Inside Obama's stealth startup

http://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

by fred256 • 11 years ago

121 101 11 years ago

sswaner• 11 years ago

I hope they are able to make some good, lasting progress. I fear that a Republican administration would dismantle the startup style team and replace it with a more enterprise approach (bring in IBM or Accenture type companies) that would spend substantially more and accomplish substantially less.

The basis for this concern is the contrast in technology efforts in the last presidential campaign, where Obama brought in Harper Reid and a small team of very talented people. Romney hired some big companies.

18 months is not a lot of time to change the federal government.

jonlucc• 11 years ago

There was a lot of talk in the wake of the Obama/Romney election that Obama's digital efforts gave them a very important advantage, so I think it is likely that the main Republican campaigns will have changed to that approach this cycle.

jmspring• 11 years ago

Seriously? Party affiliation automatically means bringing in an "enterprise" entity? Both parties are pretty heavily in bed with many of those.

I think both learned from the last two elections.

fixxer4• 11 years ago

Don't let the marketing machine fool you. Both sides use a ton of enterprise software and are in bed with companies that practice strong enterprise tactics (DNC & Catalist; GOP & whatever the Kochs/Rove are calling their thing).

The Obama campaign had a great organization with a ton of youth techies in control (funny things happen to organizational structure when salaries are 50% of what one can get in the private sector), but so much of what you read is absolute hype. Regarding the performance of Narwhal, lots of sour feelings between the analytics team and the tech team.

d_shaw• 11 years ago

The not-so-new-anymore GOP one is called Para Bellum. http://www.parabellumlabs.com/

selimthegrim• 11 years ago

How many successful launches has Civis had again? (tumbleweeds roll)

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

Obama had some structural advantages in 2012 because he was the incumbent.

Obama already had a lot funds in the bank, and names on his lists, from his huge 2008 win. Romney is rich, but was starting from essentially scratch in building his volunteer army and voter database.

Obama was able to start investing in his national campaign infrastructure way before Romney because he did not have to win a primary first. Almost every early dollar Romney brought in had to be spent right away on short-term ads and organizing to make sure he won the primary.

And Obama was able to access the national Democratic party infrastructure from the beginning. Romney did not have access to the national Republican infrastructure until he won the nomination.

The effect of all this was that Obama was able to take his time and build all his software custom, while Romney had to wait until the last minute and buy things from external sources.

By the way, 2012 also demonstrated that shortcomings of Super PACs. They can spend a ton of money on TV ads, but they're no help at all with the (increasing important) data operations, because they are forbidden from coordinating with the campaign. While Romney was supported heavily by Super PACs, almost all of Obama's fundraising went directly into his campaign--where it could pay for core technologies.

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As for lasting progress, the U.S. Digital Service is not going to last beyond Obama, at least not in its current incarnation. It's housed under the Executive Office of the President and it is a political operation--their job is to make sure that the President's policy priorities have good technology. Obviously a new administration (of either party) is going to have different policies and priorities.

There's also the ephemeral "Obama magic"--he's just built a good reputation for using and appreciating technology. Pretty much no other candidate in the 2016 race has that (at least yet). Alpha geeks might not stick around for a more "old school" president like Hillary, Jeb, etc.

Things look a lot better for 18F because it is housed under GSA and it is intended to be politically neutral. And there's also a push on right now to get agencies to hire more digitally savvy people directly into staff roles--those would also be more likely to persist into the next administration.

myblake• 11 years ago

Yeah very good point about USDS being in a political and less bureaucratic / civil service part of government. However, I'd argue anyone that wins in 2016 regardless of age or party (not that there aren't huge differences) will have to figure out how to leverage technology to effectively govern, so we may yet be surprised.

ra1n85• 11 years ago

Didn't CGI (among an army of other large, "enterprise" companies) build most of Healthcare.gov? https://www.cgi.com/en/us-federal/services-solutions

daveloyall• 11 years ago

Is that the link you meant to post? Did it change?

civilian• 11 years ago

I heard about this a couple months ago, with largely the same sales pitch: "We're looking for software developers to help rebuild the government's systems. You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty. And we're looking for 500 people! Also you'll be relocating to DC."

