[wslack]

I'd just push back - technology is a tool to accomplish the missions of government.

The positions that run those missions - enforcing the law, ruling on the law, running Medicare, etc etc - should be more prestigious. That said, if the government wants to have prestigious technical work, it should be more open to taking big swings (in an agile way) on hard problems, but that requires investment and taking risks.

[zjaffee]

I think there would be comparable prestige if the government did something like roll out public broadband or made some sort of publicly owned social media.