>What is the expected compensation for participants? Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.
>Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
So "early-career" but they're going to get paid GS-14/15 pay[1] in DC? New grad engineers in DC are going to be GS-7/9 at best. This is either a blatant lie, or created by someone who has no idea of how federal pay works (or both).
As an aside, I was a fed for >10 years and left last year for industry but stay in touch with friends still working federal jobs. Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.
> Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.
Also, many people took pride in the service they provided to their country (or to the people, or as part of a team that did good, however they thought of it).
I don't have high hopes for this new thing.
After recent treatment of federal employees, and other things going on in the US this year, including how USDS as DOGE was weaponized against the US... I'd expect this new thing to only be able to recruit from these categories:
1. Outright bad people, with anti-US, looter/saboteur intent, as we've seen from other facets recently. They will focus on their own bad-person individual interests.
2. People who aren't bad, but who are so cognitively impaired, that they still don't realize that they're probably going to get screwed personally and/or directed to be the baddies. They will be bad at everything they do.
3. People who are intelligent and pro-US, and have no illusions about what they're signing up for, but who desperately need the income, after being screwed earlier this year. They won't be inspired to execute well on whatever anti-US directives they're given.
Before all of this happened the hiring I had to deal with when I was federal fell into similar buckets:
1. Completely inept or lazy people that couldn't get a job anywhere else (~50%)
2. Smart people that took the job because it was close to their family (~30%)
3. Smart people that took the job because they liked the the specific mission and felt like it was really important (~10%)
4. Smart people that took the job after retiring from a private industry job as a sort of laid-back post-retirement hobby (we called them re-treads, ~10%)
From what I've heard, a lot of federal employers can only hire from the #1 category now, and the applicants in that category have gotten worse.
There's just no path to home ownership in the DC area for the fed career path after the ZIRP era. A capable person would have to be insane or desperate given the economics alone.
DC has the highest per capita income of anywhere in the US (vs other states/territories), so when you realize federal workers are producing the most value for America the economics are at least a little better. If you look at relative economic slackers like workers of NYC and the private industry where less value is per capita created, it's a bit rougher.
Googling average Federal worker income in DC, every number I came up with was the above the average for DC, and DC is higher than every other state/territory.
I find nothing supporting your assertion but plenty opposing it. Feds are not only pulling it up, but the biggest group of people doing so.
One thing to remember is that federal workers tend to be older because most agencies have been encouraged to hire contractors for decades. That skews averages up towards the mid-career managers, which will seem high if you compare it to the entire job market but if you only compare them with similar private sector employees who have comparable experience and skills they’re underpaid.
Yeah, it's marginally above average for DC, but that doesn't mean they're "raking it in". The average (which is a bad metric for income) is dragged up by the wealthy in DC balancing out the poor in DC, not hordes of Federal Workers (most of whom live outside DC in Maryland/Virginia, FWIW) making $120k.
What number do you have for median federal worker income in DC then? The median representing the 'hordes' were making $120+k from what I saw, not just the average.
Okay, cite your source for that. ZipRecruiter says the median federal income is $125k, with other sources saying the average is $130k. I don't see any source saying they're making way more than that.
This is a distorted comparison and you know it. DC in unique among US states and territories in that it encompasses a major metropolitan area with no rural regions. In this comparison, DC also leads the country in population density, average building height, public transit usage, latte consumption, and any other correlate of living in a city.
No it doesn't, not according to the linked data you're proposing. I sorted by per-capita income of MSAs on the second table of that page, it shows DC MSA blowing the other metropolitan areas away. Might not still be accurate as that's a 2010 census, but you're the one insisting on it.
Looks like you're the one, distorting your own citations, mate and you "know it." Methinks this a case of psychological concept known as 'projection'.
I thought you had to realize that comparing DC to a state like California wasn't going to be an apples-to-apples comparison, which is why I wrote, "and you know it." I'm sorry for making assumptions.
You're also right, I was sloppy with my citation. I looked into the source data, and I believe Wikipedia's second table may be wrong here. Here is B19301 from the 2010 census. The Bridgeport MSA is first: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT5YSPT2010.B19301?q=b19301...
Unfortunately, the table on Wikipedia is uncited (beyond the 2010 census) and was added by an anonymous IP address editor, so I don't know how they got their numbers. I'll double check my work and update the article if I don't find anything else.
Generally, though, my point is that if you compare the states and DC, you'll find that DC is an outlier on a lot of dimensions. If you compare the DC metro area with other MSAs, a lot of that exceptionalism goes away.
This feels like it needs a MAGA vs Republican distinction. There are plenty of Republicans who (privately) have issues with some things Trump is doing.
They aren't in Congress, they are working in the states, I would guess. The Republicans in Congress mostly volunteered for a spinectomy when Trump was elected again.
That's part of it: many felt the winds and simultaneously made the choice to "focus on family" and step back from politics during the 2nd Trump administration.
But the wheel turns, and there's going to be a lot of folks in the party with very sharp axes to grind during the lame duck period.
The meme is that Susan Collins is “always concerned”. But still votes along with the MAGAs. If they are silently going along, what difference does it make? They are still MAGA.
No one except the Freedom Caucus in the House are true MAGA to their core the rest are just opportunists. I’m not sure who are the true believers in the Senate.
Absolutely not. Almost every non-MAGA Republican voice that served in federal public office has been ousted, and it's not like they were good to begin with.
by and large the "anti-trump republican" has ceased to be a relevant political bloc. they have either vote for trump / pro trump candidates and are functionally indistinguishable from MAGA, vote for the most moderate democrat possible, or have given up politics entirely. I suspect you didn't mean this, but the largest group of self identified republicans who have an issue with trump are angry he isn't far right enough (ie groypers, klansmen, neonazis, and like).
You should try having a casual chat sometime with people who voted for and/or like Trump. You'll quickly discover how wrong this statement is.
It's always easy to spot a person who has enclosed themselves in a political or ideological bubble. They're typically first to apply a label to a large group of people and then assume all the people with that label are the exact same.
This has never been true for any group of people and as it turns out, it's the same for people you disagree with politically.
I've had two such chats with Trump supporters, and one said in great detail that this statement is true. He acknowledged that Trump has done a number of ethically and legally problematic things, and that supporting Trump means enabling this, but feels that he has to accept that necessary evil in order to achieve his policy goals on various issues. (The other flatly denied that Trump has ever done anything wrong and refused to keep talking when I produced examples of the most pointlessly cruel stuff.)
Have you heard differently in your own casual chats on the topic?
Reducing illegal immigration seemed to be the primary one. Some stuff on civil rights too, but I'm not sure if that was a big concern for the guy I was talking to or an attempt to find common ground where he knew I'd be more sympathetic.
> It's always easy to spot a person who has enclosed themselves in a political or ideological bubble. They're typically first to apply a label to a large group of people and then assume all the people with that label are the exact same.
Your recent posting history here includes calling the entire European Union a "non-contributing toddler" to the world. Hmm.
At least in 2010, it was common for new grads to get GS-14/GS-15 pay for in-demand tech skills. It's a bit odd that early career folks would start out at the max of the pay band, but it is what it is. These were for roles which required a clearance.
Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity). GS-12 was a more typical "target" position (with GS-13 on occasion, like at some of the labs) back in 2010. A masters or a PhD could have bumped you up to GS-13/14/15 though.
Target: People typically enter, when coming out of college, at a lower grade in the GS-5/7/9 area with a target position of one of GS-11/12/13. IT (not CS) folks were often in GS-11 targeted positions, computer scientists and engineers often in GS-12 positions. They'd get promoted in two grade increases (5 to 7, 7 to 9, 9 to 11) or one grade increases (11 to 12, 12 to 13) until they hit their target grade. At a rate of either one increase per year or per 6 months depending on when they got hired, by what agency, and in what role. An IT person, usually one increase per year; engineer, typically two increases per year. Computer scientists usually got screwed and got one increase per year which meant you had fewer of them wanting to work for the government (they also, at that time, rarely got signing bonuses). This leaves a lot of the software shops in DOD (where I had experience) mostly filled with aerospace and electrical engineers.
"Cyber" roles (security; which could be a couple different job series) in some agencies jumped up faster or had a higher target grade due to the need (or perceived need) for more people.
> Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity)
Based on the FAQ, US Tech Force roles are located in DC (so they'll get the DC adjustment) and from the sounds of it, this proposal is the AI Washing the "Cyber Service" or "Cyber Exempted Service".
Also, based on Scott Kupor's (former Managing Parter at A16Z turned head of OPM) memo [0] it appears they seem to be using the same approach used to start the USDS back in the Obama admin. And based on their mention of "fellows", I think they'll merging parts of what used to be the Presidential Management Fellows program.
If AI-washing and Trump-washing helps maintain the core of these programs, there's nothing wrong with that.
Edit:
Dug deeper thru the FAQ - it's basically an AI washed version of the PMF and PIF.
I was responding to someone's claim about new grads (read the comment I responded to), not about US Tech Force. The person I responded to claimed that it was common for new grads (circa 2010) to jump in at GS-14/15. That was not common.
Ahh! My bad! Yea you're absolutely right - aside from PMFs who came out of grad programs you aren't see a new grad starting beyond GS7/8 in most cases.
It's also why a large portion of Gov employees end up jumping ship to professional services firms like BAH, Deloitte, Accenture, etc.
It could be a bias in the roles I was looking at - but coming in with physics undergrad for computer science roles, that was the standard set of roles in the Boston area for defense roles. Granted, these were mostly with private contractors who mirrored the GS pay scale along with their supporting government offices.
This was absolutely not true, and I don’t know where you’re getting this. A newly minted CS PhD with a top end clearance would have gotten a GS-13 at most, anything less would have been much lower. Where I worked, STEM bachelors were generally hired on as GS-7s or 9s.
Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO.
... although that seems depressingly like it would also be the experience with new administrators being installed in executive agencies every 4 years, except they're slightly older.
By function a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee and there’s nothing they can do about it
I posted elsewhere that I left a govt career as a military officer precicely because of this reality. It’s like a old boring joke now that politicians are corrupt and worthless.
I will tell you from the inside that not only is it true but it’s 10 times to 100 times worse than you think it is.
I have multiple stories of operational systems, functions, whatever you wanna call them that we’re working exceptionally well had good backing, good funding and were completely wiped out because whoever became the deputy under secretary for that budget line decided they didn’t want to do it anymore. and completely shelved decades worth of work. Like literally I remember having to unplug a server that was running life-critical beacons for POWs because they weren’t being used enough.
As if that weren’t enough that same development problem then shifted over to some new hot organization that is in the politicians jurisdiction and then they start over from scratch with none of the learning from the previous admin.
There is no positive system that can be affected by the United States government
It does not exist, they cannot functionally or structurally exist, because the government of the United States but is not and has never been built on supporting citizens or the global community it is built and has always been built to support wealthy politicians and that’s all.
I’m not aware of how every other countries work but the ones I’ve seen the inside are the same
Going into the government for the “mission” is probably the most intentionally ignorant thing somebody could do given the plethora of easily accessible data proving exactly this
Somehow this country has managed to do big and bold things when it is needed. Those great systems that were dismantled got built at one point so it is theoretically possible to do good. Furthermore other countries seem to do a better job at serving their citizens so its not like effective government is impossible((look at how the EU at least gets some things that benefit their citizens even though most of it is a mess).
There has got to be some pathway to get back to that.
> a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee
It’s worth being specific about what is meant by “political appointee” here. That term has specific legal meaning in the context of federal staffing, and (as I understand it, not a lawyer) is not the same thing as “GS employee who was hired as part of an administration’s political agenda”.
> Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you
GS grade does not correspond directly to manager/managee relationships at plenty of federal agencies. Someone getting hired at a higher GS grade is not automatically “over you” in the formal reporting hierarchy. That’s not to say this never happens (GS:org chart level is the case more often than not, I’d guess), but it’s not a given.
Now, if your issue is that agencies sometimes offer high (by the standards of current employees) GS grades to attract talented hires, then I agree that is a problem! The solution to that is to improve government pay scales and fix fed hiring more generally: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...
Until that is done, (good) policies like the Pendleton Act cannot help that much.
Not being dismissive of your experience (or that of a civil servant with 10s of years of experience). I have a deep respect for that kind of work and folks who give up more lucrative opportunities in order to serve their country and fellow citizens.
> whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO
That’s being awfully dismissive of the individuals skill set. Nobody gets the job by making the right kind of jokes around the CEO. Nobody. Getting in the door takes hard work, talent and some amount of luck.
For DOGE specifically? Would be interested to hear of those DOGE employees who truly deserved to be GS-15s due to their extensive experience in both tech and government.
The USDS and DOGE had completely different mandates. Non government experience makes sense when you’re trying to learn the lessons of industry to improve gov website accessibility, performance and ux.
On the other hand, trying to slash spending with no understanding of the agencies you’re working at- let alone any life experience for a lot of these folks- is a very different mandate.
Not to mention “…recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build…” while also “…participants will receive technical training…”
So “elite” engineers need technical training?
What am I missing here.
I have extensive experience with this kind of government nonsense, but usually it is kind of in the background, blather no one really takes serious because it’s just blowing smoke. But this seems so credibility destroying through its ridiculous contradictions and bombast.
(1) Are you saying it's bad if they're upping engineer pay to be more competitive, or you're just skeptical that they will?
(2) I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best, rather than those desiring a stable, low-paying bureaucracy — I don't think that attracts the best people.
