Matt_Cutts

For what it's worth, I pinged someone about it.

For what it's worth, I worked with Dr. Seales while getting my undergrad degree. Happy to vouch that he and his team are great humans.

This is such a fascinating problem, and could have real benefits for society. Imagine uncovering ancient works that would otherwise be lost.

This is a pretty intriguing contrarian view. I recall fielding many such inquiries during my Google days.

Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.

If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.

If folks are looking for another Tracy Kidder book, I'd recommend _House_. It's the story of building one house in Massachusetts in 1985 or so. Kidder goes into the life of the buyers and the builders, and the result is surprisingly compelling.

I know what you're thinking: why not _A Truck Full of Money_, Kidder's book about Paul English, the founder of Kayak? It's a fine read, but I found _House_ to be more contemplative and open up wider vistas (for me, at least).

Kidder is a great writer. I think people might enjoy _House_.

I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter. That led to the insight that Google could be spammed. That led to fights with Google's founders--Sergey thought Google couldn't be spammed, for example.

Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.

I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.

Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.

I came here to note the same connection. I forwarded both articles to a spam person at Google.

(Disclosure: I invested in this company at YC back in 2018, when it was Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals)

That article is a bit short on details. Some other recent articles I thought were more helpful included https://www.healio.com/news/rheumatology/20220428/mark-cuban... and https://www.drugtopics.com/view/the-good-the-bad-and-the-mis... . The second article is written more from the perspective of independent pharmacies.

The first article includes this snippet: "If there is reason for optimism, though, it lies with the medical background of Oshmyansky, the company’s co-founder and CEO, according to Gewanter.

'The radiologist Cuban is working with knows the business,' Gewanter said. 'Between the two of them, it is not difficult to imagine that they will figure out where the gaps are and how to exploit them. We can only hope that when they do, our patients will be the beneficiaries.' "

I think YC made a fantastic choice including Alex's company in YC, and it's been a pleasure seeing what Alex has done and is doing. I'll stop there for now.

For data science, we've seen things from looking at disability claims appeals of Veterans and how those are handled, to looking for anomalies and malicious attacks on login.gov, to looking at Medicare payments and how to improve that process.

The data that the government has is often smaller scale than industry, but it usually represents people who are genuinely in need of help.

And if anyone has any questions about the US Digital Service, please ask!

It's a really remarkable window of time right now to make government work better for the public using technology and design.

If you wanted to try a short tour, now is a very good time; things are quite remote-friendly right now. Then when the COVID situation is better, you'd have better information about whether the DC trade-off is worthwhile.

The work we're doing helps everyone from Veterans to medical patients. Making government services responsive, accessible, and transparent is really important right now.

Please consider applying, or just ask here if you have any additional questions!

I mean, if you wanted to do a short tour (~6-9 months) right now, you could probably start and stay remote for most of that time.

In general, it's really useful to be around the table with stakeholders. In a COVID world, that's less important, but when we get through this, it really does make a difference if people can be in DC.

That said, these times are definitely an experiment in how to do remote work well.

We could really use some folks to help on impactful, important projects if people are willing to help. Thanks!

The PDF above is really good, but there's also this recent segment on CBS if you want to get more context: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-us-digital-service-...

If you're willing to watch a short video, we recently had this segment on CBS: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-us-digital-service-...

USDS has been doing a lot of impactful work lately, and we need more engineers, designers, and product managers to help improve US government services for the public.

Just to give some examples of the sort of work we're doing recently, we've been assisting the CDC with user research to improve their pages about COVID-19, we've worked with the SBA on their disaster loan assistance program, and we've built tools to provide more granular data to the coronavirus task force, not to mention the USDS folks working at specific agencies like Veterans Affairs to help ramp up capacity.

There's a lot of government systems that are facing high levels of load/stress right now, and we need the US government to work well right now. If you're an engineer/SRE or designer or product manager, please consider applying.

We've been helping quite a few folks based on the current COVID-19 situation. There's important work to do in the federal government right now.

I appreciated the allusion to Conway's Law here. I will say that in a government of 2M+ people, there's a ton of problems that are completely non-partisan that everyone would like to solve where technical expertise can make a real difference.

Fun fact: the reason that USDS applicants (who would work within the Executive Office of the President) have to take a drug test goes to a Clinton-era legal battle that went to the Supreme Court: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-03-mn-24917...

P.S. If you're looking for some interesting chaos to revitalize your life, have you considered doing a tour of public service? :)

Thanks for all the things you did. The Android jank stuff made a big impression on me--you made the value so clear with your work.

And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking about https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/ , which has only grown more hilarious to me over time.

If anyone has any questions, please let us know. We've been working with partners in the federal government on impactful things.

Hey, I would ask her to go ahead and apply--we're always taking applications--and then indicate in the text field that she's closer to a project manager.

We have been reworking some of our competencies on product and delivery, but I'd still like to see whether it might be a match.

We should definitely be talking to more folks locally in DC. Are there any meetups that you especially enjoy?

Thanks for asking! On the interview process, there's a resume review stage, then a technical interview. If the technical interview goes well, then there's one more technical interview plus a resilience/emotional intelligence/EQ interview. We do typically ask one coding question when we're talking to engineers, but you're right that we're more concerned about large-scale systems, diagnosing bottlenecks, and asking the right questions compared to (say) focusing on algorithms. We care less about minimum spanning trees and more about practical aspects of making real-world systems perform well.

On the transition between administrations, we've been fortunate to have solid support in both administrations. It's been a non-partisan issue to make the government more effective and efficient using technology. No one wants archaic computer systems that could break and risk delivering services to the public. I feel very good about our ability to prioritize projects based on their impact, and we've been able to continue to work on vital services.

That wasn't us, but I'm glad that it was a good experience for you! Lots of tech in government is getting better these days, and we'd love to have more folks helping up push the state of the art forward.

We're typically looking for folks who have experience setting up large-scale systems. When doing this job, it helps to have a few scars (or at least the resilience that comes from pushing for change in difficult situations). And we can only hire US citizens.

Here's an example article from last week about the kind of work we help with: https://governmentciomedia.com/va-radically-streamlining-cla...

The US Department of Veterans Affairs recently released a new online tool that makes it much easier for Veterans to apply for compensation claims. Based on user research, if the claim is for something like PTSD, it encourages the user to take a break and also includes crisis line info. Because the tool is digital instead of paper, it eliminates entire classes of mistakes and means that claims are processed a lot faster.

Lots of government systems need to work so much better for people. Why not join us in DC to tackle some really impactful projects? I'm always happy to answer questions if people want.

We don't really end up building many apps, so you're probably better off finding a closer match to your interests/skills. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

We are definitely looking for product managers, along with software engineers (e.g. backend, frontend, SRE, data science, security, cloud, API design) and designers (e.g. UX research, service design).

For product marketing, the closest role to that might be content strategy, which has proven quite useful.