Poor guy is going to hate life so much. The number of times he's going to hear "we can't do that because some person at some important level - a person that probably started as a clerk and has been promoted to high level security doesn't understand it, so... no."
As someone who left federal government for private industry, I am shocked at just how much freedom I have to experiment. Thinking creatively is rewarded. I applaud the administration for attempting to get to this level... but they'll have to remove all the old tired government employees with the authority to say "no" before this plan will work.
Disclosure - I met David Recordon via Healthcare.gov
It's a true statement that he is facing an uphill battle. However, it's heartening to hear that he's making the move because he's been doing this job already for the last couple months - just as a individual contractor on loan to the government. The fact that he's willing to keep doing the admittedly difficult but critically important work of securing White House IT speaks volumes.
It's clear that people like David are needed inside the government and you've identified the key issue - how can you retain talent in an organization that moves slower and more cautiously (and yes, sometimes a bit obtusely[0])? That's in my opinion, the beauty of USDS, 18F, the other healthcare.gov tech surge spinoff companies[1] - by concentrating enough technical talent in one place, you give everyone a place to talk shop, share strategies, and yes, vent frustrations.
USDS and others are not guaranteed success - by no means. However, they have a minuscule but non-zero chance and a little hope goes a long way. I look forward to cheering for each tiny little win they get, no matter how trivial (for instance WhiteHouse.gov is now https[2]). I want the government to do big things and watching it do simple things is the first step on a long long journey.
[0] Though most of the time, there is some rationality to how decisions get made - just sometimes not the rationale you were hoping for. Often it's because it doesn't exactly match a checkbox on a security checklist and you have to explain to them how SSH keys are pretty much like 2048 character long passwords.
Another great program worth looking into as a technologist is the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. Join government for 12 months and help tackle challenging problems with federal agency partners. The people in this program are really, really impressive and many of them have moved into the WH, USDS, 18F, and strong roles in the agencies afterward. https://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows
While I understand where the skepticism comes from, I think it's overly pessimistic to think nothing's changed since your time in the government, or that Recordon won't be able to enact positive change.
I've been really impressed with the quality of talent that USDS and 18F have been drawing, and with the quality of their output. While I'm sure there's still more friction than you'd see at a super-tiny private sector startup, I think everyone's aware that software/IT delievery needs to radically change, and there's a lot of smart, driven people who seem to be helping enact that change.
Full disclosure, I left in 2014. I watched the healthcare.gov debacle from inside the fence. I was told "no" on a daily basis because I had the audacity to hope and dream. I really do wish the absolute best for this pioneer. I hope I'm completely wrong and people LISTEN to his advisement.
As someone who's about to leave government (DoD) I'm looking forward to the opportunity to experiment. That being said, your description is pretty accurate. Simple things like designing a more efficient workflow becomes something that metastasizes into a "well, idk that seems to break the usual business rules" conversation. My sincere hope is that Recordon isn't afraid to get in trouble. Actually, my advice to him would be "get in trouble all the time" or "if you're not getting in trouble, you're doing something wrong".
This raises the issue that's plaguing government and big corporation (non-tech) organizations alike - inability to attract nor retain talent. DoD has been going through a bit of a contraction and the best developers I knew in DoD space have all turned their backs on their clearances and run very far away. At my current place, they're having an issue where we have some fairly interesting technical work but nobody with the skills to go do it because they're based in flyover country and people that can do it regularly get $160k+ base offers in the Bay Area or New York. The brain drain problem is exacerbating the problems in most of these places because the existing employees just don't feel like making a change or are benefiting from the current standard performance of abysmal and dysfunctional across most large organizations when it comes to anything innovative (as opposed to execution, which is what established businesses tend to think about mostly through extensive processes and risk avoidance).
