I've worked in government, late startup and corporate roles. There isn't anything fundamentally broken about government. The difference is operate vs. build.
Government is usually optimized around operational activity, and it usually does so very well from the perspective of how the organization is designed. Things get weird because priorities are driven by external mandate. DMV issues licenses, taxes are collected, social services are delivered. The downside of scaled operations is that changes are difficult and expensive. The exception is when there is growth -- the government is good at borrowing money and good at building stuff.
Large corporations aren't that much different. If anything, the average medium/large corporation has fewer controls and is less competent at a given task that a .gov organization would be, but delivers each marginal task at a lower cost and less red tape. (aka compliance requirements)
Startups are different. They are built to build and tend to do the minimum viable activity and are usually a big mess operationally.
I think where people get frustrated about government is that they expect it to respond to changes in society and technology. They see inertia and think inefficiency.
I think that’s missing the point entirely. What governments offer is stability. “Inertia” is a feature. If governments swung around rapidly the way tech trends change then it would cause tremendous damage to people’s lives and to the economy as a whole.
This is so key. I do a lot of government consulting and one of the iceberg issues right now is how to reconcile devops, whose economics are designed to facilitate revenue growth, with fixed budget public service horizons of a decade or more.
The whole public enterprise model was up front costs for expensive developers, then offload it to cheaper operations teams on shared production infrastructure for long haul. The unspoken implication of devops/CICD/cloud/agile, etc, is that you have developers available to roll out patches and features, which sends the long term cost of the service multiplying. Imagine retaining your development consultants and a product team past the 2-3 dev years through the 10+ years of production, with no revenue growth and more probably, budget cuts.
The table in the article provides a good overview, with the caveat that defence is not normal public services in government.
Even many bank architects aren't close enough to the code of their services to meaningfully reason about what's going on.
Tech is necessarily the expression of economic relationship models, where if you don't have a grasp of them, implementing tech without a view to the economics is going to sink some ships.
> There isn't anything fundamentally broken about government.
The government is simply the extreme version of "too big to fail."
And governments should be treated as "too big to fail" entities; a failed government is a very, very bad thing.
But it's also inevitable that government has the same problems as any organization with that label: misalignment of incentives, stagnation, tendency to corruption, reduced customer choice, inefficiency, etc.
Would be great if there was an efficiency task force directed at digitizing, streamlining, and optimizing government functions, communication, and programs.
Might be and might be not. Many revolution started on country level. In fact the whole word “revolution” are from that. And some change like Roland and Margaret started or even Chrysler or may be Apple 2nd life is how a large org can change course.
It is by definition larger. But may be not so different when an idea caught up, you do not know the end but still try.
There are many government process, role, citizen ... within one Gov
> Government is usually optimized around operational activity, and it usually does so very well from the perspective of how the organization is designed.
First, I think this depends a lot on your locality. I think you'll find a lot of places where people are nowhere near as complimentary about basic government services like DMV as you seem to be.
Second, I think this depends a lot on the type of service and how large a segment of the population needs it. Everybody gets driver's licenses, so there is a limit to how much suckitude the DMV can have before it becomes a political issue. But many social services are only used by a small fraction of the population, so unless you are one of those people or know one of them closely enough, you won't be aware of how much those services suck, and if you are aware of it, you will have a very hard time getting other people, who don't use the services and don't know anyone who does, to care. And the people who do need those services are usually those who have little if any ability to push back at suckitude.
Finally, I think you are ignoring the huge difference in how the incentives of a government organization are determined, as compared with those of a corporation. A corporation is a business: its fundamental incentive is to make money. Corporations that don't do that go out of business. A government organization, however, has whatever incentives were put in place by the political process that created it (and those incentives can gradually change as the political process changes); and the one constant about government organizations is that, once they're created, they never go away.
As a physicist who is looking for a job, the primary things preventing me from working on defense projects are twofold:
1. Defense systems are, in general, useful for offense. Unless I can know that the primary utility of an innovation is for good, I cannot work on it. Our only control in the matter is our choice of which innovations to make. I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work.
