[sabarjp]

"Fixing" government web has nothing to do with young people. I contracted for 5 years for the Department of Defense doing full stack web. Yes, most people I worked with were double my age or more, but many of them are very talented and eager to implement new technology.

The problem is the massive, unbelievable amount of red tape to get things done. Software stacks and browsers have to get approval and re-approvals, a years-long process. Code has to be written in something stable, not something trendy. The programmers spend more time writing documents and attending meetings than coding. There are meetings about meetings and the layers of management are infinitely recursive (managers for the managers).

Start-up culture and tech trends just don't work at the scale of government, for much the same reasons massive corporations move glacially. Just add even more layers of management, congress, civil service employees that cannot be fired, and tax dollars to the mix.

I enjoyed my time working in government web, but "youth" isn't really an answer.

[wpietri]

Speaking as an old, I think youth is part of the answer. One of the things I have to really work at as I get older is unlearning the things that used to be true. Given the pace of technological change, younger people have an advantage in that they have less to unlearn.

> Start-up culture and tech trends just don't work at the scale of government, for much the same reasons massive corporations move glacially.

This is good example of an old truth that needs some unlearning. Old corporations move glacially. Some new ones work differently, though.

Government can also work differently. The folks at 18F and the US Digital Service are demonstrating that in ways both large and small. Indeed, when I was looking at a USDS job, a White House advisor told me plainly that agile, iterative approaches were clearly better for government because they were much more effective at risk reduction than producing piles of documents ever could be.

[toomuchtodo]

> Government can also work differently. The folks at 18F and the US Digital Service are demonstrating that in ways both large and small. Indeed, when I was looking at a USDS job, a White House advisor told me plainly that agile, iterative approaches were clearly better for government because they were much more effective at risk reduction than producing piles of documents ever could be.

Is there a reason you didn't take the USDS job?

[agumonkey]

I'd love to hear you list the kind of things you had to unlearn, very curious about that.

[ubernostrum]

Of course, part of the "fun" is that much of the red tape is put there by (theoretically) well-intentioned people who want to prevent waste, inefficiency and corruption.