If I was rebuilding important systems, I'd happily take 300 people at market rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-;

phillmv• 11 years ago

Not that many people who work directly for the government work for market rates.

Cabinet members for instance make about $200,000 - which is not comparable to executive salaries in 2015.

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

They are also "paid" in name recognition and political access, and those retain some value after that person has left the office.

Furthermore, the base salary does not include the value of various benefits available to the government employee, which varies wildly by the office to be filled. These often include immunity from prosecution, defined benefit pensions, service discounts, medical benefits, protections against arbitrary dismissal, and others.

Even so, those barely obfuscated benefits are probably not nearly enough to match the usual differential between a competitive market rate and the government pay scales.

Just a few years ago, I was asked by an Army officer to consider a job with the government. She said, "The government needs good programmers." As I politely disengaged, I thought silently to myself, "Yes, well, that's because the government only pays for awful to mediocre programmers."

Unlike some other positions in the bureaucracy that may be indirectly monetized, the only truly remunerative route I see on this proposed team is to work in it for a few years, writing obscure arcana into the code, then quit to become a consultant in working around the quirks in the very same code you just wrote.

I don't know anyone who works as a bureaucrat who does it out of a sense of patriotism.

fixermark• 11 years ago

> You won't make as much as you make in the private sector.

But the overall benefits package may very well be competitive, assuming they're bringing people in as government employees or contractors. The federal government is legally back-stopped on how limited it can allow benefit packages to be (contrast with the package in some startup companies, though of course the possibility of massive windfall profit sharing is supposed to make up the difference).

jonjenk• 11 years ago

I know some of the people who have signed up for this and I can say with confidence that I'd happily take them at any salary.

The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.

bcg1• 11 years ago

Have you ever worked for the government? Your friends will either be assimilated by the Borg or shot out of a torpedo tube. Resistance is futile.

tolmasky3• 11 years ago

There's no excuse for not giving people what they're owed -- never trust anyone that wants to exploit your skills. Whether its by "changing the world" in a startup or being patriotic for the government.

The fact that some of the best and brightest in our industry have decided to do this work because it's important rather than because it's the most financially rewarding option is encouraging.

There's actually really simple reasoning behind this: the flip side to your statement is "the fact that the government isn't willing to pay for work that is important is discouraging".

You hear about the tremendous amounts of waste in government projects (everything from military contractors to the bay bridge that got built by a FOREIGN company, went over budget, and now may not even be safe). Clearly some projects are deemed "important enough" to be paid for. If your project doesn't command market rate, then either it isn't as important as they're trying to tell you it is (since they've clearly demonstrated a willingness to pay in other areas), or, perhaps worse, it is but they just don't care about it enough.

Its so strange that the patriotism line only applies individuals who can't negotiate for themselves. When it comes to huge corporations, these arguments never seem to come up.

tomjen3• 11 years ago

The government spends billions on useless new fighter jets. How it is not exploitative to not pay software developers what they are worth?

The government is not a charity and doesn't deserve ours. It is the government that spies on us, runs a war on drugs that has seen countless minorities thrown in prison. The government tortures, commits crimes against humanity and god knows what else. Oh yeah, they still haven't closed gitmo.

DevX101• 11 years ago

They should just pay market rates. The alternative is hiring contractors at 2-3x market rate

ethanbond9• 11 years ago

This article is entirely about another alternative. Which is to pay below private market rates but exposure to otherwise inaccessible problems.

wslack• 11 years ago

It's not possible. Government jobs (except for those for the equivalent of flag officers in the military) are categorized at certain pay levels. The highest pay level tops out around 160K. I think the original intent was to avoid politicians paying their friends extreme salaries, which is how gov't jobs used to work (see "Spoils System).

s73v3r4• 11 years ago

Feel free to tell that to Congress.

