[shanear]

These plays can work. Why? Because USDS employees are government employees with escalation paths all the way up to the very top which gives them a lot of power to break down bureaucratic barriers to modern software development that government contractors & consultants would have no chance of doing. They then can bring in contractors to work in the relatively modern shell that they've created.

For example, here's a project started by the USDS in 2015. It's responsible for managing the complex bureaucratic process of VA legal appeals. (https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow) It's open source, continuously integrated and deployed with close to 100% test coverage, deployed on an AWS GovCloud VPC, and was built on a fraction of the budget of similar systems.

Active development on this system is now done primarily by contractors now that the relevant bureaucratic barriers were removed.

How do we scale this story? More talented people with the desire to serve their country. It's not easy, but it can work.

[throwafed98]

Contractors can also be part of the problem. Very few contracting firms with access to blanket purchase agreements are willing to dump proprietary tech—as it’s their cashcow. For example, Oracle is huge in the federal gov, and Oracle DBAs are billed at a premium over a dev who can just make Postgres work. Worse, Oracle isn’t the problem rather the problem is some legacy tech or middleware no one has ever heard of that is incredibly fragile and has been hacked into a partially working solution by a vendor over a five year period and management isn’t willing to expend the financial, social, nor political capital to correct and forget about management acknowledging sunk costs.

IMO, USDS makes this worse as someone like Matt Cutts has the cachet to bring in the playbook and get execs to listen. Whereas, I’ve been doing this for 3 years and routinely have to fend off coup attempts as the term “mvp” sounds like a joke to other career employees. As such, it’s often easier to check the box of the federal acquisition requirements and collect a paycheck versus hustling to build a vanilla web app using JavaScript a rest api and Postgres before the checkbox folks shut you down because the baselined version of Jenkins is 5 years old and you installed version 2.26x without a request for change.

So how do we scale this story? Inform politicals and bureaucrats that incentives matter, successful tech start-ups are exception not the rule, sunk costs are real, and you don’t need a catchy name like 18f nor the catchet of celeb dev to right a failing project.

[wslack]

I've also heard of contractors selling nearly identical software to multiple agencies and charging each the full price of development (one reason open source has faced opposition), and sometimes decent excel macros can solve the actual problem.

You're totally right that if the incentives don't change, the choices made by execs won't change either. For example, a contracting officer I've met saved their agency a billion dollars by not continuing a failing contract, and was punished (to the point of leaving that agency) because that wasn't what the incentives supported.

How can USDS/18F be helpful to you and others in your position? The messages you list at the end are all true.

[throwafed98]

The Playbook is helpful. So is the DoD’s Detecting Agile BS. More publish references similar to these that can be presented to management. Another Avenue would be to engage GAO and OMB in order for their reports to align with above. Thank you!

[texasbigdata]

At market comp with market frustrations?

Most reasonable people might wanna work for their government for a 20% discount in either, but my fear is that it’s much much more and in both.

[shanear]

It's both more difficult than any private company job I've had and it paid less, but knowing the impact my work had on veterans was well worth all of it. I'm extremely proud of the work that my teammates and I did there.

So many people complain about the government, so few are willing to fight to fix it.

[wbl]

No civil service job can make us replace political appointees with well compensated civil servants like Singapore and the UK have.

[antpls]

Off-topic : I always wondered if serving one country also deserves the whole world.