(3) On talent and recruiting: This is being done by the National Design Studio, it says at the bottom. That's led by a cofounder of Airbnb - I know one person who works at the National Design Studio and he's a phenomenal engineer. The administration also has the involvement of David Sacks, who founded Craft Ventures and is pretty well-known in SV. I think this is probably the most tech-competent the government will have been in a long time. I'm not crediting Trump at all for that, to be clear - just pointing out that tech talent in government seems to be getting better, not worse.
#1: I am extremely skeptical they are paying that. I suspect this was put together by someone who has no understanding of federal pay systems. "$150,000 to $200,000" is already an erroneous number, federal salary is limited by federal law and cannot exceed $195200.
#2: Overwhelmingly I agree. Federal pay is very, very broken. They should reform it to align more with the private sector, and there are laws in place that do that, and every year the sitting president literally writes a letter stating it would be an economic emergency to pay federal employees equivalent wages and instead sets them low. You are still limited by federal law to that current $195k, so it means it's impossible for the federal government to hire technical experts and pay them a fair wage.
#3: I'm sure the federal government is paying those people some ridiculous amount of money to put this together, and they'll probably do a decent job because of it. It still doesn't change the fact that federal hiring is really broken, and has become significantly worse in this admin.
Serious question: what makes you think team “hold my beer” won’t find a way around past norms, or just ignore them? Not that they actually care enough to do it, but I don’t think they wouldn’t/couldn’t if they did care.
Left federal and my private 401k is 150% match up to 6%. Better than TSP in everything except fees, which are slightly higher. But that mattered a lot less than my pay, I was a GS-15 in a leadership role and took a role in the private sector for a 30% pay increase back into an individual contributor role. So much less work and a huge pay increase.
3 dollars for every 2 up to 6% of pay? So you could get up to 15% of pay into the 401k (or the annual limit, whichever comes first)?
That’s by far the best I’ve ever heard of. Usually employers screw us by keeping the majority of the max annual contribution, which only they can make, out of our reach with crappy “50% match up to 3%” policies or whatever (even a 100% match means you can’t hit the actual annual max, it has to be higher than that).
Oh that's actually really good. Beats a TSP for sure even with the fees. But from what I remember you're at a defense contractor - they probably have the best benefits plans overall in the US.
As I wrote in another comment, US Tech Force participants doing 2-year stints won't qualify for the gov't backed retirement (unless they were prior military, prior civil service, or find a non-term appointment to follow this stint with). You need three years to keep the 5% TSP (401k equivalent) match, which is similar to many private companies. You also need 5 years to qualify for FERS (if you quit before then you can get your contributions back, but that's optional as you may want to come back to gov't later and have the years count).
If I was late-career with a good solid financial foundation im place and just looking to work to cover living expenses the Federal Gov as fucked as it may be doesn't seem like a bad gig. Since the bar is so incredibly fucking low you just mail it in and collect the money and when youre furloughed you play golf or do extra hobbies. The ball just needs to keep moving, it doesn't actually need to move quickly. Heck it doesn't even need to necessarily move forward.
I am 51 “late career” and there is no way in hell I would work for the federal government now.
Even if I didn’t care about the politics, I have made more than the posted salaries working full time for outside consulting companies contracting with the federal government over the last five years and I wasn’t working at the whims of the government
There are way more people calling it in at large orgs or FAANGs. Clearly you've never worked in a civil service position given your foolish caricature of one.
Figures this comes from the National Design Studio (https://ndstudio.gov/) which ironically also ignores the government's own advice on web standards and correct use of identifying headers.
One can assume the US Tech Force will perceive itself as also unfettered by those silly rules and good practices.
My actual first thought was "Is this a hoax?" precisely because the website did not identify itself as a US government website in the usual way for executive branch sites.
I know it's par for the course these days, but that's a lot of Js and CSS for a single page app with some text, a few images, and a list of collapsible info sections (whose animations aren't very smooth).
I didn't mean the logo (honestly didn't even notice). I was talking about the robot guy's t-shirt - it does have 13 stripes, but the number and layout of stars look rather play-it-by-ear.
"What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else.
...
This is President Trump going bigger than President Nixon"
Of course. Whatever problems the US government had before, mass firings, loyalty tests, furloughs, and endless other shenanigans have only exacerbated them.
There is a somewhat stubborn idea that a government will always have many inefficiencies baked in, since there’s no real incentive to remove them beyond a generic “that would be nice”.
:( I had to click through because I didn't believe you at first... as someone who used to proudly work with feds, this yet another low point in many over the past ten years.
That's a nice idea, so nice in fact that it already existed as 18F until they closed it under the guise of efficiency earlier this year and are now starting over.
And USDS, which was specifically 2 year terms just like this, for actual experienced engineers at the top of GS15 pay. They destroyed USDS to pretend to reinvent it but with new worse humans.
This is just their attempt to destroy USDS, started by Obama, and rebrand with a Trump-created effort. Just like everything. He wants credit for everything. I am shocked he isn’t calling this Trump Digital Government Services or something.
> Additional benefits include professional development opportunities, networking with government and industry leaders, and a pathway to continued public service or private sector careers.
Given the lack of mention of any benefits prior to this, it sure sounds like "you'll get lots of exposure!"
edit: not sure if they just added it, or if I just missed it, but there is an FAQ entry on compensation:
> Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.
Yeah, given the primary benefit of government jobs like this is usually the stability, pension etc when you’re offering absolutely none of that you really need to look down the back of the couch for some benefits.
For me as someone that would potentially be interested in and qualified for one of these roles, the DOGE actions earlier this year and ongoing firing of nonpartisan & non-appointed that don't tow the current ruling party line ruined the stability benefit. I think it also casts doubt on the pension aspect, but I know less about what's required to get pension in US fed positions.
I think the stability is the traditional perk of government work (in exchange for a smaller salary). The funding trouble does make it seem like less of a fair trade…
I was super-interested in this years ago. My interest vanished when I encountered the “tour of duty” concept. I don’t make FAANG money so the pay was roughly a lateral move for me if it’d included retirement, but having it be time-bound rather than career-oriented was a huge turnoff. Was ready to make that my whole deal, potentially for the rest of my life.
The US going politically totally batshit crazy shortly after ended up making it for the best that I did’t join, but still, it struck me as weird that they had to set it up with that extra sting of “we have to make sure this is a sacrifice”.
>Given the lack of mention of any benefits prior to this, it sure sounds like "you'll get lots of exposure!"
Well, they are also "partnering" with some private sector companies. I guess the idea is that candidates will put in their 2 years, then take their contact list and join federal sales arm of one of the private companies.
The initial roster of private sector partners includes Adobe, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3.ai, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, and Zoom. This list will expand over time.
Are there any companies on that list who haven't made gross public displays of servitude towards the current administration?
Every one of them will also be tripping over each other to try and push their software as the solution to any and every problem. I'd wager a hefty sum that at the end of the day every US government department is going to have it's own unique software stack that will be ill-suited for their needs, incompatible with what adjacent departments use, and offer no robustness in the event of an emergency.
I know it's annoying now to nitpick over what's AI generated, but I'm noticing their robot mascot has two different incorrect American flags on its sweater..
Yeah my first thought was that this already existed, was doing great work, and got canned by DOGE in favor of what appears to be a MUCH MUCH more expensive version of it here.
I was having a conversation with a Trump-supporting relative, who was genuinely asking me, “Don’t you think it’s great that they put a bunch of [DOGE] engineers into the government to fix things?”
When I said, “Well, we already had that - the USDS. And what has DOGE done, specifically, to fix things?” it just went right over her head. Did not even land.
Most people have very little idea how anything works. Especially in the government, but it’s fairly true in general.
Something like half of US adults don’t know how marginal income tax rates work, which is one of the very most-relevant-to-them-personally things for them to know about the federal government. The loudest ordinary citizens complaining about foreign aid or the estate (“death”, as republicans rebranded it on strategist advice) tax can’t tell you a halfway accurate thing about either, they’re just repeating what they heard, or some assumption they made (“well if [talking head] is complaining about it this much it must be really bad!”)
This doesn’t get better for any other program or tax or whatever that you can think of. Folks have no idea how anything works and the media figures and politicians they trust lie to them constantly, and are rewarded for it.
That was my first thought too. But they can say that this one was created by their administration. And is more AI.
I'd love to hear from people who had experience with USDS before this administration. The chatter I see online is overwhelmingly positive. OTOH, I interviewed with USDS and the experience was not good. I don't love tech interviews in general but this one was somehow worse. I remember thinking the interview would have made more sense if they were hiring for PMs, but I wasn't a PM and didn't want to be one. Focusing on my communication abilities and professional history is one thing, but this ... wasn't that. I always wondered if others had the same experience. Maybe I just had the wrong interviewer on the wrong day.
No, USDS was about modernizing the government's tech systems in general.
This one is about jamming AI into shit:
> Tech Force will be an elite group of ~1,000 technology specialists hired by agencies to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) implementation and solve the federal government's most critical technological challenges.
And apparently implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency using TrumpCoin.
> Backed by the White House, Tech Force will tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era – from administering critical financial infrastructure at the Treasury Department to advancing cutting-edge programs at the Department of Defense – and everything in between.
Also, surprised their AI reviewer allowed the use of DoD... I thought they identify as Dept of War now.
I wonder if there are living people who don't interpret it as a sign of something __REALLY__ weird going on here.
I view Trump as a clinical case of narcissism, bad upbringing, screwed-up mentors, but too late for treatment anyways.
But man, the crowd that lick his boots in public for a position or some coins... They should be shunned for life. This level of sycophancy would destroy one's reputation for ever in my culture and I just don't want to believe it wouldn't in American culture. But even the official government channels have been turned into fan pages run by six year olds. Not even the most backward countries in the world do look so stupid, so overtly corrupt, so I am at a loss: why does the USA? Is this really considered acceptable? Maybe some Americans can explain how this is being perceived in cultural terms.
Everyone who would have said no, every leader, with self-respect, has been removed or fired, at least in the executive branch. Every person with a spine who resigns or gets fired is replaced by someone a bit more sycophantic (and craven/stupid), and the whole thing slowly ratchets into what it is now. Lots of good people are gone -- more true the higher up you go.
You have to understand that most Americans do not approve of what's going on here. But, most people go with the flow, and are waiting for all of this to blow over and go "back to normal" next election. We'll see if it ever does, it probably won't. We took the whole thing for granted, big time.
Enormous amounts of money and 30ish years (about 1980 or a bit after, to 2016) were spent building the largest web of propaganda distribution probably ever, to make this happen. Plus pioneering PR and crisis management strategies and testing the limits of voters’ tolerance for bullshit (very important post-Nixon—an early major experiment was the Iran-Contra scandal, and it went great for them)
After 30 years it was so good it could make Republicans who’d been making fun of Trump as a notorious failed businessman, clownish self-parody, conman, and philanderer five minutes earlier (and I mean common voters, not politicians) do a 180 on a dime and send the dude money.
None of this was built for Trump, but in priming their base to never consider voting for a democrat, they made them both way too right-wing and also made them wonder why Republican politicians weren’t going after democrats way harder (they’re so terrible, after all!) which teed up a coup within the party just perfectly.
Except that many of the swing states were solidly democrat for decades. It was only after repeated failures at providing meaningful change (healthcare, stopping the erosion of jobs to China, providing cheaper access to education among other promises) that people had enough and started voting red consistently. look at Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Hell even Florida voted for Obama. He was just another in a long line of controlled opposition. People have become wise to the grift.
So is hiring young people over a better qualified senior applicant. You wouldn't have to make it a point if recent grads would win in a meritocracy.
It's fine to hire a bunch of juniors but then you're kinda explicitly not looking for the best. But at $150k-ish they'll get mid career and senior devs from low CoL areas pouring in.
Because in this administration, I guess it is different.
The "US Government" are the people and agencies that DOGE tried to get rid of and that were taken out of their jobs or unable to provide any services due to the shutdown.
Whereas "The White House" is Trump and his buddies.
> Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
> Tech Force will include centralized organization and programming and serve as a recruiting platform post-employment.
Be prepared to struggle at the end of your two year placement because you have no idea how this is going to look on your resume two years from now. Maybe it’ll have the gravitas of having worked at the former USDS. But maybe it’ll be the black mark of having worked at DOGE. The latter feels much more likely than the former.
You will have no control over this outcome. If I had to bet I’d say they will take advantage of your junior status to get you to do the kind of wildly irresponsible hacking, slashing and AI injecting that a more senior engineer would object to and you’re going to face some tough questions in subsequent job interviews.
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed. I wouldn't want a spiteful employer.
The flip side is that a lot of government jobs lead to pretty good private sector opportunities working with those same agencies. If you want to contact to DOE, knowing how it works in the inside and knowing people there definitely helps.
A lot of military contractors are former military. Who better to design something for a soldier than a soldier?
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed.
It's not always that black and white. In spite of appearances, many many companies make hiring decisions based on things other than what's in a resume.
For example, a company may have $mm contracts with another company whose owners/operators/shareholders/etc. favor one particular view, political party, or social construct. That company will most certainly look down upon the other company hiring people of a particular background.
Or the pressure could be internal. A couple of times in my life I've worked for companies where certain departments were unionized. Even if you weren't in one of those departments, if the company hired you and you had a particular background, the union would object.
I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.
For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.
Im all for it. Software job markets are inflated. Id be 100% willing to take a lower salary if that meant a reduction of all salaries across the board. Younger people need to be going into things like EE or MechE instead of CS in hopes of getting a six figure job out of college, living in downtown highrises, while working on something that is essentially funded by ads.
> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).
Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?
I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.
Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.
