[nrr]

I think the obvious answer is to make it compelling for those kinds of engineers to consider civil service as a long-term option. Right now, 18F positions on the general schedule, which is probably where ICs would land, are time-limited up to, I think, four years.

That said, we should perhaps not have Google engineers live the meme of bringing their flavor of complexity everywhere they go, but I feel that having permanent FTE positions within government agencies specifically for bolstering up the competency and cost-effectiveness of information technology projects is overall a good thing.

My suspicion is that the majority of the projects that agencies like the GSA undertake (through its TTS arm, of which 18F is a constituent part) are ho-hum boring business IT projects, where most of the complexity comes not from the technology itself but from having to deal with getting a handle on the meandering specifications laid down by stakeholders (read: the plebiscite via representation in Congress).

I further suspect that the engineers that are recruited by 18F and the USDS tend not to go into the weeds on immediately building out, e.g., systems like Chubby and Stubby and D/GFS and Bigtable for the sake of it but rather tend to focus on trying to solve the problem at hand. I feel that the requirement to submit timesheets (and, hence, justify time spent) every week tempers that "every problem is tempting" feeling. Anecdotally, it did for me when I worked at a similar three-letter organization, albeit in the private sector, for the better part of half a decade.