I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day, but won't touch a system that can kill another human unless we are at war. Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
2. Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
> I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day, but won't touch a system that can kill another human unless we are at war. Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
I don't think you can stop humans from getting better at killing each other. So the real question is: who should have the best killing systems? If the answer is "not the US," then who will it be?
> I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work
Isn't a cornerstone of scientific research that you never know what fruitful unrelated applications could be created by your work? The scientific community is collaborative, multidisciplinary, etc.- you should be happy your work contributed to progress.
> I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day
Even though full non-proliferation will likely contribute to more war?
> Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
Shouldn't we ALWAYS strive to get better at everything? Isn't that the point of scientific research?
> unless we are at war
Well, we are at war. In 2018, Congress identified 7 countries that we are officially in conflict with. And if you have a broader definition of war, the number is much higher.
> Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
Offensive capabilities aren't linearly related with human death and suffering. It's not even clear whether the relationship is positive or negative.[0] Have you considered the possibility that your work could potentially create a net-benefit to humanity by keeping world powers in a state of Nash-equilibrium/MAD?
In bullet 1, you say that you were heartbroken to see a citation in a defense project.
In bullet 2, you say that classification is the antithesis of science because projects are classified (read: not published)
But in Bullet 1, somebody cited you in an unclassified paper, and also once you publish you obviously don't get to control who uses your ideas or for what purpose short of a patent.
These seem mutually exclusive, but I might be misunderstanding.
Government and corporations are full of compromise. Stay in a school related environment for as long as possible if your ideals are the most important aspect of your career search.
> The government isn’t a bigger version of a startup and can’t act like a startup does. Innovation activities in government agencies most often result in innovation theater. While these activities shape and build culture, they don’t win wars, and rarely deliver shippable or deployable products.
> The very definition of a contractor implies a contract. And a government contract starts with fixed requirements that only change with contract modifications. That makes sense when the problem and solution are known. But when they are unknown the traditional methods of contracting fail.
This I think is the biggest failure in public private partnerships. These arrangements were supposed to save the taxpayer money by allowing nimble contractors to come in and do the heavy lifting on projects.
However what it really did is:
1) Create an adversarial relationship between between the government and the contracting entity, which is very much filled with even more red tape then it was were trying to replace.
2) Hollow out the talent in the government, causing more reliance on the private sector.
I'm not convinced these relationships can exist in a healthy way. If there isn't a lot of red tape and strict contracts then it's likely the government will get robbed blind and that leads to stricter contracts and more red tape: a virtuous cycle of red tape and lack of progress.
I think less emphases needs to be put on these partnerships and more on developing talent within the government that can innovate from within. This creates the possibility of empowered leaders within government departments that can run projects like agile mini-startups.
For what it's worth (to the initial quotes posted) there are plenty of options in the FAR and on existing contract vehicles to hire people with particular sets of skills to achieve a general goal / purpose of the organization "and other duties" that will allow you to contract flexible skills that you can direct as needed.
To your last point - I agree there is a lot of red tape. This needs to improve but it's also there for protection.
At a minimum, updating the GS scale / hiring authorities to ensure that the right expertise can be hired at competitive rates to effectively manage and guide contractual expertise is a MUST.
Right now, program officers may not even have the expertise / in-house resources to understand whether the work being done / reported is going to achieve their contract objective, and they might be relying on contractor project managers to translate. (Sometimes from the same company!) so checks are hard to come by and it's all very inefficient. To do this effectively you have to be able to hire folks that know, to create a culture around the effort at the agency so they can bring contractors on as true partners that understand the way the agency does business (norms, engineering standards, reporting, etc) - this goes a long way to ensuring objectives are met and real work is getting done.
> If there isn't a lot of red tape and strict contracts then it's likely the government will get robbed blind
I'm mostly in agreement, but regarding this point:
What needs to happen here instead of the strict contracts is that government nurtures good contractors. It's actually not terribly different from nurturing good employees. You need to look for people who do their jobs responsibly, efficiently and properly.