You're assuming everyone is one side or the other and there aren't people who think both sides are awful and they love making their problems with each other the world's problems.
I think it would be best to work with people that I could trust to be civil and not to scream at or enact physical violence on another person, while wearing the hoodie with my companies name on it.
Or at the least, I don't want to have to wonder if I hire a Jewish coworker if there are gonna be any issues.
Even before LLMs, most coding problems really are a test of efficient pointer manipulation. You either move a pointer to character in words, pointer to data in array, or traverse n-node linked lists.
This level of pointer manipulation is rarely ever needed these days, as things like sorting, searching, and parsing are all handled by functions. An LRU cache is literally a function decorator in Python.
What I care more is if someone can understand that network calls take time, that data processing is fast, and how to optimize that pipeline. Threading is not a requirement, they can do it with async as well, or even without async with just smart scheduling.
The core of the problem that makes it LLM proof is that the problem doesn't disclose anything about network latencies or data structure. So standard iterative solutions from LLM usually end up taking longer because they get stuck waiting on a single network response. And so you can clearly tell who understand the core operations at hand, versus someone who just memorized a bunch of patterns and/or using LLMs.
> Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed
I disagree. If a persons resume contains description of blatantly harmful work how else can I interpret it but negatively? At best you’d have to chalk it up to “just following orders” but I don’t want blind obedience in a prospective employee either.
The destruction caused by DOGE is evident to anyone with eyes, as is the agency’s complete lack of achievement. I would absolutely be asking questions about why someone remained there.
These employees will be hired by the companies they helped integrate. Not a single one will look on them poorly. They will have domain knowledge, turf knowledge, and they won't argue about working with MAGA for money.
Embracing MAGA on your resume can pay dividends when they’re in power. Perhaps less so once the tide (inevitably) turns. There’s a reason a lot of gov tech folks deliberately paint themselves as non partisan.
Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.
You seem to be assuming that someone who remained working for DOGE would even want to work for a company who would pass them over for having worked for DOGE.
I think you are right that you could face some challenges during the screening process but if you get to the interview this should be easy to explain with a face saving excuse.
"The tech industry was doing poorly and I was faced with a layoff so I took whatever job I could get. While I didn't agree with the actions of the administration I felt like I could be a force for good in an otherwise turbulent environment"
As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa. The reputation hit of disreputable employers is dramatically overblown.
To be honest you can also get through issues with the resume screening process you can generally just change the wording and section headers a bit in order to avoid a quick filter out.
I'm pretty much a closet conservative working for big tech so I've had a lot of practice with this sort of stuff :D
I'd wager "scientist with a deep background in research of rocket propolsion technology in the 1950s" was a bit more difficult to come by than "early-career software developer who integrated a bunch of APIs and maybe wrote a frontend in React".
> Participants are hired as federal employees based on their technical qualifications and serve in non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation.
well, it's going to be incredible. Its gonna be something like you've never seen before. I've never seen anything like it. In fact, I hear many say it's going to be one of the greatest Tech Forces they've ever seen, maybe even the greatest.
I don't know, with almost thirty private contracting firms already identified (and a note that that list will grow) and a target of ~1,000 federal employees, seems like all the actual “Tech Force” public sector staff are going to be in contract management, oversight, and related roles.
Did I miss congress passing a new set of laws creating the US Tech Force? I'm confused, as this seems like a direct and open violation of the Appointments Clause.
You're being facetious I see, but I assume there will be litigation brought up against it being illegal, and then it will be stuck down as blatantly illegal in the next 6 months, and people involved will not get paid and be fired / dissolved.
Top level hiring is a close knit network. The FAQ I wanted to see answered: who’s onboard already, and how do I know them / how might I have heard of them / what have they done before?
I’m going to make a guess that the answers are missing for a reason.
Space Force, Tech Force, Ass Force. What a stupid timeline. I've been promoting government work (state, not federal) to my friends ever since I landed a sweet gig. It's awesome. Guess what job I won't seek.
I was just browsing this website and found that the jobs are actually listed at https://www.usajobs.gov I think.
The latter website, job search, job details and help center look actually nice. Unfortunately I'm living in EU and not an American citizen, but I wish EU did something similar.
(There is https://eures.europa.eu but just like almost any other EU website, the design is very confusing and cluttered)
This is not a political appointment, but if you have mentioned something even mildly negative about a certain person in the past, not only we'll walk you out, we'll probably arrest you!
I don't know the book, but I hope it isn't yet another complaint about bureaucracy in need of "business thinking". I.e., how deep are they digging to find the real players?
Because you can bet your home this "AI" initiative is just another instance of Elite Capture¹ here. The last thing any government needs right now is letting its policies and implementations being steered by (and made dependent on) hallucinating "AI", whose ownership ultimately is in the hands of the democracy destroying tech oligarchs.
They talk about the specific systems in terms of legacy code and how far removed government agencies are from automated testing and other modern, best practices. It has been a couple of years since I read it but I recall a part about a business process at the IRS that that people don't start learning until they have been there for about 17 years - due to the complexity. It talks about how there had been failed attempts to migrate to a new database, some of the data is now duplicated but the upgrade is de-funded so all the new code has to be aware that data may be duplicated.
I'm not sure if this book got into it but I've also read that the IRS has assembly code from the 1960s that is very optimized and only a few devs can work on it. ChatGPT knows a lot about this history as well.
It’s not that. It’s a several-years-old (and still very good) book by one of the original leaders of the USDS, a group which put many of the proposals described therein into practice.
> No, Tech Force positions are not political appointments. Participants are hired as federal employees based on their technical qualifications and serve in non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation.
Will you be forced to set a politically biased out-of-office message that blames the Other Side when you're inevitably furloughed during the next funding crisis?
Given the current administration's desire for unmitigated power, and SCOTUS' inclination to give it to them, there's really no such thing as a non-partisan role anymore. When you can be fired at any moment for any action the regime deems disloyal, you can't be nonpartisan.
They might as well be political appointments after Trump v Slaughter is decided since the unitary executive maximalists would swallow all for-cause job termination protections that have defined the professional civil service.
It seems like an effort to hire newly educated people for a two year
program, to work on various efforts in the federal government as
something close to on the job training.
Once you are done you can pair up with one of the private partners
you had contacted with during your program. (If they want you).
This does not appear to be an effort to hire people to the federal
government, but to get cheap labour from new grads who hope to
work on something cool.
(But yes they will have to hire the framework people)
You can go ahead and add this to the list of job experiences that will earn you a "Definitely Not" rating from me in the hiring committee, along with doge, palantir, coinbase, etc.
A person who willingly worked for doge or whatever has a lot of explaining to do. All you know about them on paper is that they are either a clueless dupe, or a closet nazi. Either way why would you want them in your repo?
That’s your choice, though please consider that many people who worked for those places may have done so before the behavior you disagree with started. Also consider that there are reasons to work for an organization other than “paycheck” and “alignment with organization priorities”, and that it is entirely possible (and sometimes uniquely possible) to do important, beneficial work while employed by an organization with which you fundamentally do not agree; the majority of my resume lines fit this description, I think.
Reasonable minds can differ as to whether that constitutes unethicality or hypocrisy.
You're right – close-minded is immediately blacklisting. Thoughtful is:
"What did you do at $PLACE_CURRENT_ADMIN_LIKES, and what, in retrospect, did it actually accomplish that made people and society freer, more empowered, and their lives richer?"
At which point you can say "I made an interface to let anyone with access scrape ALPRs around the nation, and I genuinely didn't think about what people would do with it", and then that speaks for itself.
==> We are going to build infrastructure with teams of people who won't stay longer than two years. Nobody has thought about this long enough to realise this might be a problem.
I still can't decide whether DOGE was a genius steal "hit job" to steal a bunch of data and place people into key positions under the pretext of waste reduction, or whether it was just truly an exercise in rushed "kill them all!" style incompetence that was never properly thought through or executed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277687 mentioned Recoding America as "what you're up against", omitting the important "people had learned what they were up against and were well into the process of building collaborative effort between civil servants
the book _is_ good, but it's rather disheartening that all the people discussed (and many more that couldn't fit into the book) on the federal side were summarily fired to clear space for sycophants and toadies round one (the DOGE broccoli hair kids siphoning off sensitive data and doing some casual corruption) are putting out this as sycophants and toadies round two: _lasting_ corruption in partnership with the least scrupulous bits of private industry
the people in the book are https://18f.org/ and spent the last decade building useful relationships, familiarity with public sector quirks, and standard software toolkit items for government tech. they got tossed for the crime of working with the Biden admin and wanting to work towards building tech entirely for public good under the auspices of the law.
whatever branding and whatnot this comes wrapped in i don't trust this admin nor whatever bits of the private sector are looking to work with it in the slightest to not stand up something that works in the public interest. we're gonna get new and exciting forms of graft and revolving door exploitation of sensitive data
How is this different from 18F (a group within GSA which Elon killed), US Digital Service (which Elon kind of converted to DOGE) or Defense Digital Service (DDS)?
Is the only difference that the current government can claim they started this (completely ignoring they dismantled the previous programs)?
Now that the administration killed 18-F and USDS, they need a new organization that does the same thing but consists of people loyal to this administration.
More seriously, one big difference is that USDS recognized that design is as important as technology. This org only wants engineering-types.
> We're looking for expertise in software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics, or technical project management. Strong problem-solving abilities and a passion for public service are essential.
Something often observed in authoritarian states is duplication of effort because of empire building. The ruler cannot trust any of his underlings- they are all sucking up to him and backstabbing each other constantly, so he pits them against each other, assigning overlapping responsibilities on purpose to keep any one subordinate from becoming too strong. This is why all of the "fascism/communism is so efficient" arguments need to actually look at the nature of Soviet or Nazi governments. As an example, there were at least five completely separate armed ground forces in Nazi Germany (1).
This constant competition between parts of the government actually led to tremendous waste. You can see it again in the Soviet space program during the 1960's. While NASA had a single purpose of getting to the moon before 1971 with a unified organization under the control of a single leader, after Khrushchev was deposed (and Korolev died) the Soviet space program splintered into a war between the old OKB-1 (Korolev's group) and Chelomei's OKB-52 that lasted for twenty years over Super-Proton vs Energia etc.
1: The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS are the two most famous, but the Luftwaffe recruited, trained and equipped the Fallschirm-Panzer Korps and Fallshchirmjaeger- yes, German paratroops worked for Goering not the Wehrmacht. There were also five Marine Infantry Divisions under the Navy- they had half as many Marine Divisions as the US did, despite many fewer amphibious assaults! And the Volksturm, at the end of the war when things looked grim for Nazi Germany, was under NSDAP party control but separate from the Waffen-SS.
Don't forget to work in "dominance" and "lethality"! It really, truly, is all about criticizing and tearing the old thing down, and belatedly stepping it up again with neoconservative vibes.
Yeah, this is nothing more than grandstanding idealism. Their staff will no doubtably be as dumb as Space Force or Air Force when it comes to cloud and technology. I've dealt with them in various forms throughout the years contracting. BESPIN was entirely contractor driven. Their devops pipelines and how to deploy things. If that's your indicator, good luck.
Fortunately that's addressed in the extremely fine FAQ:
> How is Tech Force related to other government technology programs, including ones at GSA or the United States DOGE Service?
> While Tech Force will coordinate across all of government, it is distinct from other technology initiatives within government, including the United States DOGE Service and programs managed by GSA. These programs differ in their mandates, structure, required skillsets, and ability to convert to the competitive service.
It looks like this is trying to fit into the same space as the former USDS and F18 which had term appointments. The key idea behind those was the industry partnership (recruiting experienced people from industry) and the knowledge/skills transfer that came with it. If you look at some other programs (Peace Corps, for instance) you'll see a similar thing. 2-year terms with extensions up to maybe 5 total years.
What's funny is the retirement benefits won't apply to most 2-year term employees. Unless they were prior military or civil service, or come back later, two years is not long enough to keep the TSP match (three year vesting period) or to qualify for the pension (five years). (EDIT: Funny because they explicitly list it as a benefit, but these folks won't qualify for it.)
The funny thing here is that the short (often 1-3 years) tenure that's so common in the industry leads to some absolute dogshit software. Good things take time. By limiting terms to 2 years you almost guarantee that outcome.
The biggest red flag on engineering resumes is never sticking at something for more than 2 years. Your bad decisions never catch up to you.
Funnily enough I had recently been thinking something like this would be a good idea. Like if the govt. created a department with the soul goal of developing open tech for the public good. I guess you could say they kind of already do this with research grants but something with more clear focus could be a good thing.
It's too bad this was created by an absolute dumpster fire admin that will 100% use this for malicious ends.
This looks like a way to force a few key players to gobble up all the federal dollars by forcing many executive controlled agencies to be force fed these LLM solutions because these same key players cannot sell their wares to the public so they need to steal public money, once again.
The difficulty for any party to want to govern after this is... there is no government. It is all oligarch captured, the candidates are oligarch sponsored, and don't count on the media to sound the siren because, well, you know why.
This is a plane that is never gonna fly again. The only way is to build a new plane, as impossible as that might sound.
Is DOGE still there? The latest reporting [1] I've seen is that it's leaderless and has more or less just been absorbed into other organizations. This aligns with DOGE not posting anything for several months now.
Ugh. I didn't realize until looking at the "US Tech Force" FAQ that USDS is now "United States DOGE Service." Somehow I assumed it had just faded away when all the good people left.