Is it not the job of the contracting companies to find and retain the talent though? One major issue that I see with many of these government contracting companies is that they exist only to support the US government. They have no other clients, no products of their own and no non-government projects coming in. How many young developers want to join companies like that? How long until even more experienced developers move on to more interesting work? I just cannot fathom many of these companies being sustainable in the long run. As for the government, I believe it would be in their better interests to starting working more with companies outside of the beltway for a change.
It is certainly the responsibility of the contractors to retain talent. This is extremely difficult for the reasons you've mentioned, and the fundamental problems are simply that working with the government (or any enterprise) is insanely administrative-overhead prohibitive and tends to lock you into operating specifically for just the government. Most DoD contractors in the beltway besides the usual big ones are starving for contracts and those that have survived are now involved in commercial work for a lot of their business probably. Growing most of these contracting companies is similar to trying to grow boutique web design businesses only far, far more expensive.
From a talent pool perspective, for every person like Mikey Dickerson (US Digital Services, Healthcare.gov overhaul) you have now 10 people that are barely able to understand what DevOps even stands for as much as 100 acronyms and jargon only applicable to government systems and regulatory measures. Mikey doesn't even have to think about an SF-86 probably - who can you clear for a TS now that's considered top talent by Silicon Valley standards when these people would have these same companies trying to knock their door down?
It is currently against young developers' best interest IMO to join anything BUT the most interesting, high-talent seeking government contracting companies IF they have any thought of going into that line of work. They must also be prepared to have their work oftentimes be thrown away and be laid off repeatedly as these projects tend to be extremely tough to sponsor now in today's post-sequester era of contracting. It's heart-breaking to see the junior developers I saw across so many companies wasting away their talent on oftentimes rather stupid work due to completely inane reasons solely related to being government work.
You're on the right hunch to where the end-game is. The end-game state with the current trajectory is 2-3 huge defense contractors that mostly do non-tech contracts stuck with loads of useless retirement-age administration amid pockets of some competent ones all in charge of scores of kids that just couldn't get into GOOD software companies... and Google, Microsoft, Amazon supplying the majority of the underlying technology. All the "integrators" will have been absorbed into mid-tier companies probably and the various Pentagon incubator-ish programs considered failures for lack of innovation AND lack of projects successfully seeded.
Myself, almost all my ex-coworkers from DoD-centric companies, and a good number of people I've been interviewing are completely throwing away their DoD / government backgrounds in their careers for greener (we know for sure) pastures. There's just not enough funding for interesting work and DoD is contracting back toward its fundamentals of creating jobs for opportunities that are really, really boring that nobody talented or interested in being able to cite an interesting project in a job interview wants to spend time on.
US DoD's leaders are not completely stupid and have finally managed to get Amazon's GovCloud approved for certain uses. IBM sued of course, but how many people even use IBM's cloud again in industry? Getting stuck in the vendor wars of its time is something DoD definitely doesn't want to do, and this time around it sounds like someone actually might get slapped for buying IBM.
> My sincere hope is that Recordon isn't afraid to get in trouble.
He's extremely good at that. In fact, I can think of few better qualified to push through the BS of bureaucracy than him. That being said, FB is almost certainly easy-mode compared to the government.
Yeah I can't stress enough that the way to break bureaucracy really is to just ignore it and do something better. Once the bosses see that what you're doing makes more sense or works better, whatever transgressions you committed on the way to the finish line will, generally, be ignored.
While I agree with the approach's effectiveness the risk of doing that in government is high because breaking an official policy can be construed into violating a federal law which could land you in jail. Something as simple as installing software on a government computer w/o permission. At some point you have to ask yourself why taking such a risk is rational.
I have never worked for the federal government (or any level of government) so I could be commenting without the appropriate context here but I have worked at a massive (200K+ person) company before and it sounds just about the same as what you describe above. "We can't do anything about that" could have been on auto-reply from my boss's email.
Same thing happens in smaller companies too... My solution is to do it anyways. The people who say no? Fuck em, build it and if no one comes at least you KNOW that this company has too much bureaucracy to change and you should dump them. Programmers are modern day gods and we should start acting like it.
