incorporate B, C, D and E, with an easy framework that enables F, G and H, and...

Can we vote on what they work on?

I just want to be as sure as possible that they never get around to fixing the traffic ticketing system.

God forbid the state cops ever realize how many times the local cops have pulled me over, or vice versa, and that's before we even get out-of-state violations involved.

Good lord, keep them away from the traffic tickets. COBOL is just fine for that.

I've had a lovely problem of having a Dutch last name and the officer writing my middle name as "Van", then trying to inquire about said ticket in a system which apparently you can only search by name or ticket number (which I lost), only to be told "no record found" and later getting a notice that my license was suspended from the DMV.

Request noted. :)

> serving your country

Erm. Serving your country does not equal to serving the government. Often the government in place actually has an active role in destroying the country or making it worse. Look at the NSA - are the NSA folks really serving their country or their goverment first ?

Saying, "Help the monied interests who control governments." doesn't sound as convincing.

Serving your country/honour/helping the group are rhetorical tools used convince people to sacrifice themselves (their human capital, and sometimes their bodies) for this group.

Governments are extremely powerful (obviously), and part of that power comes from co-opting people. A metaphor can be seen in the Matrix. To quote Morpheus:

> The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

The hacker culture is being co-opted wholesale. Technology is powerful—both as an economic driver and a competitive advantage against other groups—, so it's not unexpected that the human capital which are tech savvy are targeted.

People can't be forced to do anything—unless they break the law at which point they will have the full force of law brought down upon them, with no mercy applied (if members of the gov choose!). As such, people with skills need to be convinced to work with government, and that's where the rhetorical tools are implemented.

When you read comments about how governments help the people they preside over, you're reading the grass-roots propaganda from those which Morpheus talks of. The businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, coders!

Do as you like, but it's important to know the message conveyed in the blog post is from a member of the business-class who has been fully co-opted, and doesn't follow the very advice he gives! And why would he? It's much more profitable (in the board sense of the word) to use his platform as a tool of marketing and persuasion for said establishment—I.e. getting others to make sacrifices, so those with control can live with impunity and in-group-largess (with the cost borne by society).

18F/USDS doesn't really work on the military industrial complex, but civil applications like social welfare. The beneficiaries of USDS's work are, for example, poor people who can get benefits more efficiently. In that sense it is "serving your country" like AmeriCorps or Habitat for Humanity or becoming a social worker. So yes, U.S. Cyber Command will use the same rhetoric and you shouldn't believe it, but this isn't that.

They even run a kissmetrics-style real-time analytics page:

https://analytics.usa.gov/

Between immigration and weather one can cover 70% of queries right there ;) And thanks to sama for the write up.

Yup. I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. This project is really important for two reasons.

1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users.

2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.

> I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this.

Thanks! We loved the opportunity to assist the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) with the dashboard. They've been around since ~2012 and have been doing the legwork to get agencies to participate in the program for years:

https://www.digitalgov.gov/services/dap/

Oh! Thanks for letting me know. Had no idea about that particular team. Will happily give you both credit next time!

The Digital Analytics Program (DAP) rocks!

Will this scale? For me it looks like a kind of organizational anti-pattern. Imagine you are working in your project, then comes the "Know it all" guys trying to redo everything you know about. After rebuilding everything they will leave, take all the credits and leave the bomb with you.

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.

Any idea what the compensation is like? Would the "tour of duty" be considered a sacrifice or is it a viable way to make a living for a talented engineer?

I'm currently at the US Digital Service so figured I'd add some color. There are many subtleties about how government hires that makes this a really interesting question.

We are brought in either under Intermittent Consultants or Schedule A hires. This means that in exchange for being able to hire you by name rather than going through a more structured process through USAjobs.gov, you can only work for 2 years. Therefore, no matter what the pay, it's probably not a viable long term career.

It's also important to note that this is probably a good thing - I've been at Healthcare.gov and USDS since Jan of 2014 and I'm finding that I'm getting adjusted to some of the bureaucracy. It's therefore actually key to balance experience with fresh perspectives.

I'd also say that the salary ranges - it's in part based on what you used to make in the private sector but has a hard ceiling. For everyone who comes, it's more than enough to survive but not a long term career move for anyone. And of course, there are no stock options or equity stakes :D.

You also have to move for a little while, right?