That's its official name. Obama had created the US Digital Service (USDS) back in 2014- it was essentially a formalization of the "Tiger Team" that had fixed Healthcare.gov the year before. The idea was that you would take mid-career to senior SDE's, PM's, UX people, DevOps, etc. from industry, and bring them into the government for a 2-3 year period, where they would jump into a specific government IT thing and fix it up, revamp and improve, and then after a few years leave the USDS and go back to industry. It was part of the Executive Office of the President, though it was funded by Congress through 2024 (and then via CR like the rest of the government until the shutdown).
It wasn't a large group, and they weren't really responsible for much so they never got much attention. They would just try and fix a few specific pain points at a time. I only knew about it because one of the best PM's I ever worked for did a stint exactly like it was supposed to work- she joined the USDS, worked for the American people for a few years, then left and went back to industry.
And then on January 21st, 2025, his first full day in office, Trump renamed the USDS to the United States DOGE Service, because USDS had money to pay salaries and since it was part of the EotP he could easily hire new people without civil service restrictions. So he could bring in new people (Big Balls etc.) easily enough. By February, essentially everyone who had been in the USDS on the last day of Biden's term were either laid off or resigned. And since then the USDS has been entirely DOGEified.
Oh come on, quality of life has improved so much in the world in the last 50 years! With progress like that, it's fine to set aside your values for a few years at a time ...
> Participants will work on high-impact technology initiatives including AI implementation, application development, data modernization, and digital service delivery across federal agencies.
> The initial roster of private sector partners includes Adobe, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3.ai, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, and Zoom. This list will expand over time.
Ever wanted to get involved in government-sanctioned espionage technology? This seems like an recruitment effort for that. Applicants beware. Remember that in just 3 years this will stop helping you to get hired, and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
This is a thing you can only say if you know very little about the talent pipeline for actual espionage technology in the USG, which: they do not have a lot of problems there. Lots of people don't share your precise values about espionage or about espionage technology, and the real jobs in this field are extremely high-status. There's competition to get them.
> This is a thing you can only say if you know very little about the talent pipeline for actual espionage technology in the USG
Or something one might want to say if they want to still have plausible deniability about not having been there, yet still want to say something. Who knows.
The USG does not want plausible deniability about this. They actively recruit on elite engineering campuses over it. It is super fucking interesting work and candidates compete for the opportunity to do it. If you think otherwise, you're in a filter bubble.
There is this consistent myth by the most radical faction of people in the country. They are only the most radical 5 or 10%, but they seem to believe their anti-nationalist, anti-government, anti-American views are much more widely share than they are. The vast majority of American's view working in the defense industry, espionage, etc as a good thing.
There are ways in which it clearly is a good thing. I don't have my head around how people could oppose CNE operations aimed at counterproliferation, for example. But obviously, it's morally fraught work (fraught, meaning complicated, a minefield, not meaning "damnable") and I don't have the stomach (or, really, the talent) for it.
Theres a spectrum too it. Helping design fighter jets and missiles? Yes that has to be done with the idea that the weapons you are designing for national security can and most likely will be used in such a way that will cause harm. However in espionage or cyber security, those are almost all pure good. You are protecting information or attaining information.
The main myth though is that somehow there is this idea that someone working as a booze allen contractor for the NSA or CIA is going to now be blackballed by everyone out of disgust. Most people will see it as good, and most companies just want talent and dont actually care about what areas people are in.
> If you think otherwise, you're in a filter bubble.
Belittling. Excellent way to get your point across.
> They actively recruit on elite engineering campuses over it. It is super fucking interesting work and candidates compete for the opportunity to do it.
This seems like it should be an easy thing to verify with some sort of reference. This is exactly what the parent comment is suggesting and you still flippantly are avoiding it as "trust me bro". I actually believe you, so why don't you share some evidence then?
I don't really care in this instance, because the information I'm relaying here is obviously, verifiably correct. It's not like, a persuasion challenge for me here. I'm just relating basic facts.
If you have something to say, I think you should say it. This is vacuous. I understand why it's unpopular to relate the fact that applications for serious surveillance/espionage CNE work at NSA are competitive, and that the USG is very open about soliciting those applications. It remains a fact. Feel free to challenge me on that; we can go deeper.
What I'm not going to do is write you an apology for confronting you with that information.
> I understand why it's unpopular to relate the fact that applications for serious surveillance/espionage CNE work at NSA are competitive, and that the USG is very open about soliciting those applications.
And I'm not challenging you on that, at all. I actually believe you are correct because you typically provide very thoughtful answers from a position of authority and usually bring evidence to back your assertions. In this case, you're not. Your comments are childish and makes your position way less believable and hence why I'm pushing you.
> It remains a fact.
Just because you say it's a fact doesn't mean it is. The fact that you've done nothing but say "I know its a fact so therefore it is" doesn't help your position either.
> What I'm not going to do is write you an apology for confronting you with that information.
Yeesh. Chill out. I never asked for an apology. Your discourse is belittling and unproductive.
I'm not talking about the USG... Yes yes, it's great work and no drawbacks, particularly not considering the moral and ethical implications. But please do continue try to help them recruit while purposefully misunderstand what I write.
They do not need my help recruiting and the fact that you think an HN thread has any impact whatsoever on elite CS talent matriculating into CNE programs is further evidence you may be in a filter bubble. Not understanding this can't possibly help your cause.
> and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
Not necessarily, especially in the private sector. It's hard to justify not hiring an excellent employee because he or she worked for a company you don't like. Especially if the hiring panel is composed by >1 person.
>Remember that in just 3 years this will stop helping you to get hired, and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
The worst part about this entire political is that Dems are most likely gonna win, and everyone will just move on.
Im really hoping that Trump lives long enough to actually stage a coup and tank the US economy so hard that things like working for this or DOGE actually do start to matter.
Right… because those definitely don’t already assist three-letter agencies and the presence of the largest tech companies on the planet on your CV will definitely somehow become a net negative because uh, orange man bad? I assume that’s what the 3 year window is about?
>What is the expected compensation for participants? Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.
>Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
So "early-career" but they're going to get paid GS-14/15 pay[1] in DC? New grad engineers in DC are going to be GS-7/9 at best. This is either a blatant lie, or created by someone who has no idea of how federal pay works (or both).
As an aside, I was a fed for >10 years and left last year for industry but stay in touch with friends still working federal jobs. Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
> Before this administration recruiting was extremely difficult and candidate quality was low. I've heard that it's nearly impossible now and in the last 18 months they've only been able to hire a single person. Federal jobs used to be considered stable, with good benefits, but low pay. Now they're unstable, the current administration is actively working to make benefits worse, and the pay is still really low.
Also, many people took pride in the service they provided to their country (or to the people, or as part of a team that did good, however they thought of it).
I don't have high hopes for this new thing.
After recent treatment of federal employees, and other things going on in the US this year, including how USDS as DOGE was weaponized against the US... I'd expect this new thing to only be able to recruit from these categories:
1. Outright bad people, with anti-US, looter/saboteur intent, as we've seen from other facets recently. They will focus on their own bad-person individual interests.
2. People who aren't bad, but who are so cognitively impaired, that they still don't realize that they're probably going to get screwed personally and/or directed to be the baddies. They will be bad at everything they do.
3. People who are intelligent and pro-US, and have no illusions about what they're signing up for, but who desperately need the income, after being screwed earlier this year. They won't be inspired to execute well on whatever anti-US directives they're given.
Before all of this happened the hiring I had to deal with when I was federal fell into similar buckets:
1. Completely inept or lazy people that couldn't get a job anywhere else (~50%)
2. Smart people that took the job because it was close to their family (~30%)
3. Smart people that took the job because they liked the the specific mission and felt like it was really important (~10%)
4. Smart people that took the job after retiring from a private industry job as a sort of laid-back post-retirement hobby (we called them re-treads, ~10%)
From what I've heard, a lot of federal employers can only hire from the #1 category now, and the applicants in that category have gotten worse.
There's just no path to home ownership in the DC area for the fed career path after the ZIRP era. A capable person would have to be insane or desperate given the economics alone.
DC has the highest per capita income of anywhere in the US (vs other states/territories), so when you realize federal workers are producing the most value for America the economics are at least a little better. If you look at relative economic slackers like workers of NYC and the private industry where less value is per capita created, it's a bit rougher.
> DC has the highest per capita income of anywhere in the US
This isn't from the Federal workers; it's from people working in contracting for the Feds or other similar roles.
Googling average Federal worker income in DC, every number I came up with was the above the average for DC, and DC is higher than every other state/territory.
I find nothing supporting your assertion but plenty opposing it. Feds are not only pulling it up, but the biggest group of people doing so.
There are a lot of old feds that can afford the area because of how it was priced 25-40 years ago. That’s how stable some fed jobs and careers were.
Now, talking to a barista in DC and the solution is 4-5 roommates. Not unfamiliar to those in the bay area, but less upside.
Less upside…unless your goal is to mix it up with politics,
vs the tech machine.
Not everyone is you, us.
One thing to remember is that federal workers tend to be older because most agencies have been encouraged to hire contractors for decades. That skews averages up towards the mid-career managers, which will seem high if you compare it to the entire job market but if you only compare them with similar private sector employees who have comparable experience and skills they’re underpaid.
Yeah, it's marginally above average for DC, but that doesn't mean they're "raking it in". The average (which is a bad metric for income) is dragged up by the wealthy in DC balancing out the poor in DC, not hordes of Federal Workers (most of whom live outside DC in Maryland/Virginia, FWIW) making $120k.
What number do you have for median federal worker income in DC then? The median representing the 'hordes' were making $120+k from what I saw, not just the average.
Okay, cite your source for that. ZipRecruiter says the median federal income is $125k, with other sources saying the average is $130k. I don't see any source saying they're making way more than that.
>> not hordes of Federal Workers (most of whom live outside DC in Maryland/Virginia, FWIW) making $120k.
> ZipRecruiter says the median federal income is $125k
By your own (contradicting) admission it's hordes of federal workers making $120+k.
I cite your own source, which is inline with what I found.
What does this have to do with the price of DC housing and federal employee salaries' ability to purchase it?
Lower salaries at the same home prices would make it even more difficult. This is what we see in NYC, for instance.
DC has some of the highest home prices but also the highest incomes.
But Feds aren’t the ones earning those big salaries. They make ok money, but an engineering manager in the DC suburbs earns more.
This is a distorted comparison and you know it. DC in unique among US states and territories in that it encompasses a major metropolitan area with no rural regions. In this comparison, DC also leads the country in population density, average building height, public transit usage, latte consumption, and any other correlate of living in a city.
If you compare DC against other major metropolitan statistical areas, the leadership disappears -- see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...
>If you compare DC against other major metropolitan statistical areas, the leadership disappears -- see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...
No it doesn't, not according to the linked data you're proposing. I sorted by per-capita income of MSAs on the second table of that page, it shows DC MSA blowing the other metropolitan areas away. Might not still be accurate as that's a 2010 census, but you're the one insisting on it.
Looks like you're the one, distorting your own citations, mate and you "know it." Methinks this a case of psychological concept known as 'projection'.
I thought you had to realize that comparing DC to a state like California wasn't going to be an apples-to-apples comparison, which is why I wrote, "and you know it." I'm sorry for making assumptions.
You're also right, I was sloppy with my citation. I looked into the source data, and I believe Wikipedia's second table may be wrong here. Here is B19301 from the 2010 census. The Bridgeport MSA is first: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT5YSPT2010.B19301?q=b19301...
Unfortunately, the table on Wikipedia is uncited (beyond the 2010 census) and was added by an anonymous IP address editor, so I don't know how they got their numbers. I'll double check my work and update the article if I don't find anything else.
Generally, though, my point is that if you compare the states and DC, you'll find that DC is an outlier on a lot of dimensions. If you compare the DC metro area with other MSAs, a lot of that exceptionalism goes away.
when I saw 18F, CISA, USDS were targeted by DOGE, everything was clear. They were just cutting all the good muscle and leaving the bad fat :(
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Those people were covered in 1. Outright bad people.
This feels like it needs a MAGA vs Republican distinction. There are plenty of Republicans who (privately) have issues with some things Trump is doing.
Talk is cheap; actions are what matters. Based on their actions (or lack thereof), the group you're describing must be a very small minority indeed.
They aren't in Congress, they are working in the states, I would guess. The Republicans in Congress mostly volunteered for a spinectomy when Trump was elected again.
Can you name any currently serving?
That's part of it: many felt the winds and simultaneously made the choice to "focus on family" and step back from politics during the 2nd Trump administration.
But the wheel turns, and there's going to be a lot of folks in the party with very sharp axes to grind during the lame duck period.
Yeah, and I'm sure the Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party will be first in line to help rehabilitate their image.
The meme is that Susan Collins is “always concerned”. But still votes along with the MAGAs. If they are silently going along, what difference does it make? They are still MAGA.
The difference comes when Trump needs help but no longer wields power.
His dyed in the wool followers will still support him.
The convenience crowd? I wouldn't take that bet. Especially after he's been such a dick to so many folks in his own party.
But we'll see.
No one except the Freedom Caucus in the House are true MAGA to their core the rest are just opportunists. I’m not sure who are the true believers in the Senate.
I get the sense that Republican senators have always been more willing to see this administration as a passing tide.
E.g. Thune's propensity for letting Trump's more excessive ideas die on the vine.
Ten years ago, that distinction may have been a valid one.
That distinction ended when Romney left Congress. It’s entirely MAGA now.
It’s not even historically rare for a party to merge or be subsumed like that. Here’s the historical list just for the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_t...
No. Having issues with them privately and not speaking out is half of the problem.
Absolutely not. Almost every non-MAGA Republican voice that served in federal public office has been ousted, and it's not like they were good to begin with.