If they don't, you try to help them correct course, and if they can't, you let them go.
The strict contracts are precisely the problem - they lock everything down, lull you into false security and prevent you from discovering and cutting bad actors quickly. No cure, no pay never pans out, and meanwhile you're bleeding from the opportunity costs.
Of course, in order to make this work, you need people with clue on the inside so they can distinguish good work from bad work. I do think you can attract people like this, if you don't prevent them from doing their work by letting the lawyers run the show.
you hit the nail in the head. Innovation cannot be contracted, it needs to be nurtured from the inside. I think a better model for that would be a professional, long term version of Code for America.
This is a weird article. The author has plenty of background and standing to comment on the topic.
But he's leaving out that many of the problems the government seeks to address are bigger than what a "startup" (his word) would ever address. A better comparison might be between governments and very large-scale enterprises -- not startups. A lot of his words have to do with software, when typically the problems governments address have to do with (in increasing order of difficulty) hardware, big infrastructure, or society, or other societies. The startup/government comparison is not parallel for other reasons too -- and it's exhausting to enumerate!
Nobody's talking about the whole government being a startup. He's saying that government agencies can't be run like a startup. As far as scale goes, many government agencies are smaller than many successful startups.
I've worked in both the public and private sector, albeit not in the USA.
The simplest and biggest difference between public and private sector organisations is their motive: Private sector makes money. Public sector avoids being front page of the news. The behavior of each organisation often maps directly to these motives (albeit also, sometimes, perversely).
Secondary to that you have the fact that startups (and other private-sector organisations) fail and disappear all the time. Public-sector organisation's are enduring. If your defense force screws up and waste 100 billion dollars, there will still be a defense force the next day. This explains differing priorities around enduring, consistent activity and focus where in the private sector you might see full-blown pivots.
I like some of the stuff in the article's table but some of it is presented as a bit more immutable than is the case in reality. For example, fixed requirements on government projects versus agile/testing/story/feedback based delivery? Not true as a rule, lots of that kind of thing happening in the public sector. But fair as a broad generalization.
I've worked for defense contractors, but most of my time has been spent at a very conservative, results-driven, constantly-in-ship-mode commercial corporation.
It has taught me to make software that actually works; not software that looks like it works.
I don't give pitches; I give demos. I quickly learned to never try selling a pig in a poke. It had better work.
The problem with that, is that it takes more work and time to get to that phase, and, possibly, more risk.
It taught me to carefully evaluate projects, and plan for the long term.
I'm often painted as a "naysayer" because of this.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I plan to succeed. That means shooing the unicorns and pixies out to pasture, and concentrating on the raw materials, and how we will get from here, to there. That often requires resource husbandry, and compromises.
I also NEVER assume that the MVP will be a "one-off." It WILL be the seed of the product for the long term, so it can't be rushed, and it must be of the highest quality that can be reasonably achieved. I generally optimize for quality over features for early-stage releases; knowing that we probably will never be given the chance to "go back and fix it later."
In that respect, the corporation was very much like the defense department. There's a story about Hyman Rickover, and how he'd deal with tech salesmen, coming to his office with sample kit. I'm not sure if it's true, but it is fun:
He is said to have taken the kit, walked over to his second-story Pentagon window, and dropped the device out onto the ground below.
"If it still works, I'll consider it." He is reputed to have said.
> So, the question is: What’s next? How do leaders in government think about and organize innovation in a way that makes a difference?
The answer here for me is to create a culture of experimentation and hypothesis testing whose results can be rapidly incorporated into the operations of the agency. Allow for testing off the critical path. Allow for smaller-scale experimentation to prove a concept that has an on-ramp into your day-to-day operations
This works for technology approaches, this works for regulatory approaches - it even works for opt-in citizen services IF you create the framework that supports it. (Director signs paper saying citizens can opt-in to test practices and those that do have X rights in the normal process, get the language cleared by legal, and you've got something that can last for a bunch of use cases)
Reduce the burden to get something started at a low level when your staff know it's a better way. Continue to reach out to line employees to ask what they would like to try out / attempt to make the organization better.