Overall, it doesn't sound like you get strung out to dry in any particular way. Seems like it's mostly a "sacrifice" in the sense of putting your ordinary professional opportunities on pause for a little bit- although if the program becomes highly reputable, it could actually be good for you professionally.

Many of us move to DC. However, 18F also has teams in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Raleigh, Tuscon, Austin, Dayton, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara, Seattle, and Portland.

I had never lived in DC before joining USDS, but soon added a new favorite city to my list! I definitely never felt strung out to dry either.

And Denver!

Thanks for the info, that's pretty interesting. Are you ever allowed to go back and do another 2 years?

I'm not certain about the exact intricacies of the Schedule A hiring authority so I may be corrected by someone later - but my understanding is that this would not be possible to be rehired under the same hiring authority. People have joked about doing both a Schedule A and an Intermittent Consultant[0], which would allow you to do 4 years (2x2) - as we've just hit our 1st birthday, no one has tried it yet!

[0] There are some slight differences in how pay, retirement, and some other benefits are distributed, so they are mostly but not entirely interchangeable.

Do you get 2 years worth of pension? ie 2 40ths (or whatever the accrual rate is )

Pensions have a 3 year cliff - but you're only allowed to work for 2 as a schedule A and you don't accrue years as an IC so one can conclude with very high confidence that I will not have a pension :D.

Ah sneaky if a highly unfair to the people taking a paycut to work for their country.

I'm not an expert (by any stretch of the imagination) on federal hiring policy, but my appointment is 2 years, with the opportunity to extend another 2 years. No clue what happens after that.

Salary range is $116,021 to $158,700.

(From va.gov/ds/, where I work, I believe this is the same for all the other Digital Service teams though)

So basically it's more "mercenary" than performing a "tour of duty" to serve your country.

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.

I think lots of people would enjoy serving on a jury if two things were fixed:

* You don't have to spend a full day in a courthouse doing nothing during the selection process

* The government guarantees you will continue receiving your normal income during the trial

Please add "Having Jury Nullification Explained in Detail" to your list.

Of course, if you're a student, they have no problem pulling you out of the classes that you might be paying several hundred a day to attend, without comp...

Market for the people USDS is hiring generally is higher than that in cash, plus better benefits, plus 50-100k/yr in equity. There is some sacrifice, but not an insurmountable one.

The army is all volunteers. But they still get paid.

Wouldn't it be difficult to attract top talent (or even mediocre talent) in that range?

Honestly, that's much better than I was expecting. Two years working to improve our shitty government systems in exchange for a quarter of a million? Sounds like a fair short-term deal, even if higher comp is available elsewhere...

Bottom of 116 is pretty huge. Even for the Bay Area thats not a bad start

The actually-doing-tech-work GS levels (GS-10 to GS-13), by comparison, are 50-60k. That is where government pay is still the big impediment.

$116k/yr for your entire mid/late career would also suck (compared to 200-400k in industry), but for <2 years, I can't see that alone being a huge issue, unless you have kids in college, are paying for a mortgage elsewhere, etc.

Honest question, because I can't find it in the copy on the USDS page, but have seen comments here about this:

Do you treat this as a job with a certain known tenure, or rather as a sabbatical? It seems like they want specific periods of work, but how does that fit with a regular job where you're vaguely working for a company indefinitely?

How does relocating to the DC-metro area fit in with that? Relocation is expensive and a hassle, after all.

Is it me or does $4M annually still seem like a high cost?

It sounds high to me too and I'm was on the team that rebuilt the login system. From what I know about it - we knew how much it cost us[0] and didn't have the support and maintenance contract figured out yet so we reported out 4 to build and no more than 4 to maintain and the number has kind of stuck.

I would say that I (very naively) thought that it would be easy peasy to rebuild all of healthcare.gov. I was wrong. There are all sorts things that make it much harder than you'd expect in a private sector environment.

I do think that there are probably ways to get this cost even cheaper - however, from a software profiling perspective, moving it down an order of magnitude or two is a huge win and that it's a pretty clear choice between further optimization compared to an order of magnitude change on a VA, immigration, or other system.

[0] I'm not actually sure how exact this number is either - lots of help required from people from all different contracts - so this is an upper bound estimate

It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?

It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly.

By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses.

The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.