If you keep your issues with Trump private, you're complicit with those who follow him blindly.
by and large the "anti-trump republican" has ceased to be a relevant political bloc. they have either vote for trump / pro trump candidates and are functionally indistinguishable from MAGA, vote for the most moderate democrat possible, or have given up politics entirely. I suspect you didn't mean this, but the largest group of self identified republicans who have an issue with trump are angry he isn't far right enough (ie groypers, klansmen, neonazis, and like).
You should try having a casual chat sometime with people who voted for and/or like Trump. You'll quickly discover how wrong this statement is.
It's always easy to spot a person who has enclosed themselves in a political or ideological bubble. They're typically first to apply a label to a large group of people and then assume all the people with that label are the exact same.
This has never been true for any group of people and as it turns out, it's the same for people you disagree with politically.
I've had two such chats with Trump supporters, and one said in great detail that this statement is true. He acknowledged that Trump has done a number of ethically and legally problematic things, and that supporting Trump means enabling this, but feels that he has to accept that necessary evil in order to achieve his policy goals on various issues. (The other flatly denied that Trump has ever done anything wrong and refused to keep talking when I produced examples of the most pointlessly cruel stuff.)
Have you heard differently in your own casual chats on the topic?
What were the policy goals?
Reducing illegal immigration seemed to be the primary one. Some stuff on civil rights too, but I'm not sure if that was a big concern for the guy I was talking to or an attempt to find common ground where he knew I'd be more sympathetic.
> It's always easy to spot a person who has enclosed themselves in a political or ideological bubble. They're typically first to apply a label to a large group of people and then assume all the people with that label are the exact same.
Your recent posting history here includes calling the entire European Union a "non-contributing toddler" to the world. Hmm.
Digging through my chat history to misrepresent something I've said only underscores my original point.
Would you give the same leeway to a supporter of Hitler? Stalin? Pinochet?
At least in 2010, it was common for new grads to get GS-14/GS-15 pay for in-demand tech skills. It's a bit odd that early career folks would start out at the max of the pay band, but it is what it is. These were for roles which required a clearance.
Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity). GS-12 was a more typical "target" position (with GS-13 on occasion, like at some of the labs) back in 2010. A masters or a PhD could have bumped you up to GS-13/14/15 though.
Target: People typically enter, when coming out of college, at a lower grade in the GS-5/7/9 area with a target position of one of GS-11/12/13. IT (not CS) folks were often in GS-11 targeted positions, computer scientists and engineers often in GS-12 positions. They'd get promoted in two grade increases (5 to 7, 7 to 9, 9 to 11) or one grade increases (11 to 12, 12 to 13) until they hit their target grade. At a rate of either one increase per year or per 6 months depending on when they got hired, by what agency, and in what role. An IT person, usually one increase per year; engineer, typically two increases per year. Computer scientists usually got screwed and got one increase per year which meant you had fewer of them wanting to work for the government (they also, at that time, rarely got signing bonuses). This leaves a lot of the software shops in DOD (where I had experience) mostly filled with aerospace and electrical engineers.
"Cyber" roles (security; which could be a couple different job series) in some agencies jumped up faster or had a higher target grade due to the need (or perceived need) for more people.
> Not for people with just a BS, at least outside certain areas (DC) and roles (cybersecurity)
Based on the FAQ, US Tech Force roles are located in DC (so they'll get the DC adjustment) and from the sounds of it, this proposal is the AI Washing the "Cyber Service" or "Cyber Exempted Service".
Also, based on Scott Kupor's (former Managing Parter at A16Z turned head of OPM) memo [0] it appears they seem to be using the same approach used to start the USDS back in the Obama admin. And based on their mention of "fellows", I think they'll merging parts of what used to be the Presidential Management Fellows program.
If AI-washing and Trump-washing helps maintain the core of these programs, there's nothing wrong with that.
Edit:
Dug deeper thru the FAQ - it's basically an AI washed version of the PMF and PIF.
[0] - https://www.opm.gov/chcoc/latest-memos/building-the-ai-workf...
I was responding to someone's claim about new grads (read the comment I responded to), not about US Tech Force. The person I responded to claimed that it was common for new grads (circa 2010) to jump in at GS-14/15. That was not common.
Ahh! My bad! Yea you're absolutely right - aside from PMFs who came out of grad programs you aren't see a new grad starting beyond GS7/8 in most cases.
It's also why a large portion of Gov employees end up jumping ship to professional services firms like BAH, Deloitte, Accenture, etc.
It could be a bias in the roles I was looking at - but coming in with physics undergrad for computer science roles, that was the standard set of roles in the Boston area for defense roles. Granted, these were mostly with private contractors who mirrored the GS pay scale along with their supporting government offices.
>Granted, these were mostly with private contractors who mirrored the GS pay scale along with their supporting government offices.
So they weren't federal jobs?
This was absolutely not true, and I don’t know where you’re getting this. A newly minted CS PhD with a top end clearance would have gotten a GS-13 at most, anything less would have been much lower. Where I worked, STEM bachelors were generally hired on as GS-7s or 9s.
I believe the new grad DOGE employees were GS-15s. So yes, it seems likely that they plan to hire at GS-14 or GS-15.
It still takes around 5-15 years to get to the upper end of the pay scale, currently $195K.
Not true
I was hired in under HQE accession in 2019 and made SES 4 equivalent with zero civilian time in service.
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/pay-admi...
Doesn't sound like you're talking about General Schedule.
Correct and there’s no legal requirement to use the GS.
This new force could easily and legally acquire and pay through other schedules - happens all the time.
Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO.
... although that seems depressingly like it would also be the experience with new administrators being installed in executive agencies every 4 years, except they're slightly older.
Man, if only there were some way to retain talent in the face of political leadership transitions... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
That’s the life of a civil servant though
By function a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee and there’s nothing they can do about it
I posted elsewhere that I left a govt career as a military officer precicely because of this reality. It’s like a old boring joke now that politicians are corrupt and worthless.
I will tell you from the inside that not only is it true but it’s 10 times to 100 times worse than you think it is.
I have multiple stories of operational systems, functions, whatever you wanna call them that we’re working exceptionally well had good backing, good funding and were completely wiped out because whoever became the deputy under secretary for that budget line decided they didn’t want to do it anymore. and completely shelved decades worth of work. Like literally I remember having to unplug a server that was running life-critical beacons for POWs because they weren’t being used enough.
As if that weren’t enough that same development problem then shifted over to some new hot organization that is in the politicians jurisdiction and then they start over from scratch with none of the learning from the previous admin.
There is no positive system that can be affected by the United States government
It does not exist, they cannot functionally or structurally exist, because the government of the United States but is not and has never been built on supporting citizens or the global community it is built and has always been built to support wealthy politicians and that’s all.
I’m not aware of how every other countries work but the ones I’ve seen the inside are the same
Going into the government for the “mission” is probably the most intentionally ignorant thing somebody could do given the plethora of easily accessible data proving exactly this
Somehow this country has managed to do big and bold things when it is needed. Those great systems that were dismantled got built at one point so it is theoretically possible to do good. Furthermore other countries seem to do a better job at serving their citizens so its not like effective government is impossible((look at how the EU at least gets some things that benefit their citizens even though most of it is a mess).
There has got to be some pathway to get back to that.
All those things were reactions to either disasters or radical growth.
The only way to make people act is to create a situation they can’t avoid
> a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee
It’s worth being specific about what is meant by “political appointee” here. That term has specific legal meaning in the context of federal staffing, and (as I understand it, not a lawyer) is not the same thing as “GS employee who was hired as part of an administration’s political agenda”.
Cause a “political” GS is not a thing hence why they have either congressional appointment or alternative pathway to political appointment
> Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you
GS grade does not correspond directly to manager/managee relationships at plenty of federal agencies. Someone getting hired at a higher GS grade is not automatically “over you” in the formal reporting hierarchy. That’s not to say this never happens (GS:org chart level is the case more often than not, I’d guess), but it’s not a given.
Now, if your issue is that agencies sometimes offer high (by the standards of current employees) GS grades to attract talented hires, then I agree that is a problem! The solution to that is to improve government pay scales and fix fed hiring more generally: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...
Until that is done, (good) policies like the Pendleton Act cannot help that much.
Not being dismissive of your experience (or that of a civil servant with 10s of years of experience). I have a deep respect for that kind of work and folks who give up more lucrative opportunities in order to serve their country and fellow citizens.
> whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO
That’s being awfully dismissive of the individuals skill set. Nobody gets the job by making the right kind of jokes around the CEO. Nobody. Getting in the door takes hard work, talent and some amount of luck.
For DOGE specifically? Would be interested to hear of those DOGE employees who truly deserved to be GS-15s due to their extensive experience in both tech and government.
> extensive experience in both tech and government.
The USDS (group that was renamed to a part of DOGE) has previously hired with an emphasis on non government experience: http://govciomedia.com/usds-developing-innovative-approach-t...
The USDS and DOGE had completely different mandates. Non government experience makes sense when you’re trying to learn the lessons of industry to improve gov website accessibility, performance and ux.
On the other hand, trying to slash spending with no understanding of the agencies you’re working at- let alone any life experience for a lot of these folks- is a very different mandate.
because, at the time, slick landers, and general good UI/UX was completely missing from government tech workflows.
I'd wager that the "approximate" in that sentence is going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Not to mention “…recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build…” while also “…participants will receive technical training…”
So “elite” engineers need technical training?
What am I missing here.
I have extensive experience with this kind of government nonsense, but usually it is kind of in the background, blather no one really takes serious because it’s just blowing smoke. But this seems so credibility destroying through its ridiculous contradictions and bombast.
(1) Are you saying it's bad if they're upping engineer pay to be more competitive, or you're just skeptical that they will?
(2) I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best, rather than those desiring a stable, low-paying bureaucracy — I don't think that attracts the best people.
(3) On talent and recruiting: This is being done by the National Design Studio, it says at the bottom. That's led by a cofounder of Airbnb - I know one person who works at the National Design Studio and he's a phenomenal engineer. The administration also has the involvement of David Sacks, who founded Craft Ventures and is pretty well-known in SV. I think this is probably the most tech-competent the government will have been in a long time. I'm not crediting Trump at all for that, to be clear - just pointing out that tech talent in government seems to be getting better, not worse.
> I'd actually like the American government to pay better wages for its engineers, and optimize for hiring the best
Yes, and a big part of this involves changing the way agencies rely on contractors for specialty work (including tech work).
#1: I am extremely skeptical they are paying that. I suspect this was put together by someone who has no understanding of federal pay systems. "$150,000 to $200,000" is already an erroneous number, federal salary is limited by federal law and cannot exceed $195200.
#2: Overwhelmingly I agree. Federal pay is very, very broken. They should reform it to align more with the private sector, and there are laws in place that do that, and every year the sitting president literally writes a letter stating it would be an economic emergency to pay federal employees equivalent wages and instead sets them low. You are still limited by federal law to that current $195k, so it means it's impossible for the federal government to hire technical experts and pay them a fair wage.
#3: I'm sure the federal government is paying those people some ridiculous amount of money to put this together, and they'll probably do a decent job because of it. It still doesn't change the fact that federal hiring is really broken, and has become significantly worse in this admin.
Serious question: what makes you think team “hold my beer” won’t find a way around past norms, or just ignore them? Not that they actually care enough to do it, but I don’t think they wouldn’t/couldn’t if they did care.
> Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards
Paid time off???
Health insurance???
Retirement plans????
OMG this is incredible! What an offer!
/s
No 401k can ever match the beauty that is the TSP.
Left federal and my private 401k is 150% match up to 6%. Better than TSP in everything except fees, which are slightly higher. But that mattered a lot less than my pay, I was a GS-15 in a leadership role and took a role in the private sector for a 30% pay increase back into an individual contributor role. So much less work and a huge pay increase.
3 dollars for every 2 up to 6% of pay? So you could get up to 15% of pay into the 401k (or the annual limit, whichever comes first)?
That’s by far the best I’ve ever heard of. Usually employers screw us by keeping the majority of the max annual contribution, which only they can make, out of our reach with crappy “50% match up to 3%” policies or whatever (even a 100% match means you can’t hit the actual annual max, it has to be higher than that).
> my private 401k is 150% match up to 6%
Oh that's actually really good. Beats a TSP for sure even with the fees. But from what I remember you're at a defense contractor - they probably have the best benefits plans overall in the US.
I can guarantee you I can save/invest more in the private sector with the gap between public sector pay and make up for the TSP.
A gov-backed retirement plan actually is nice. You don’t have to worry about losing your Chrysler pension because they went out of business.
As I wrote in another comment, US Tech Force participants doing 2-year stints won't qualify for the gov't backed retirement (unless they were prior military, prior civil service, or find a non-term appointment to follow this stint with). You need three years to keep the 5% TSP (401k equivalent) match, which is similar to many private companies. You also need 5 years to qualify for FERS (if you quit before then you can get your contributions back, but that's optional as you may want to come back to gov't later and have the years count).
Amusingly, there's actually a government agency that takes over pension plans from failed companies. PBGC.
Yet another corporate welfare mechanism.
What I meant was that in developed countries these things are the utter minimum, required by law.
I don’t think it’s worth advertising you offer the bare minimum. Nothing to be proud of
If I was late-career with a good solid financial foundation im place and just looking to work to cover living expenses the Federal Gov as fucked as it may be doesn't seem like a bad gig. Since the bar is so incredibly fucking low you just mail it in and collect the money and when youre furloughed you play golf or do extra hobbies. The ball just needs to keep moving, it doesn't actually need to move quickly. Heck it doesn't even need to necessarily move forward.