jsolson2• 11 years ago

I know two people who went to do this (and have stayed on past their initial six month terms). I think they're insane, but they are fantastic engineers. Even at the top of the GS pay scale, they're making ~half what they were in their prior industry jobs. The government just doesn't pay that well, and as far as I know the pay scale is congressionally managed.

sehugg• 11 years ago

If you stick around for the long-term, you can make $130k-150k as a GS-15, work eight-hour days, and get a sweet pension at 55 instead of the Logan's Run layoff-crystal going off when you turn 30.

renegadedev• 11 years ago

"You won't make as much as you make in the private sector. You should think of it as a tour of duty"

Sounds like a modern day Shackleton job posting

0xdeadbeefbabe• 11 years ago

Well you can't pay for good software these days, so maybe they are on to something.

rbanffy• 11 years ago

I'd happily take 300 people at market rates over 500 people at government salaries. -_-;

I mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again here. There is the best talent money can buy and there is the talent no money can buy. If I could, I would apply without thinking twice.

mesozoic• 11 years ago

What a sales pitch!

yoz• 11 years ago

I was hired into 18F last year. I work out of San Francisco, where we have a team of about 15 working in the center of the city (UN Plaza). It's the second-largest office; the largest is DC, but we have smaller offices in Chicago and NYC, as well as many people working remotely in other parts of the country.

I have 20 years of software engineering experience, and the salary I get is competitive with similar salaries in SF. The benefits are decent, plus you get loads of discounts of things just for being a Federal employee.

There were several reasons I joined, but patriotism isn't one of them: I'm actually a British citizen who relocated to the USA almost a decade ago. Having kept in touch with friends back in London, I'm amazed and inspired by what GDS has achieved: they are, quite literally, setting the high water mark for user-centered design and research. Then I looked around the state of US government websites, and I felt what is one of the most common motivations for an engineer: seeing something broken that you know how to fix.

Not only are the people here fantastic, but we're getting to use better tools and services than I have previously. We started deploying using AWS and all its associated services, but have recently set up Cloud Foundry, and that's made fast development and deployment so much easier. (Yay, that wonderful feeling of deleting huge swathes of configuration you just don't need any more.) The project I'm on uses Mandrill and Twilio, plus Snap CI for testing & deployment. (Other projects may use different tools. Not much is mandated.) We all work on MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt Displays. (Some of us run Linux on those MacBooks.)

Part of what makes this work so well is that, while 18F does bill clients for our time, our primary motivator is quality rather than profit. We get to do the right thing because it's the right thing. If we find a better way to build, we switch to that. I've worked with plenty of startups but I've rarely worked with any team that was able to improve its working methods so quickly.

Everything we build is open source by default, available on Github. Plus, we contribute to other FOSS projects (such as the aforementioned Cloud Foundry). I've ended up making PRs back to plenty of libraries and other projects while working on this one to fix minor bugs or add useful features.

No, my day job here is not totally free of strange and frustrating bureaucracy, but there's far less than you'd guess, and plenty of freedoms that make up for that. I could bang on about my beliefs about the role of government and politics and how all this should work, and that is all important to me, but it's less relevant to the day-to-day work. And so far, that work is immensely satisfying.

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

Are you still permitted to do consulting on the side working for 18F/USDS?

ianstallings• 11 years ago

I think the biggest impact they'll have is on the mindset of the US government has as a whole. Particularly their involvement in health care technology reforms such as the HITECH additions to HIPAA regulations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Information_Technology_...

Or Medicare's Meaningful Use initiative: http://www.healthit.gov/providers-professionals/meaningful-u...

If you visit your doctor and see new technology in place, and also see data privacy taken seriously, there's a good chance that government incentives were involved. Now these guys might not have been directly involved in the trench-related work, but the administration is definitely pushing these agendas.

GolfyMcG• 11 years ago

They are pushing these agendas but unfortunately the standards are rather abysmal.

"Meaningful Use" has become the butt of many jokes. HITECH is the preferred compliance framework for Healthcare companies but it takes dramatically longer, and by extension is more expensive than comparable frameworks like SOC 2. The UX of most new Healthcare IT is embarrassing, by the standards of anyone who grew up in Web 2.0.

