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Who wants to get ~sloshed~
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End of summer. Days become darker.
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Probably nothing, they face no consequences for their actions because they have a total monopoly. Imagine if you updated DMVs with cutting edge Kiosks and chat bots. What would happen? The same amount of people would renew because people have to renew licenses regardless of how crappy it is.
Let’s just focus on getting the federal government a steady budget instead of continuing resolutions and threats of sequestration. Without the ability to forecast authorized and appropriated monies, these departments and agencies can’t plan on a variety of fronts including talent, programs, and infrastructure.
Also, the government isn’t a monolithic organization like many private sector companies. So, innovative technologies implanted in one place aren’t necessarily going to be spread across departments/agencies. This is not even taking into account the state and federal divide.
Making government “accomplish” more is going to take a lot more than adding engineers who can code.
Having two political parties who actually care about governing is necessary.
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Probably not a whole hell of a lot.
Let's say the engineering groups from Big Tech suddenly got transplanted to various agencies across the government. Here are the issues they'd have to face:
-Interagency cooperation: Way easier said than done, and that's ignoring any legislative hurdles
-Funding process: The funding cycle in the federal government is broken. No ifs, ands, or buts, it's just flat out broken.
-Funding priorities: Given finite tech dollars in a budget, how much of that goes to new tech vs sustainment?
-Congress: Generally gotta get Congress to pass legislature to do anything that involves real modernization...good luck getting those clowns on board
-Scope: Some of the sheer size and scope of systems in the federal government (Treasury and IRS, for example) far outstrip the bulk of the work done by the private sector, Big Tech or otherwise. They'd likely flounder just as much as the feds/contractors have so far.
-Bureaucracy: How many of those BT engineers would last under the miles and miles of bureaucratic red tape that's endemic with the feds?
-Comp: White collar pay for feds generally sucks compared to tech, especially at the GS-13+ levels. How many engineers are going to turn down $400k+ TC to work at BT for $125k as a fed?
They do have the development power. There’s just no incentive to behave like those companies do. People join faang simply for money and status.
On what systems, exactly? With what data? We're not well-utilizing the developers we have now. Personnel is not the major constraint.
The same as status quo. They would make the economy better, and then all their talent would leave for better pay in the private sector. The government is a victim of their own success.
They'd be much worse-off I think. The in-house Fed Developers still would have to navigate security, beaurocracy, and government funding. Anything that ever resembles " Continuous Technical Transformation" efforts in the Fed space is always the first to go whenever some Senator in Oklahoma or Wyoming gets upset about something. You'd need a China-esq level of centralized government to get anything done and sustainable.
Unless it is on the same playing field as the mission nothing changes.