I am 51 “late career” and there is no way in hell I would work for the federal government now.
Even if I didn’t care about the politics, I have made more than the posted salaries working full time for outside consulting companies contracting with the federal government over the last five years and I wasn’t working at the whims of the government
There are way more people calling it in at large orgs or FAANGs. Clearly you've never worked in a civil service position given your foolish caricature of one.
Can confirm that 70% of faang are slackers
Figures this comes from the National Design Studio (https://ndstudio.gov/) which ironically also ignores the government's own advice on web standards and correct use of identifying headers.
One can assume the US Tech Force will perceive itself as also unfettered by those silly rules and good practices.
My actual first thought was "Is this a hoax?" precisely because the website did not identify itself as a US government website in the usual way for executive branch sites.
I know it's par for the course these days, but that's a lot of Js and CSS for a single page app with some text, a few images, and a list of collapsible info sections (whose animations aren't very smooth).
Do those standards mandate a correctly rendered US flag?
New memo is one star, but compensate with 5 squares for what could be a simple rectangle. That logo's SVG is weird.
I didn't mean the logo (honestly didn't even notice). I was talking about the robot guy's t-shirt - it does have 13 stripes, but the number and layout of stars look rather play-it-by-ear.
If you scroll to the bottom there's another image of the robot with lights/dark stripes flipped. And his head is different.
This government is a joke.
AI slop
Why is all of ND Studio's work so severely AI/'tech/crypto bro'/SF-billboard-vibe coded?
That's what an oligarchy looks like, 'careers' consist of trying to glaze whatever moneyed person in power you can in hopes of getting a contract
I’d bet this whole initiative exists only as an interface to issue fat “AI” contracts to pals.
[dead]
Click on America by design initiative
"What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else.
...
This is President Trump going bigger than President Nixon"
Jesus christ, man
I about spit my coffee when I saw that. Good grief.
> We've been conditioned to accept that mediocre in government is normal.
Yes, I do now accept that mediocre [sic] in government is normal for the next few years.
An entire generation has grown up post Nixon and hasn't known government that worked so yes...could you blame them?
Furthermore only ~50% of the country has a passport so many haven't even seen how things run elsewhere.
Are you under the impression this is somehow different from the last few years?
Of course. Whatever problems the US government had before, mass firings, loyalty tests, furloughs, and endless other shenanigans have only exacerbated them.
Are you American? Do you think this is normal? Just curious (non American).
There is a somewhat stubborn idea that a government will always have many inefficiencies baked in, since there’s no real incentive to remove them beyond a generic “that would be nice”.
Mediocre is probably the ceiling.
:( I had to click through because I didn't believe you at first... as someone who used to proudly work with feds, this yet another low point in many over the past ten years.
That's a nice idea, so nice in fact that it already existed as 18F until they closed it under the guise of efficiency earlier this year and are now starting over.
And USDS, which was specifically 2 year terms just like this, for actual experienced engineers at the top of GS15 pay. They destroyed USDS to pretend to reinvent it but with new worse humans.
This is just their attempt to destroy USDS, started by Obama, and rebrand with a Trump-created effort. Just like everything. He wants credit for everything. I am shocked he isn’t calling this Trump Digital Government Services or something.
> Are there any other benefits?
> Additional benefits include professional development opportunities, networking with government and industry leaders, and a pathway to continued public service or private sector careers.
Given the lack of mention of any benefits prior to this, it sure sounds like "you'll get lots of exposure!"
edit: not sure if they just added it, or if I just missed it, but there is an FAQ entry on compensation:
> Compensation varies based on experience level and agency placement. Annual salaries are expected to be in the approximate range of $150,000 to $200,000. Benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and eligibility for performance-based awards.
Yeah, given the primary benefit of government jobs like this is usually the stability, pension etc when you’re offering absolutely none of that you really need to look down the back of the couch for some benefits.
For me as someone that would potentially be interested in and qualified for one of these roles, the DOGE actions earlier this year and ongoing firing of nonpartisan & non-appointed that don't tow the current ruling party line ruined the stability benefit. I think it also casts doubt on the pension aspect, but I know less about what's required to get pension in US fed positions.
Is it stability when funding bills dont pass?
I think the stability is the traditional perk of government work (in exchange for a smaller salary). The funding trouble does make it seem like less of a fair trade…
I was super-interested in this years ago. My interest vanished when I encountered the “tour of duty” concept. I don’t make FAANG money so the pay was roughly a lateral move for me if it’d included retirement, but having it be time-bound rather than career-oriented was a huge turnoff. Was ready to make that my whole deal, potentially for the rest of my life.
The US going politically totally batshit crazy shortly after ended up making it for the best that I did’t join, but still, it struck me as weird that they had to set it up with that extra sting of “we have to make sure this is a sacrifice”.
> "you'll get lots of exposure!"
"Backed by the White House"
I don't think this is the kind of exposure most people are going to want, nor will they want this on their resume.
>Given the lack of mention of any benefits prior to this, it sure sounds like "you'll get lots of exposure!"
Well, they are also "partnering" with some private sector companies. I guess the idea is that candidates will put in their 2 years, then take their contact list and join federal sales arm of one of the private companies.
"Big Balls" and his ilk got a lot of attention.
What companies are participating in Tech Force?
The initial roster of private sector partners includes Adobe, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3.ai, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, and Zoom. This list will expand over time.
Are there any companies on that list who haven't made gross public displays of servitude towards the current administration?
Every one of them will also be tripping over each other to try and push their software as the solution to any and every problem. I'd wager a hefty sum that at the end of the day every US government department is going to have it's own unique software stack that will be ill-suited for their needs, incompatible with what adjacent departments use, and offer no robustness in the event of an emergency.
Interesting to see AMD on there and not Intel.
I know it's annoying now to nitpick over what's AI generated, but I'm noticing their robot mascot has two different incorrect American flags on its sweater..
It's the perfect metaphor for a Trump-era group whose aim is to jam poorly-thought-out AI in to random bits of the government.
Like this administration cares about little things like how many states there are. L'état, c'est Trump.
Is this just US Digital Service V2?
https://www.usds.gov/
Ever since USDS got renamed as DOGE, they've had trouble recruiting people. I suspect this move is maybe an effort to shed DOGE's negative image.
Textbook PR. If your reputation went to shit, just rebrand it.
See, for example, how the head of DOGE said "That wasn't a nazi salute, that was roman salute! It's a completely different thing."
Is the implication that they are in fact the same thing or that you don’t like Elon?
Yeah my first thought was that this already existed, was doing great work, and got canned by DOGE in favor of what appears to be a MUCH MUCH more expensive version of it here.
I was having a conversation with a Trump-supporting relative, who was genuinely asking me, “Don’t you think it’s great that they put a bunch of [DOGE] engineers into the government to fix things?”
When I said, “Well, we already had that - the USDS. And what has DOGE done, specifically, to fix things?” it just went right over her head. Did not even land.
Most people have very little idea how anything works. Especially in the government, but it’s fairly true in general.
Something like half of US adults don’t know how marginal income tax rates work, which is one of the very most-relevant-to-them-personally things for them to know about the federal government. The loudest ordinary citizens complaining about foreign aid or the estate (“death”, as republicans rebranded it on strategist advice) tax can’t tell you a halfway accurate thing about either, they’re just repeating what they heard, or some assumption they made (“well if [talking head] is complaining about it this much it must be really bad!”)
This doesn’t get better for any other program or tax or whatever that you can think of. Folks have no idea how anything works and the media figures and politicians they trust lie to them constantly, and are rewarded for it.
And with Trump-aligned people running it, of course, not like the purged USDS. One of the perks is "networking" after all.
You beat me to it. Minus the good will and civic mindedness that v1 had going for it of course.
Minus the talent, as well.
We went from top notch Google SREs fixing HealthCare.gov to… “Big Balls” and script kiddies.
That was my first thought too. But they can say that this one was created by their administration. And is more AI.
I'd love to hear from people who had experience with USDS before this administration. The chatter I see online is overwhelmingly positive. OTOH, I interviewed with USDS and the experience was not good. I don't love tech interviews in general but this one was somehow worse. I remember thinking the interview would have made more sense if they were hiring for PMs, but I wasn't a PM and didn't want to be one. Focusing on my communication abilities and professional history is one thing, but this ... wasn't that. I always wondered if others had the same experience. Maybe I just had the wrong interviewer on the wrong day.
No, USDS was about modernizing the government's tech systems in general.
This one is about jamming AI into shit:
> Tech Force will be an elite group of ~1,000 technology specialists hired by agencies to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) implementation and solve the federal government's most critical technological challenges.
And apparently implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency using TrumpCoin.
> Backed by the White House, Tech Force will tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era – from administering critical financial infrastructure at the Treasury Department to advancing cutting-edge programs at the Department of Defense – and everything in between.
Also, surprised their AI reviewer allowed the use of DoD... I thought they identify as Dept of War now.
They couldn't even get the fucking US flag right on the AI-generated images.
These are incompetent buffoons who simply don't care about anything.
This makes feel a bit queasy for some reason https://americabydesign.gov/
I find it deliciously fitting that the UX on this website kinda sucks.
America as a brand... my soul weeps.
> This is President Trump going bigger than President Nixon.
You don't say...
I wonder if there are living people who don't interpret it as a sign of something __REALLY__ weird going on here.
I view Trump as a clinical case of narcissism, bad upbringing, screwed-up mentors, but too late for treatment anyways.
But man, the crowd that lick his boots in public for a position or some coins... They should be shunned for life. This level of sycophancy would destroy one's reputation for ever in my culture and I just don't want to believe it wouldn't in American culture. But even the official government channels have been turned into fan pages run by six year olds. Not even the most backward countries in the world do look so stupid, so overtly corrupt, so I am at a loss: why does the USA? Is this really considered acceptable? Maybe some Americans can explain how this is being perceived in cultural terms.
Everyone who would have said no, every leader, with self-respect, has been removed or fired, at least in the executive branch. Every person with a spine who resigns or gets fired is replaced by someone a bit more sycophantic (and craven/stupid), and the whole thing slowly ratchets into what it is now. Lots of good people are gone -- more true the higher up you go.
You have to understand that most Americans do not approve of what's going on here. But, most people go with the flow, and are waiting for all of this to blow over and go "back to normal" next election. We'll see if it ever does, it probably won't. We took the whole thing for granted, big time.
If people can tell you’re a republican from your resume alone it’s already in the trash can.
No one is getting hired anyway these days, does it even matter?
Enormous amounts of money and 30ish years (about 1980 or a bit after, to 2016) were spent building the largest web of propaganda distribution probably ever, to make this happen. Plus pioneering PR and crisis management strategies and testing the limits of voters’ tolerance for bullshit (very important post-Nixon—an early major experiment was the Iran-Contra scandal, and it went great for them)
After 30 years it was so good it could make Republicans who’d been making fun of Trump as a notorious failed businessman, clownish self-parody, conman, and philanderer five minutes earlier (and I mean common voters, not politicians) do a 180 on a dime and send the dude money.
None of this was built for Trump, but in priming their base to never consider voting for a democrat, they made them both way too right-wing and also made them wonder why Republican politicians weren’t going after democrats way harder (they’re so terrible, after all!) which teed up a coup within the party just perfectly.
Except that many of the swing states were solidly democrat for decades. It was only after repeated failures at providing meaningful change (healthcare, stopping the erosion of jobs to China, providing cheaper access to education among other promises) that people had enough and started voting red consistently. look at Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Hell even Florida voted for Obama. He was just another in a long line of controlled opposition. People have become wise to the grift.
> Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
Baking in the ageism right from the start. Few want to work for this government, but at least they can keep those unsavory 30+ year olds out!
> ageism
This is DEI talk to them.
So is hiring young people over a better qualified senior applicant. You wouldn't have to make it a point if recent grads would win in a meritocracy.
It's fine to hire a bunch of juniors but then you're kinda explicitly not looking for the best. But at $150k-ish they'll get mid career and senior devs from low CoL areas pouring in.
Last Day, Capricorn 25s, this is Carousel…
> Backed by the White House
Somehow it hits differently than the similar phrase, "backed by the full faith and credit of the US Govt."
Because in this administration, I guess it is different.
The "US Government" are the people and agencies that DOGE tried to get rid of and that were taken out of their jobs or unable to provide any services due to the shutdown.
Whereas "The White House" is Trump and his buddies.
Welcome to the autocracy...
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> Tech Force will primarily recruit early-career technologists
> Tech Force will include centralized organization and programming and serve as a recruiting platform post-employment.
Be prepared to struggle at the end of your two year placement because you have no idea how this is going to look on your resume two years from now. Maybe it’ll have the gravitas of having worked at the former USDS. But maybe it’ll be the black mark of having worked at DOGE. The latter feels much more likely than the former.
You will have no control over this outcome. If I had to bet I’d say they will take advantage of your junior status to get you to do the kind of wildly irresponsible hacking, slashing and AI injecting that a more senior engineer would object to and you’re going to face some tough questions in subsequent job interviews.
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed. I wouldn't want a spiteful employer.
The flip side is that a lot of government jobs lead to pretty good private sector opportunities working with those same agencies. If you want to contact to DOE, knowing how it works in the inside and knowing people there definitely helps.
A lot of military contractors are former military. Who better to design something for a soldier than a soldier?
Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed.
It's not always that black and white. In spite of appearances, many many companies make hiring decisions based on things other than what's in a resume.