So much of government stagnation is the sheer burden of getting any sort of experiment approved / blessed, so you miss out on what's already in the building, let alone what can be gotten from outside. Maybe what I'm describing is "lean enterprise" type stuff.
As for Why Government Isn't a Startup and the original premise. Well... why isn't IBM a bigger version of a startup? Imagine dealing with all of the cruft ever written by congress since the formation of the country as your basis for operation. :)
"But the 2013 Snowden revelations damaged that tenuous relationship yet again. In hindsight the damage wasn’t the result of what the United States was doing, but over the Pentagon’s inability and unwillingness to own up to why it was doing it: After the intelligence failure of 9/11, security agencies overcompensated by widespread, warrantless datamining as well as electronic and telephonic surveillance, including on U.S. persons.
Without a clear explanation of why this had been done, startups,..."
I don't think that lack of understanding of the reasons for surveillance is the problem. It is quite common for people to understand the desire to fight terrorism and prevent another 9/11, and still understand that the NSA's methods are ripe for abuse. Lying to Congress about the nature of the program (the what, not the why) doesn't inspire confidence that abuse won't happen.
I find the idea that the reasons for surveillance was simply not explained very well to be ahistorical. Perhaps that's just the bubble I've been in though.
Bureaucracy is a major reason. See Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy ("in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."). A government tend to be less and less efficient, whereas a startup has to be more and more to survive.
Technocracy is another one. The Dilbert principle/Putt's law/corollary ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand"/competence inversion) is everywhere at play, however startups are too young and not big enough to really suffer from it.
Raw power, coupled to inertia, is also a reason. As J. Ousterhout pointed it out "The most important component of evolution is death. it's easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one. Most organisms are highly resistant to change, but when they die it becomes possible for new and improved organisms to take their place" ( https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php ). A government is very powerful and has huge inertia, it won't easily evolve or die.
I was on an agile team for a government project and one of the other people on a team made the observation that agile is about people over process and government is about process over people and I don’t think people would prefer government to work the other way.
Startups are generally taking risks by design. When you are allowed and expected to take risks, your behavior is different than those being risk averse. Most gov't services are infrastructure to a degree. You don't want people gambling with infrastructure.
If public-sector work actually cared about reducing risks, then SRE would be huge in the public sector. SRE is literally about making rational decisions about engineering reliability in the context of risk-tolerance levels (i.e. availability/error and financial budgets). But it's not.
The kind of risk-avoidance that pervades the public sector (really, all sufficiently large organizations) is actually one of political risk avoidance. It's perfectly OK for systems to fail for reasons that were forewarned, because management's ass is covered. If something is working, then don't fix it, because all change is political risk.
This happens because ultimately, at the end of the day, public sector organizations are led by politicians. The "deep state" is not genuinely independent from politics - the attitudes of leadership trickle down the chain. No matter which policies are currently favored by the politician serving at the head, the process of advancing your interests is largely identical.
> Startups can do anything. They can break the law and apologize later (as Uber, Airbnb, and Tesla did), but a government official taking the same type of risks can go to jail.
That doesn't seem right at all. Shouldn't we all be equal before the law? Or has it become the norm that the foundations of democracy are being vanished one after another?
Because most start ups fail and when government's fail really really bad things happen? Because government's have an utterly different set of priorities than startups which are founded with the aim of making their founders as much money as possible? Because move fast and break things works of you're building Facebook but not if you're providing end of life care?
One more. Whilst you want success but do you want some government Lue HONG kong and chinese government successful. Hence what government is more important than success for government.
We can have a lot of startup and we hope we will so some can fail !!! May be we want some government to fail as well but not most of them.
> the damage wasn’t the result of what the United States was doing, but over the Pentagon’s inability and unwillingness to own up to why it was doing it
What? Is violating the Constitution on a massive scale just a casual pastime like pepper-spraying a protester?
