<story><title>White House Launches US Digital Corps</title><url>https://www.fedscoop.com/white-house-launches-us-digital-corps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true.&lt;p&gt;America did seem to have a golden age.  Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.  Compare that to the new bay bridge.  Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years.&lt;p&gt;Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech.  Then they got to see people flying in jets.  Then nuclear energy.  Then they got to see people walking on the moon.  All in a single life.&lt;p&gt;The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.  And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged.  It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government.  This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.</text></item><item><author>MattGaiser</author><text>A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories.&lt;p&gt;My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc.&lt;p&gt;My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.</text></item><item><author>ketzo</author><text>I, like (I think) many young people, am pretty disillusioned with the current state of the U.S.&lt;p&gt;I would really like for things to be better than they are, and I&amp;#x27;m still fairly convinced that software has the potential to make good things happen and improve people&amp;#x27;s lives.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is where more people would start to disagree with me, but I would like to live in a place where government work was seen as a noble calling, or at least &lt;i&gt;better&lt;/i&gt;, morally, than optimizing ad revenue. I would like to work with people who want to make things that solve problems for huge swaths of people who really need help.&lt;p&gt;But I read about the realities of U.S. government work, and frankly, it doesn&amp;#x27;t sound like a place I want to work. Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, &lt;i&gt;slow&lt;/i&gt;. That&amp;#x27;s just not attractive to me.&lt;p&gt;If these impressions are wrong, I hope that the USDC has a sizeable marketing budget to correct me. If they&amp;#x27;re right, then I hope they have a plan to change things.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think a lot of our really big problems are solvable without the input of a massive number of technologists, and I am worried that we&amp;#x27;re not going to have them where they need to be.&lt;p&gt;I hope this works.&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;I do agree that &amp;quot;fast work&amp;quot; is probably a bad heuristic in many ways, particularly when it comes to work that requires &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; consistent outcomes, like much government work.&lt;p&gt;But shit, it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;fun&lt;/i&gt;, particularly in software, to make quick decisions and move efficiently to solve problems. And I think you have to contend with the engagement and &amp;quot;fun&amp;quot; that moving fast brings.&lt;p&gt;Compensation is one form of motivation, yes, but there are others. There are reasons people romanticize working at startups, take up new programming languages and frameworks in side projects on their own time: it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;cool&lt;/i&gt;, and feels good to work on. That&amp;#x27;s one lever you have to try and push as an employer of engineers (or really of people in general, but particularly people who are very in demand).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not advocating for &amp;quot;Move Fast And Break Things,&amp;quot; but I am saying that you have to compete with the people who &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; advocate for it, because that can be really fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kortilla</author><text>&amp;gt; Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.&lt;p&gt;Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.&lt;p&gt;The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.&lt;p&gt;I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.&lt;p&gt;My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.&lt;p&gt;Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).&lt;p&gt;The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.&lt;p&gt;The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.</text></comment>
<story><title>White House Launches US Digital Corps</title><url>https://www.fedscoop.com/white-house-launches-us-digital-corps/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostromo</author><text>This is a comforting thought, but I don’t think it’s true.&lt;p&gt;America did seem to have a golden age.  Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.  Compare that to the new bay bridge.  Or just look at how the US mobilized during WWII to produce an insane amount of weaponry in just a few years.&lt;p&gt;Think about the people that grew up when the telegraph was high tech.  Then they got to see people flying in jets.  Then nuclear energy.  Then they got to see people walking on the moon.  All in a single life.&lt;p&gt;The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.  And I think a big part of it is our government is woefully mismanaged.  It mostly seems engineered to help other people in government.  This may be why so many of the richest counties in America are the suburbs of DC, compared to centers of innovation or industry.</text></item><item><author>MattGaiser</author><text>A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories.&lt;p&gt;My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc.&lt;p&gt;My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.</text></item><item><author>ketzo</author><text>I, like (I think) many young people, am pretty disillusioned with the current state of the U.S.&lt;p&gt;I would really like for things to be better than they are, and I&amp;#x27;m still fairly convinced that software has the potential to make good things happen and improve people&amp;#x27;s lives.&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is where more people would start to disagree with me, but I would like to live in a place where government work was seen as a noble calling, or at least &lt;i&gt;better&lt;/i&gt;, morally, than optimizing ad revenue. I would like to work with people who want to make things that solve problems for huge swaths of people who really need help.&lt;p&gt;But I read about the realities of U.S. government work, and frankly, it doesn&amp;#x27;t sound like a place I want to work. Slow, bureaucratic, opaque, slow, low-compensation, &lt;i&gt;slow&lt;/i&gt;. That&amp;#x27;s just not attractive to me.&lt;p&gt;If these impressions are wrong, I hope that the USDC has a sizeable marketing budget to correct me. If they&amp;#x27;re right, then I hope they have a plan to change things.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think a lot of our really big problems are solvable without the input of a massive number of technologists, and I am worried that we&amp;#x27;re not going to have them where they need to be.&lt;p&gt;I hope this works.&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;I do agree that &amp;quot;fast work&amp;quot; is probably a bad heuristic in many ways, particularly when it comes to work that requires &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; consistent outcomes, like much government work.&lt;p&gt;But shit, it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;fun&lt;/i&gt;, particularly in software, to make quick decisions and move efficiently to solve problems. And I think you have to contend with the engagement and &amp;quot;fun&amp;quot; that moving fast brings.&lt;p&gt;Compensation is one form of motivation, yes, but there are others. There are reasons people romanticize working at startups, take up new programming languages and frameworks in side projects on their own time: it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;cool&lt;/i&gt;, and feels good to work on. That&amp;#x27;s one lever you have to try and push as an employer of engineers (or really of people in general, but particularly people who are very in demand).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not advocating for &amp;quot;Move Fast And Break Things,&amp;quot; but I am saying that you have to compete with the people who &lt;i&gt;do&lt;/i&gt; advocate for it, because that can be really fun.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mucholove</author><text>The relative status of the US was very high at thr time.&lt;p&gt;Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner.&lt;p&gt;During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution.&lt;p&gt;The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then.&lt;p&gt;This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature.&lt;p&gt;In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.”&lt;p&gt;I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.</text></comment>