While in US Goverment is hiring engineering talent, in other parts of te world like where I live (Spain), this is still a dream.
At least your goverment tries!
I understand your pedestrian frustrations, but what you don't seem to understand is that the risks to government and military, i.e., your defense, are wildly exponentially larger and far more consequential than you quite clearly seem to appreciate.
Sure, there are many under and even unqualified people in positions that they are overpaid for, but that's largely more due to HR policies dictated by Congress and nepotistic corruption. Besides, those people who you think aren't quite possibly are incompetent, are largely doing a job that in all reality doesn't need to exist and is really only a position in order to fabricate a job for a vet or make various people money for various reasons.
The reason you see and experienced such frustration with the immovable and static nature of government / military networks is simple a matter of real national security. Reality is that on a geo-political scale that you can't even imagine exists, there are real reasons for concern and anxiety that is only stoked by the paranoia of our guilty subconscious conscience due to our own nonsense actions and behaviors.
You have freedom in the private sector, because ultimately, if a company fails, all it means is that you find another job at some other fabricated, imaginary, lofty, con job of a start up that is pumped out of "Silicon Valley" on a quarter hour basis. Failure of a nation, because some lackey wanted to experiment, means a real threat that you are incinerated, lines up looking down at a mass grave, or vaporized.
Because at the core, no matter how advanced we want to perceive ourselves in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, humanity consists of various troops of primates which a rival troop will try to kill, pillage, rape and steal our women at the first chance that presents itself as perceptually cost-benefit positive.
I work at NASA. I do have a pretty high level of autonomy in my work (with room to experiment with new technologies and processes), but it's a very hit-or-miss thing for each of the programs and projects. I know many colleagues who aren't as lucky.
As government organisations typically do not compete with other organisations and are not driven by profits, the motivation for improvement is very unclear.
Actually, it probably can't, at least in most of the cases where it would matter. The President can get the ball rolling in some of those cases, but in others there may actually be an act of Congress required, or other bureaucratic hoops to jump through.
The President is not the equivalent of the CEO of a private corporation. And like so many of the things around technology in government the last couple of years, this one is probably more for show than anything else.
The title reads as though he was the single Engineering Director of Facebook ("Facebook's Engineering Director"). But a quick look on LinkedIn shows there are dozens of Engineering Directors at Facebook, which the article confirms - "one of Facebook's engineering directors".
Might want to change the title to match the article's.
(Not to diminish in any way his achievements at Facebook or otherwise.)
Funny, but it raises a concern: You can't take that approach to White House IT. If something breaks, the consequence isn't that users' feeds of vacation photos malfunction; instead people die, nuclear codes leak, etc.
Whitehouse IT isn't responsible for anything important like that. That kind of stuff resides in the dod. Whitehouse IT would be responsible for communicating the message of the President to the public, doing special projects websites to garner support for a bill the president is hot on, etc.
Hate to rain on the parade, but the government should maybe deal with basic record retention before we look for it to enter the Information Age. We can't get at Lois Lerner's email, we can't get at the Secretary of State's? We're supposed to believe the White House didn't wonder why email to the Secretary of State wasn't going to a .gov address?
Information and the flow of information is power. So far I don't see much sign that this Administration is actually interested in handling that power in an accountable fashion.
Until we get that priority squared away, I'm not very interested in the bells and whistles.
That turned out to be a flat lie. Recently, when the appropriate investigators went to the people who maintain the backups, they found that no one had ever asked them for the emails, and they were available. Supposedly, a criminal investigation is underway.
Good for him. However this part of article bothers me:
"As a longtime advocate of open source — an online model that allows free access to websites’ source code — Recordon was awarded the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2007."
As someone who left federal government for private industry, I am shocked at just how much freedom I have to experiment. Thinking creatively is rewarded. I applaud the administration for attempting to get to this level... but they'll have to remove all the old tired government employees with the authority to say "no" before this plan will work.