Your forgetting the costs of the FS pension

That sounds like the salary of 20 engineers (+ some managers, office managers, and cleaning staff time).

Not really if it includes salaries, datacenter space, and support contracts for hardware

Not just you.

Technology makes government and other traditional institutions irrelevant. Focus you efforts on decentralizing technologies that replace giant outdated systems entirely.

The US government, like all traditional states, is just a really official type of organized crime. The DNA of the state is past its expiration.

I would have been all over this a few years ago, but being married to someone who can't also move to DC for a multi-month period makes it unworkable. For my career, I work 100% remotely - I would love to do some work for the digital service if they had opportunity for remote working.

18F is structured to support remote workers. You'd need to be on site in DC to work at the USDS though.

Yep. 18F is great, and the teams work together on a lot. Here's more on why it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888.

I attended one of the UKs GDS road shows this week. I have been trying on and off for a while to get better OSS into local government (http://www.oss4gov.org) and am impressed still by the focus there is in government in doing the right thing.

The big wins they are having is enforcing OSS licenses for bespoke development, pooling purchasing into rolling 6-9 month call-off frameworks and generally waving the agile and cheaper flags.

I am not convinced that the idea of a sort of Peace Corps couple of years will be the solution - if we get government software based on an infrastructure of OSS then it's likely both private and public developers will be familiar with those Eco systems anyway.

Sam wrote "I often get asked about what people can do for a year or two to make a big impact between projects." If the US government isn't the right fit (especially if you're not an American), consider doing a Fellowship with a non-profit which may also have a big impact. MovingWorlds.org is one place to find those opportunities. We (engageSPARK, a not-for-profit business building the "Twilio for non-techies" for NGOs & Governments) also have a Fellowship program: https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join . :)

I wonder if there is an equivalent in Australia (or other countries).

The DTO in Aus has hired a few ex-GDS employees and seems to be doing good work: https://www.dto.gov.au

If this resonated with you, check out:

Mikey Dickerson (head of USDS) at SXSW: Why we need you in government https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/mikey-dickerson-to-sxsw...

Previous HN discussion on USDS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988819

yes government needs good tech but we as a global community also need good leaders that understand implications of new tech , policy and innovation.

Absolutely - and a lot of what USDS, 18f and PIF do is bring technical people into gov't not only to design and code software, but to make sure the right solution gets implemented, and help policy makers understand how effective technology gets built.

implementing the right solutions is very subjective. There are many approaches to solving a single problem.Lets take the energy example where we have different solutions in renewables, hyro and nuclear amongst others . Now it seems that the people working on renewables dont talk to people from hydro nor with those working on nuclear. IMHO might be better for the global community where people working on a single problem communicated amongst themselves and policy makers to self select what works best.

Not disagreeing with you, but I don't see any programs that would actually help people do that on a global basis. The US Digital Service idea is great - I wouldn't want anyone to be under the impression that it isn't "big enough".

According to this talk, the work hours were pretty insane to fix healthcare.gov. From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City, Mikey Dickerson's keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov: Where Are We Now? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc8sxhy2I4

Here's Todd Park's (White House Technology Advisor) talk during the recently concluded Twilio Signal devcon. He's then followed by the co-founder of Twilio, newest avenger in the USDS team https://youtu.be/4QXZl4cFw24?t=50m33s

I agree that you should stop complain about anything IT-related in government and instead try to make a change (and complain about, let's say, bogus process of winning government contract)

That been said, I don't believe USDS/18F/GSA in big need for engineers from my own experience. So don't afraid to apply :)

Is anyone aware of any similar programs in the charity space? I would imagine there are charitable organizations out there in need of some solid tech but lacking the infrastructure to build it.

I'm a contractor under the GSA's OCSIT, sharing a floor with 18F, the PIFs, and occasionally members of the USDS that come to hang out. It's great to see the feds hiring awesome technologists and doing great things, including some of the technologies that are currently only available to teams with, as the developers of them say, "a reasonable pain tolerance". My only advice to 18F is that they should figure out pathways to provide the services they intend to provide, create a management plan, and stick with it. I would recommend them to check out the business models of Peter Corbett's iStrategyLabs, who is right here in Washington D.C. and doing great work for some really big brands, and VICE's Carrot Creative, from Brooklyn, if they want to see the agency model in action.