[alpha_squared]

> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.

Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.

[pushcx]

It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient.

18F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Overview of the related programs: https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/

(A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)

[yegle]

I took the words at their face value and genuinely thought 2 engineers got this done. In reality there's an OPM engineering team in Georgia.

[wredcoll]

I mean, the article has paragraphs like:

> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.

Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.

[awwaiid]

It was downplayed at every other opportunity including the conclusion, emphasizing instead the lone team of two heros. A few shout outs here and there, but the theme was clear.

[ZeroGravitas]

They're still pushing the "underground mine" bullshit too even though the ex-salt mine storage facility has a state of the art audio and video digitisation studio in it.