[+] [-] Spooky23|6 years ago|reply
Government is usually optimized around operational activity, and it usually does so very well from the perspective of how the organization is designed. Things get weird because priorities are driven by external mandate. DMV issues licenses, taxes are collected, social services are delivered. The downside of scaled operations is that changes are difficult and expensive. The exception is when there is growth -- the government is good at borrowing money and good at building stuff.
Large corporations aren't that much different. If anything, the average medium/large corporation has fewer controls and is less competent at a given task that a .gov organization would be, but delivers each marginal task at a lower cost and less red tape. (aka compliance requirements)
Startups are different. They are built to build and tend to do the minimum viable activity and are usually a big mess operationally.
[+] [-] chongli|6 years ago|reply
I think that’s missing the point entirely. What governments offer is stability. “Inertia” is a feature. If governments swung around rapidly the way tech trends change then it would cause tremendous damage to people’s lives and to the economy as a whole.
[+] [-] motohagiography|6 years ago|reply
This is so key. I do a lot of government consulting and one of the iceberg issues right now is how to reconcile devops, whose economics are designed to facilitate revenue growth, with fixed budget public service horizons of a decade or more.
The whole public enterprise model was up front costs for expensive developers, then offload it to cheaper operations teams on shared production infrastructure for long haul. The unspoken implication of devops/CICD/cloud/agile, etc, is that you have developers available to roll out patches and features, which sends the long term cost of the service multiplying. Imagine retaining your development consultants and a product team past the 2-3 dev years through the 10+ years of production, with no revenue growth and more probably, budget cuts.
The table in the article provides a good overview, with the caveat that defence is not normal public services in government.
Even many bank architects aren't close enough to the code of their services to meaningfully reason about what's going on. Tech is necessarily the expression of economic relationship models, where if you don't have a grasp of them, implementing tech without a view to the economics is going to sink some ships.
[+] [-] paulddraper|6 years ago|reply
The government is simply the extreme version of "too big to fail."
And governments should be treated as "too big to fail" entities; a failed government is a very, very bad thing.
But it's also inevitable that government has the same problems as any organization with that label: misalignment of incentives, stagnation, tendency to corruption, reduced customer choice, inefficiency, etc.
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|6 years ago|reply
It is by definition larger. But may be not so different when an idea caught up, you do not know the end but still try.
There are many government process, role, citizen ... within one Gov
Read the 3 lens approach.
[+] [-] pdonis|6 years ago|reply
First, I think this depends a lot on your locality. I think you'll find a lot of places where people are nowhere near as complimentary about basic government services like DMV as you seem to be.
Second, I think this depends a lot on the type of service and how large a segment of the population needs it. Everybody gets driver's licenses, so there is a limit to how much suckitude the DMV can have before it becomes a political issue. But many social services are only used by a small fraction of the population, so unless you are one of those people or know one of them closely enough, you won't be aware of how much those services suck, and if you are aware of it, you will have a very hard time getting other people, who don't use the services and don't know anyone who does, to care. And the people who do need those services are usually those who have little if any ability to push back at suckitude.
Finally, I think you are ignoring the huge difference in how the incentives of a government organization are determined, as compared with those of a corporation. A corporation is a business: its fundamental incentive is to make money. Corporations that don't do that go out of business. A government organization, however, has whatever incentives were put in place by the political process that created it (and those incentives can gradually change as the political process changes); and the one constant about government organizations is that, once they're created, they never go away.
[+] [-] Janeman544|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xkde|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ISL|6 years ago|reply
1. Defense systems are, in general, useful for offense. Unless I can know that the primary utility of an innovation is for good, I cannot work on it. Our only control in the matter is our choice of which innovations to make. I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work.
I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day, but won't touch a system that can kill another human unless we are at war. Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
2. Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
[+] [-] CharlesColeman|6 years ago|reply
I don't think you can stop humans from getting better at killing each other. So the real question is: who should have the best killing systems? If the answer is "not the US," then who will it be?
[+] [-] sdinsn|6 years ago|reply
> I was heartbroken the day I saw a citation of my work in a military application, as it was never the intent of the work
Isn't a cornerstone of scientific research that you never know what fruitful unrelated applications could be created by your work? The scientific community is collaborative, multidisciplinary, etc.- you should be happy your work contributed to progress.