For example, a company may have $mm contracts with another company whose owners/operators/shareholders/etc. favor one particular view, political party, or social construct. That company will most certainly look down upon the other company hiring people of a particular background.
Or the pressure could be internal. A couple of times in my life I've worked for companies where certain departments were unionized. Even if you weren't in one of those departments, if the company hired you and you had a particular background, the union would object.
The real world is very complex.
Yes and no.
I have hired people to work under me. Generally, if someone can pass the interview and do the job, I don't care that much about your views unless you are very outwardly with them. The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
That being said, having interviewed plenty of ex government or government adjacent people, not a single one can pass even a mediocre interview problem. Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.
For example, my interview problems are designed to be solved most efficiently with implementing parallelization, but they sound like regular interview problems, so even with LLMs a lot of candidates usually can't solve it unless they give the LLM specific instructions to implement threads, which requires understanding of the problem.
> Most people who work for the government show up expecting to be told what to do, then do it - very few can independently think for themselves.
I see this a lot in the private sector too here in Seattle. It's hurting us badly.
Im all for it. Software job markets are inflated. Id be 100% willing to take a lower salary if that meant a reduction of all salaries across the board. Younger people need to be going into things like EE or MechE instead of CS in hopes of getting a six figure job out of college, living in downtown highrises, while working on something that is essentially funded by ads.
> The only time I had to filter out a candidate was due to a quick check of his public social media where he was "enthusiastically" pro Palestine with questionable posts.
Sounds like a place I wouldn't want to work (and filtering for the reverse stance would be equally problematic).
Do you think things will work better if we have pro-Israel and pro-Palestine companies with the two groups never talking?
I would suspect that the previous poster means something along the lines of: The kind of posts that are so extreme that they're a significant reputational/PR risk to hire. No company wants to be flipping on the news and see their name associated with someone who's openly advocating for atrocities.
Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.
I've heard of a case like that where they started fights in the workplace over their views and trying to sabotage others...
You're assuming everyone is one side or the other and there aren't people who think both sides are awful and they love making their problems with each other the world's problems.
I think it would be best to work with people that I could trust to be civil and not to scream at or enact physical violence on another person, while wearing the hoodie with my companies name on it.
Or at the least, I don't want to have to wonder if I hire a Jewish coworker if there are gonna be any issues.
If you're asking candidates to write threaded code in an interview, you are doing it wrong.
Lol?
Even before LLMs, most coding problems really are a test of efficient pointer manipulation. You either move a pointer to character in words, pointer to data in array, or traverse n-node linked lists.
This level of pointer manipulation is rarely ever needed these days, as things like sorting, searching, and parsing are all handled by functions. An LRU cache is literally a function decorator in Python.
What I care more is if someone can understand that network calls take time, that data processing is fast, and how to optimize that pipeline. Threading is not a requirement, they can do it with async as well, or even without async with just smart scheduling.
The core of the problem that makes it LLM proof is that the problem doesn't disclose anything about network latencies or data structure. So standard iterative solutions from LLM usually end up taking longer because they get stuck waiting on a single network response. And so you can clearly tell who understand the core operations at hand, versus someone who just memorized a bunch of patterns and/or using LLMs.
> Employers would have to be pretty spiteful to look at it the way you purposed
I disagree. If a persons resume contains description of blatantly harmful work how else can I interpret it but negatively? At best you’d have to chalk it up to “just following orders” but I don’t want blind obedience in a prospective employee either.
The destruction caused by DOGE is evident to anyone with eyes, as is the agency’s complete lack of achievement. I would absolutely be asking questions about why someone remained there.
These employees will be hired by the companies they helped integrate. Not a single one will look on them poorly. They will have domain knowledge, turf knowledge, and they won't argue about working with MAGA for money.
Embracing MAGA on your resume can pay dividends when they’re in power. Perhaps less so once the tide (inevitably) turns. There’s a reason a lot of gov tech folks deliberately paint themselves as non partisan.
They’ll be fine in the “defense” industry.
Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.
Ah, I have no recent insight into that world. I’ll defer to you on this, maybe the “vibe”, as it were, has shifted even there.
You seem to be assuming that someone who remained working for DOGE would even want to work for a company who would pass them over for having worked for DOGE.
That would presume they are able to see into the hearts of hiring managers everywhere
"Why is government so inefficient?"
"I would never hire anybody who worked for the government during an administration I didn't vote for!"
Come on, we can aim for a higher level of discourse than that.
Coinbase will probably look quite favorably that you have been on the inside of whatever their piece is.
I think you are right that you could face some challenges during the screening process but if you get to the interview this should be easy to explain with a face saving excuse.
"The tech industry was doing poorly and I was faced with a layoff so I took whatever job I could get. While I didn't agree with the actions of the administration I felt like I could be a force for good in an otherwise turbulent environment"
As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa. The reputation hit of disreputable employers is dramatically overblown.
To be honest you can also get through issues with the resume screening process you can generally just change the wording and section headers a bit in order to avoid a quick filter out.
I'm pretty much a closet conservative working for big tech so I've had a lot of practice with this sort of stuff :D
I'd wager "scientist with a deep background in research of rocket propolsion technology in the 1950s" was a bit more difficult to come by than "early-career software developer who integrated a bunch of APIs and maybe wrote a frontend in React".
>As we all know Nazi scientists went on to work for and lead parts of Nasa.
The difference is, those scientists were literally the best of the best in the world when it came to rocketry.
All their assistants did not share the same fate.
But generally, unless something drastic happens politically, companies won't care that much.
> Participants are hired as federal employees based on their technical qualifications and serve in non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation.
"non-partisan" lol okay sure
There are two attempts to render an American flag on that page and they’re both wrong
The Emoji ones top and bottom or the animated banner?
The illustrated “hackers” clothing
How is this different from the formerly-great USDS?
well, it's going to be incredible. Its gonna be something like you've never seen before. I've never seen anything like it. In fact, I hear many say it's going to be one of the greatest Tech Forces they've ever seen, maybe even the greatest.
it has the Trump stench all over it, apparently. :(
I don't know, with almost thirty private contracting firms already identified (and a note that that list will grow) and a target of ~1,000 federal employees, seems like all the actual “Tech Force” public sector staff are going to be in contract management, oversight, and related roles.
Did I miss congress passing a new set of laws creating the US Tech Force? I'm confused, as this seems like a direct and open violation of the Appointments Clause.
oh no I wonder what will happen
You're being facetious I see, but I assume there will be litigation brought up against it being illegal, and then it will be stuck down as blatantly illegal in the next 6 months, and people involved will not get paid and be fired / dissolved.
It’s amusing that this initiative from “America by Design” uses the Neue Montreal typeface.
If you're looking for a semantic argument, Montreal is in America
Top level hiring is a close knit network. The FAQ I wanted to see answered: who’s onboard already, and how do I know them / how might I have heard of them / what have they done before?
I’m going to make a guess that the answers are missing for a reason.
Space Force, Tech Force, Ass Force. What a stupid timeline. I've been promoting government work (state, not federal) to my friends ever since I landed a sweet gig. It's awesome. Guess what job I won't seek.
I was just browsing this website and found that the jobs are actually listed at https://www.usajobs.gov I think.
The latter website, job search, job details and help center look actually nice. Unfortunately I'm living in EU and not an American citizen, but I wish EU did something similar.
(There is https://eures.europa.eu but just like almost any other EU website, the design is very confusing and cluttered)
This is not a political appointment, but if you have mentioned something even mildly negative about a certain person in the past, not only we'll walk you out, we'll probably arrest you!
Also, try not to be brown.
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If you want to know what you are up against I highly recommend - https://www.amazon.com/Recoding-America-Government-Failing-D...
This book discusses the IT systems at the IRS and VA and shows the kind of push back you can expect from entrenched players.
I don't know the book, but I hope it isn't yet another complaint about bureaucracy in need of "business thinking". I.e., how deep are they digging to find the real players? Because you can bet your home this "AI" initiative is just another instance of Elite Capture¹ here. The last thing any government needs right now is letting its policies and implementations being steered by (and made dependent on) hallucinating "AI", whose ownership ultimately is in the hands of the democracy destroying tech oligarchs.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
They talk about the specific systems in terms of legacy code and how far removed government agencies are from automated testing and other modern, best practices. It has been a couple of years since I read it but I recall a part about a business process at the IRS that that people don't start learning until they have been there for about 17 years - due to the complexity. It talks about how there had been failed attempts to migrate to a new database, some of the data is now duplicated but the upgrade is de-funded so all the new code has to be aware that data may be duplicated.
I'm not sure if this book got into it but I've also read that the IRS has assembly code from the 1960s that is very optimized and only a few devs can work on it. ChatGPT knows a lot about this history as well.
It’s not that. It’s a several-years-old (and still very good) book by one of the original leaders of the USDS, a group which put many of the proposals described therein into practice.
> No, Tech Force positions are not political appointments. Participants are hired as federal employees based on their technical qualifications and serve in non-partisan roles focused on technology implementation.
Will you be forced to set a politically biased out-of-office message that blames the Other Side when you're inevitably furloughed during the next funding crisis?
Given the current administration's desire for unmitigated power, and SCOTUS' inclination to give it to them, there's really no such thing as a non-partisan role anymore. When you can be fired at any moment for any action the regime deems disloyal, you can't be nonpartisan.
No one will force you do to such a thing, because no one who will not enthusiastically do this on their own accord will be hired.
lol. This is not even a parody.
They might as well be political appointments after Trump v Slaughter is decided since the unitary executive maximalists would swallow all for-cause job termination protections that have defined the professional civil service.
It seems like an effort to hire newly educated people for a two year program, to work on various efforts in the federal government as something close to on the job training.
Once you are done you can pair up with one of the private partners you had contacted with during your program. (If they want you).
This does not appear to be an effort to hire people to the federal government, but to get cheap labour from new grads who hope to work on something cool.
(But yes they will have to hire the framework people)
This will work perfectly with the approach used by candidates: https://www.interviewquery.com/p/tech-workers-gaming-ai-hiri...
You can go ahead and add this to the list of job experiences that will earn you a "Definitely Not" rating from me in the hiring committee, along with doge, palantir, coinbase, etc.
It seems absolutely crazy to me not to hire someone because you don't like a company they worked for.
I don't love seeing that you're far from the only person to mention it here. It's just shouting "I'm biased and I'm proud" from the top of your lungs.
A person who willingly worked for doge or whatever has a lot of explaining to do. All you know about them on paper is that they are either a clueless dupe, or a closet nazi. Either way why would you want them in your repo?
That’s your choice, though please consider that many people who worked for those places may have done so before the behavior you disagree with started. Also consider that there are reasons to work for an organization other than “paycheck” and “alignment with organization priorities”, and that it is entirely possible (and sometimes uniquely possible) to do important, beneficial work while employed by an organization with which you fundamentally do not agree; the majority of my resume lines fit this description, I think.
Reasonable minds can differ as to whether that constitutes unethicality or hypocrisy.
You assume any of them would even want to work for/with you...
I know I wouldn't want to work for or with someone or some company so close-minded as to use this sort of thing as some sort of candidate filter.
You're right – close-minded is immediately blacklisting. Thoughtful is:
"What did you do at $PLACE_CURRENT_ADMIN_LIKES, and what, in retrospect, did it actually accomplish that made people and society freer, more empowered, and their lives richer?"
At which point you can say "I made an interface to let anyone with access scrape ALPRs around the nation, and I genuinely didn't think about what people would do with it", and then that speaks for itself.
==> We are going to build infrastructure with teams of people who won't stay longer than two years. Nobody has thought about this long enough to realise this might be a problem.
I still can't decide whether DOGE was a genius steal "hit job" to steal a bunch of data and place people into key positions under the pretext of waste reduction, or whether it was just truly an exercise in rushed "kill them all!" style incompetence that was never properly thought through or executed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277687 mentioned Recoding America as "what you're up against", omitting the important "people had learned what they were up against and were well into the process of building collaborative effort between civil servants
the book _is_ good, but it's rather disheartening that all the people discussed (and many more that couldn't fit into the book) on the federal side were summarily fired to clear space for sycophants and toadies round one (the DOGE broccoli hair kids siphoning off sensitive data and doing some casual corruption) are putting out this as sycophants and toadies round two: _lasting_ corruption in partnership with the least scrupulous bits of private industry
the people in the book are https://18f.org/ and spent the last decade building useful relationships, familiarity with public sector quirks, and standard software toolkit items for government tech. they got tossed for the crime of working with the Biden admin and wanting to work towards building tech entirely for public good under the auspices of the law.
whatever branding and whatnot this comes wrapped in i don't trust this admin nor whatever bits of the private sector are looking to work with it in the slightest to not stand up something that works in the public interest. we're gonna get new and exciting forms of graft and revolving door exploitation of sensitive data
Is this backed by YC?
How is this different from 18F (a group within GSA which Elon killed), US Digital Service (which Elon kind of converted to DOGE) or Defense Digital Service (DDS)?
Is the only difference that the current government can claim they started this (completely ignoring they dismantled the previous programs)?
Now that the administration killed 18-F and USDS, they need a new organization that does the same thing but consists of people loyal to this administration.
More seriously, one big difference is that USDS recognized that design is as important as technology. This org only wants engineering-types.
> We're looking for expertise in software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analytics, or technical project management. Strong problem-solving abilities and a passion for public service are essential.
https://americabydesign.gov/
Design is separate but equal.
Ha. Nice Brown v. Board pull.