Add to this the amount of money being spent for this innovation and it's painful how inefficient of an investment the government is making. There are some companies really trying to push the envelope but the majority of the industry is mired in red tape and antique thinking.

kelvin0• 11 years ago

The problem with this is the entrenched culture and feudal turf wars within various departements in gvt will likely need to be addressed, even if you have the top tech talent of the universe working on this ... I wonder how they expect to get everyone to play nice with the new 'recruits'

adwww• 11 years ago

This is at least in part inspired by the (for the most part) success of the UK cabinet office's Government Digital Services.

Despite years of multi billion pound IT projects at the hands of Microsoft, HP, Crapita etc going over budget and delivering poor results late, the small internal team have produced some very modern, very successful web services. They even had a GitHub and PivitolTracker board publicly available if I recall.

So yeah, whether it can resist being outsourced and off shored is one thing, but with the right people (sounds good so far!) I wouldn't write it off as another government IT disaster just yet.

l4in• 11 years ago

Do you have any more information about the success of the UK's GDS? How do you evaluate their success? Are there any similar EU organs? Do you know any ways for a CS student to learn more about governance?

pdeuchler2• 11 years ago

The religious and reverent tone of this article gives away the true purpose for this initiative. Power.

Make no mistake, those pushing this project are Machiavellians of the highest order. They did not spend their entire lives playing the political game and manipulating their way to the top in order to "do good" and "change government". If they truly wanted to "do good" they could very easily accomplish huge strides with a single stroke of a pen, yet this fails to happen day in and day out. Furthermore the very idea that those who control the machinations of government would want to change that system is ludicrous on face, and requires significant cognitive dissonance to believe. This is about leverage.

Before the Snowden revelations the government had most of the tech companies comfortably in their pocket with no real downside to those companies. Those revelations have forced companies to choose between consumers and the government, a choice that seems to be slightly leaning towards consumers recently (rollouts of security features, encryption by default). Regardless of the vast abilities of the NSA, they still rely on Silicon Valley for an absurd percentage of their intelligence gathering.

This scares the Washington elite (please note this elite is not constrained by political party), and so they go after the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's own power base. Talent. This is a warning shot, a demonstration that a 45 minute meeting with the president is sufficient to fully co-opt some of the best and brightest SV has to offer.

Let's be real here. If the President really cared about the VA he wouldn't have waited until he was a lame duck to spearhead some website when the reality is the VA is woefully underfunded and highly dysfunctional as an organization from structure to implementation. No javascript front end will change those things. This lip service to building better systems to "help people" is a poor mask over the fact that they would control the people who designed and built that very system, and thus, control the system. He who has the power to destroy has the ultimate power.

Everyone on this website knows Google is one of the most powerful companies on earth because of their talent. Everyone knows that startups die when the lead engineer gets poached. You don't take talent from Google to not compete with them... this is just war games on a much more abstracted level.

ethanbond9• 11 years ago

Could you give an example of how the President could "very easily accomplish huge strides with a single stroke of a pen?"

The government is specifically designed against what you are stating is/should be the norm. This is literally the antithesis of the American government's mandate and design.

mkempe5• 11 years ago

Abolish the surveillance state, for one.

pdeuchler2• 11 years ago

The President managed to authorize a taskforce of 500 software engineers without much fuss, I don't see your point here.

But even assuming your premise, First Ladies are very often tasked with lip service public good projects, it probably wouldn't hurt to add some Presidential oomph to the existing forays. That seems like very easy low hanging fruit.

mkempe5• 11 years ago

Indeed. Those who choose to devote their life and passion to Leviathan are willing agents of Leviathan. The problem with the Modern State is not a lack of efficiency but a lack of limits.

sabalaba• 11 years ago

Is the federal government's inability to recruit and retain top talent really a mystery? It's surprising that an institution that is capable of confiscating double digit percentages of it's people's labor and capital gains[1] is unwilling to pay market or above market salaries to its employees.

If they want to capture the best and brightest, they'll have to do more than just appeal to patriotism.