Something often observed in authoritarian states is duplication of effort because of empire building. The ruler cannot trust any of his underlings- they are all sucking up to him and backstabbing each other constantly, so he pits them against each other, assigning overlapping responsibilities on purpose to keep any one subordinate from becoming too strong. This is why all of the "fascism/communism is so efficient" arguments need to actually look at the nature of Soviet or Nazi governments. As an example, there were at least five completely separate armed ground forces in Nazi Germany (1).
This constant competition between parts of the government actually led to tremendous waste. You can see it again in the Soviet space program during the 1960's. While NASA had a single purpose of getting to the moon before 1971 with a unified organization under the control of a single leader, after Khrushchev was deposed (and Korolev died) the Soviet space program splintered into a war between the old OKB-1 (Korolev's group) and Chelomei's OKB-52 that lasted for twenty years over Super-Proton vs Energia etc.
1: The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS are the two most famous, but the Luftwaffe recruited, trained and equipped the Fallschirm-Panzer Korps and Fallshchirmjaeger- yes, German paratroops worked for Goering not the Wehrmacht. There were also five Marine Infantry Divisions under the Navy- they had half as many Marine Divisions as the US did, despite many fewer amphibious assaults! And the Volksturm, at the end of the war when things looked grim for Nazi Germany, was under NSDAP party control but separate from the Waffen-SS.
Those were services, this is a force
Don't forget to work in "dominance" and "lethality"! It really, truly, is all about criticizing and tearing the old thing down, and belatedly stepping it up again with neoconservative vibes.
I'm assuming that unlike 18F or USDS, you'll likely be asked to do ethically-compromising things?
You're missing a half dozen others.
Yeah, this is nothing more than grandstanding idealism. Their staff will no doubtably be as dumb as Space Force or Air Force when it comes to cloud and technology. I've dealt with them in various forms throughout the years contracting. BESPIN was entirely contractor driven. Their devops pipelines and how to deploy things. If that's your indicator, good luck.
Fortunately that's addressed in the extremely fine FAQ:
> How is Tech Force related to other government technology programs, including ones at GSA or the United States DOGE Service?
> While Tech Force will coordinate across all of government, it is distinct from other technology initiatives within government, including the United States DOGE Service and programs managed by GSA. These programs differ in their mandates, structure, required skillsets, and ability to convert to the competitive service.
Any questions?
I was prepared to fume here until I checked your comment history. I guess it is true that sarcasm occasionally fails to get across the cable.
How are they different?
Well, they're different. That's how.
Maybe it is all LLM generated, as in: "Eat your own dog shit"
Or, they could have just kept 18F and USDS :/ Good luck trying to hire those people back, or people like them!
Very curious whether things are actually changing.
US administration seems to be making lots of moves and aggressively changing stance...but is this actually translating to real change?
Why only 2 years? Why can't it be a permanent employment?
It looks like this is trying to fit into the same space as the former USDS and F18 which had term appointments. The key idea behind those was the industry partnership (recruiting experienced people from industry) and the knowledge/skills transfer that came with it. If you look at some other programs (Peace Corps, for instance) you'll see a similar thing. 2-year terms with extensions up to maybe 5 total years.
What's funny is the retirement benefits won't apply to most 2-year term employees. Unless they were prior military or civil service, or come back later, two years is not long enough to keep the TSP match (three year vesting period) or to qualify for the pension (five years). (EDIT: Funny because they explicitly list it as a benefit, but these folks won't qualify for it.)
The funny thing here is that the short (often 1-3 years) tenure that's so common in the industry leads to some absolute dogshit software. Good things take time. By limiting terms to 2 years you almost guarantee that outcome.
The biggest red flag on engineering resumes is never sticking at something for more than 2 years. Your bad decisions never catch up to you.
My guess is that they want young and ambitious people who will use this job as a springboard to bigger and better things.
Building tech for a bunch of kleptocrats and fascists. If I saw this on someone's resumé I'd immediately refuse or dissolve any involvement with them.
I bet that will convince them to think differently
Sounds like the same thing as US Digital Service.
Which was rebranded to DOGE.
Republicans love playing shell games while they rob taxpayers blind.
The flash of unstyled text when it goes from serif Times New Roman to grotesk FF Neue Montreal is so jarring.
Elite of the elite needs no sans-serif fallback font.
Just when I thought this was on brand to the new "anti-woke" font style guide.
With my opinion of the current administration, I doubt I'd qualify.
> Backed by the White House
Yeah, that's going to be a hard pass from me
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Funnily enough I had recently been thinking something like this would be a good idea. Like if the govt. created a department with the soul goal of developing open tech for the public good. I guess you could say they kind of already do this with research grants but something with more clear focus could be a good thing.
It's too bad this was created by an absolute dumpster fire admin that will 100% use this for malicious ends.
Im pretty sure this was one of the goals of the USDS before it was gutted and turned into DOGE. Also 18F (RIP)
If you'll cut one corner to save money, you'll cut another.
https://techforce.gov/footer-robot.png
This is an example of a cut corner. AI slop with irregular pixels for the face, thumb melted into finger, ipad not subject to gravity.
I wonder what the next cut corner will be?
So they gutted and destroyed USDS in order to... Create it again?
This looks like a way to force a few key players to gobble up all the federal dollars by forcing many executive controlled agencies to be force fed these LLM solutions because these same key players cannot sell their wares to the public so they need to steal public money, once again.
Jup, the official term is Elite Capture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture
The difficulty for any party to want to govern after this is... there is no government. It is all oligarch captured, the candidates are oligarch sponsored, and don't count on the media to sound the siren because, well, you know why.
This is a plane that is never gonna fly again. The only way is to build a new plane, as impossible as that might sound.
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No, USDS became DOGE, which is still there, as is the GSA. This is probably just some dude's fief (Sacks perhaps?)
Is DOGE still there? The latest reporting [1] I've seen is that it's leaderless and has more or less just been absorbed into other organizations. This aligns with DOGE not posting anything for several months now.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-doesnt-exist-with-eigh...
> So they gutted and destroyed USDS
> No, USDS became DOGE
To me these statements are not contradictory
Ugh. I didn't realize until looking at the "US Tech Force" FAQ that USDS is now "United States DOGE Service." Somehow I assumed it had just faded away when all the good people left.
Like 18F, but pro-Trump?
Hahahaha, they just updated the website to address the criticisms on this page! Fair play, NDS employee reading this thread.
Doge 2.0
What an AI slopfest of a website.
Also: the "United States DOGE Service"? Really?
That's its official name. Obama had created the US Digital Service (USDS) back in 2014- it was essentially a formalization of the "Tiger Team" that had fixed Healthcare.gov the year before. The idea was that you would take mid-career to senior SDE's, PM's, UX people, DevOps, etc. from industry, and bring them into the government for a 2-3 year period, where they would jump into a specific government IT thing and fix it up, revamp and improve, and then after a few years leave the USDS and go back to industry. It was part of the Executive Office of the President, though it was funded by Congress through 2024 (and then via CR like the rest of the government until the shutdown).
It wasn't a large group, and they weren't really responsible for much so they never got much attention. They would just try and fix a few specific pain points at a time. I only knew about it because one of the best PM's I ever worked for did a stint exactly like it was supposed to work- she joined the USDS, worked for the American people for a few years, then left and went back to industry.
And then on January 21st, 2025, his first full day in office, Trump renamed the USDS to the United States DOGE Service, because USDS had money to pay salaries and since it was part of the EotP he could easily hire new people without civil service restrictions. So he could bring in new people (Big Balls etc.) easily enough. By February, essentially everyone who had been in the USDS on the last day of Biden's term were either laid off or resigned. And since then the USDS has been entirely DOGEified.
Awful
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Hello and greetings from the third plant from the star we call Sol! We call our planet Earth.
Where are you from?
Oh come on, quality of life has improved so much in the world in the last 50 years! With progress like that, it's fine to set aside your values for a few years at a time ...
Gotta bust that nut.
> at the Department of Defense
*Department of War
Oddly, one of the FAQs does call it the Department of War.
Oddly, one of the FAQs does call it the Department of War.
Not odd at all. That's what it's called now. Complete with new URL:
https://www.war.gov
The odd part is the inconsistency on the page.
Its an authorized secondary term. It still the DoD
> Participants will work on high-impact technology initiatives including AI implementation, application development, data modernization, and digital service delivery across federal agencies.
> The initial roster of private sector partners includes Adobe, Amazon Web Services, AMD, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3.ai, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell Technologies, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, and Zoom. This list will expand over time.
Ever wanted to get involved in government-sanctioned espionage technology? This seems like an recruitment effort for that. Applicants beware. Remember that in just 3 years this will stop helping you to get hired, and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
This is a thing you can only say if you know very little about the talent pipeline for actual espionage technology in the USG, which: they do not have a lot of problems there. Lots of people don't share your precise values about espionage or about espionage technology, and the real jobs in this field are extremely high-status. There's competition to get them.
> This is a thing you can only say if you know very little about the talent pipeline for actual espionage technology in the USG
Or something one might want to say if they want to still have plausible deniability about not having been there, yet still want to say something. Who knows.
The USG does not want plausible deniability about this. They actively recruit on elite engineering campuses over it. It is super fucking interesting work and candidates compete for the opportunity to do it. If you think otherwise, you're in a filter bubble.
There is this consistent myth by the most radical faction of people in the country. They are only the most radical 5 or 10%, but they seem to believe their anti-nationalist, anti-government, anti-American views are much more widely share than they are. The vast majority of American's view working in the defense industry, espionage, etc as a good thing.
There are ways in which it clearly is a good thing. I don't have my head around how people could oppose CNE operations aimed at counterproliferation, for example. But obviously, it's morally fraught work (fraught, meaning complicated, a minefield, not meaning "damnable") and I don't have the stomach (or, really, the talent) for it.
Theres a spectrum too it. Helping design fighter jets and missiles? Yes that has to be done with the idea that the weapons you are designing for national security can and most likely will be used in such a way that will cause harm. However in espionage or cyber security, those are almost all pure good. You are protecting information or attaining information.
The main myth though is that somehow there is this idea that someone working as a booze allen contractor for the NSA or CIA is going to now be blackballed by everyone out of disgust. Most people will see it as good, and most companies just want talent and dont actually care about what areas people are in.
Working in actual CNE as an employee at NSA has for a very long time been an effective calling card in software security roles as well.
Where can one find these people online? As they are seemingly not on HN, and as a European with similar views, it would be fun to get closer to them.
>> If you think otherwise, you're ... [elided]
Yellow card.
> If you think otherwise, you're in a filter bubble.
Belittling. Excellent way to get your point across.
> They actively recruit on elite engineering campuses over it. It is super fucking interesting work and candidates compete for the opportunity to do it.
This seems like it should be an easy thing to verify with some sort of reference. This is exactly what the parent comment is suggesting and you still flippantly are avoiding it as "trust me bro". I actually believe you, so why don't you share some evidence then?
I don't really care in this instance, because the information I'm relaying here is obviously, verifiably correct. It's not like, a persuasion challenge for me here. I'm just relating basic facts.
Flippant again. Nice.
If you have something to say, I think you should say it. This is vacuous. I understand why it's unpopular to relate the fact that applications for serious surveillance/espionage CNE work at NSA are competitive, and that the USG is very open about soliciting those applications. It remains a fact. Feel free to challenge me on that; we can go deeper.
What I'm not going to do is write you an apology for confronting you with that information.
> I understand why it's unpopular to relate the fact that applications for serious surveillance/espionage CNE work at NSA are competitive, and that the USG is very open about soliciting those applications.
And I'm not challenging you on that, at all. I actually believe you are correct because you typically provide very thoughtful answers from a position of authority and usually bring evidence to back your assertions. In this case, you're not. Your comments are childish and makes your position way less believable and hence why I'm pushing you.
> It remains a fact.
Just because you say it's a fact doesn't mean it is. The fact that you've done nothing but say "I know its a fact so therefore it is" doesn't help your position either.
> What I'm not going to do is write you an apology for confronting you with that information.
Yeesh. Chill out. I never asked for an apology. Your discourse is belittling and unproductive.
I'm not talking about the USG... Yes yes, it's great work and no drawbacks, particularly not considering the moral and ethical implications. But please do continue try to help them recruit while purposefully misunderstand what I write.
They do not need my help recruiting and the fact that you think an HN thread has any impact whatsoever on elite CS talent matriculating into CNE programs is further evidence you may be in a filter bubble. Not understanding this can't possibly help your cause.
> and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
Not necessarily, especially in the private sector. It's hard to justify not hiring an excellent employee because he or she worked for a company you don't like. Especially if the hiring panel is composed by >1 person.
A lot of these places already have massive government contracts with their own management structures.
So the plan is to also make some of them federal employees, ostensibly helping to oversee those contracts? Seems like a conflict of interest...
>Remember that in just 3 years this will stop helping you to get hired, and will probably look like a blemish on your CV when you eventually need to get a new job.
The worst part about this entire political is that Dems are most likely gonna win, and everyone will just move on.
Im really hoping that Trump lives long enough to actually stage a coup and tank the US economy so hard that things like working for this or DOGE actually do start to matter.
Bullshit. There is no company in the US that refuses to hire defense contractor employees, ex military or anyone who has worked in defense earlier.
Edit: this seems like the usds with private sector participation. I know “doge” is basically just usds.
There’s no company with a policy to refuse, but there are plenty of individual hiring managers and interviewers with personal opinions or bias.
Right… because those definitely don’t already assist three-letter agencies and the presence of the largest tech companies on the planet on your CV will definitely somehow become a net negative because uh, orange man bad? I assume that’s what the 3 year window is about?