[1] http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

navait• 11 years ago

What does tax policy have to do with how the federal government compensates it's employees?

gboone42• 11 years ago

Taxes, in one form or another, are where the federal government gets the money it uses to pay its employees.

linkregister• 11 years ago

Several agencies in the federal government strive to increase salaries to approach market values, but Congress typically prevents these measures [1]. In this case, it's my opinion that they're representing their constituents' desire to limit public sector salaries, and risk reelection by legislating otherwise. I think that over 50% of Americans suspect federal employees are overpaid. The issue isn't improved by misleading stories in the media [2].

[1] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-gop-release-bill-to-...

[2] http://www.factcheck.org/2010/12/are-federal-workers-overpai...

qdpb• 11 years ago

It's not appropriate to use the word "confiscate" in this context. If you're not satisfied with the social contract of this country, you're free to leave and earn money elsewhere.

s73v3r4• 11 years ago

Feel free to share your insights with your Congressional Representative. They're the ones who dictate the governmental pay scale.

conductr• 11 years ago

"user-friendly government" ... awesome, start with voting. This has potential to touch every "user" and should be low hanging fruit for such a crack team.

apendleton• 11 years ago

That'd be swell, but unfortunately for the most part, voting isn't the within the purview of the federal government, because it's not one of the enumerated powers in the constitution. Thank the 10th amendment, federalism, etc.

ajays• 11 years ago

These folks all seem like political appointees. What happens in 18 months when Obama is gone? I hope the successor keeps the initiative going, as it seems like a good cause.

TheMagicHorsey4• 11 years ago

My friend has been a Presidential Innovation Fellow for the last year.

Basically people can't get things done because they are being stonewalled by the old-guard in the various departments they've been tasked with reforming. There are outside vendors with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts on the line, and they don't want those contracts to be cancelled by implementing commonsense new technology reforms.

My friend described a process in one government department where digital documents were received, were printed, were then physically mailed to a back office site, and then manually entered into a system by typing. The contract for the scanning was worth millions. The contract for the back-end was worth millions. People's jobs depended on there being this whole useless exercise. Nothing could be reformed.

I think its important that we have optimism, but nothing short of sledgehammer and mass layoffs of government employees and contractors is going to improve government.

iandanforth• 11 years ago

Name names please. Perhaps it's naive, but I imagine that if we have a specific instance to work with we're much more likely to be able to force change.

toomuchtodo3• 11 years ago

Don't even need to name names. Give me a department/division name so I can start firing up MuckRock with FOIA requests.

TheMagicHorsey4• 11 years ago

The problem is people can't go public with this stuff. They will be blacklisted from ever working in government again. And these are regulatory agencies that can make trouble for you in the private sector world too.

This is why I'm being so vague. I could actually give you specific details, but then my friend would be identified.

My friend said even with the small level of reforming he was trying to do, people stopped inviting him to meetings--because he was embarrassing with the way he was saying the Emperor has No Clothes, with respect to the processes being used.

Imagine a tech company where everyone basically has tenure, and promotions are based on how long you've been warming your seat. Now bake that organization for 50 years. That is your govt. IT department.

dnesting2• 11 years ago

Don't assume that every piece of dysfunction you see can't be fixed. Many of these systems are mind-bogglingly complex and can't be replaced in one go. It seems entirely reasonable to me for a system undergoing modernization to have a modern piece interacting with the user feeding an old paper-based process behind it. That's obviously not the desired end goal but it seems like a perfectly reasonable intermediate one.

DanielBMarkham• 11 years ago

I need to remind the somewhat younger and more idealistic HN crowd that national service is just that: national service. If it's "Obama's startup", it ain't national service. It's partisan service.

It's an important point, because time will tell how some future Republican administration will both treat and be treated by this group. If you're working with millions of federal jobs, you'd better be ready to play the long game; not just play the PR game.

I wish guys joining the best. But if you're only in it because of Obama? Please don't go. I wouldn't want to see a situation where IT systems favored by one party were automated while those favored by another were not. That would take what could be a great good and turn it into a great evil.

Inside Obama's stealth startup

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