> I'll do nuclear non-proliferation work all day
Even though full non-proliferation will likely contribute to more war?
> Humans are really, really good at killing one another -- we don't need to get better at that.
Shouldn't we ALWAYS strive to get better at everything? Isn't that the point of scientific research?
> unless we are at war
Well, we are at war. In 2018, Congress identified 7 countries that we are officially in conflict with. And if you have a broader definition of war, the number is much higher.
> Defense projects are classified, and classification is the antithesis of science.
Not all defense projects are classified.
[+] [-] kube-system|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/09/Bubble-and-lines-...
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
In bullet 2, you say that classification is the antithesis of science because projects are classified (read: not published)
But in Bullet 1, somebody cited you in an unclassified paper, and also once you publish you obviously don't get to control who uses your ideas or for what purpose short of a patent.
These seem mutually exclusive, but I might be misunderstanding.
[+] [-] wolco|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonawesomegreen|6 years ago|reply
> The very definition of a contractor implies a contract. And a government contract starts with fixed requirements that only change with contract modifications. That makes sense when the problem and solution are known. But when they are unknown the traditional methods of contracting fail.
This I think is the biggest failure in public private partnerships. These arrangements were supposed to save the taxpayer money by allowing nimble contractors to come in and do the heavy lifting on projects.
However what it really did is:
1) Create an adversarial relationship between between the government and the contracting entity, which is very much filled with even more red tape then it was were trying to replace.
2) Hollow out the talent in the government, causing more reliance on the private sector.
I'm not convinced these relationships can exist in a healthy way. If there isn't a lot of red tape and strict contracts then it's likely the government will get robbed blind and that leads to stricter contracts and more red tape: a virtuous cycle of red tape and lack of progress.
I think less emphases needs to be put on these partnerships and more on developing talent within the government that can innovate from within. This creates the possibility of empowered leaders within government departments that can run projects like agile mini-startups.
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
To your last point - I agree there is a lot of red tape. This needs to improve but it's also there for protection.
At a minimum, updating the GS scale / hiring authorities to ensure that the right expertise can be hired at competitive rates to effectively manage and guide contractual expertise is a MUST.
Right now, program officers may not even have the expertise / in-house resources to understand whether the work being done / reported is going to achieve their contract objective, and they might be relying on contractor project managers to translate. (Sometimes from the same company!) so checks are hard to come by and it's all very inefficient. To do this effectively you have to be able to hire folks that know, to create a culture around the effort at the agency so they can bring contractors on as true partners that understand the way the agency does business (norms, engineering standards, reporting, etc) - this goes a long way to ensuring objectives are met and real work is getting done.
[+] [-] olau|6 years ago|reply
I'm mostly in agreement, but regarding this point:
What needs to happen here instead of the strict contracts is that government nurtures good contractors. It's actually not terribly different from nurturing good employees. You need to look for people who do their jobs responsibly, efficiently and properly.
If they don't, you try to help them correct course, and if they can't, you let them go.
The strict contracts are precisely the problem - they lock everything down, lull you into false security and prevent you from discovering and cutting bad actors quickly. No cure, no pay never pans out, and meanwhile you're bleeding from the opportunity costs.
Of course, in order to make this work, you need people with clue on the inside so they can distinguish good work from bad work. I do think you can attract people like this, if you don't prevent them from doing their work by letting the lawyers run the show.
[+] [-] luckydata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mturmon|6 years ago|reply
But he's leaving out that many of the problems the government seeks to address are bigger than what a "startup" (his word) would ever address. A better comparison might be between governments and very large-scale enterprises -- not startups. A lot of his words have to do with software, when typically the problems governments address have to do with (in increasing order of difficulty) hardware, big infrastructure, or society, or other societies. The startup/government comparison is not parallel for other reasons too -- and it's exhausting to enumerate!
[+] [-] ianai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FooHentai|6 years ago|reply
The simplest and biggest difference between public and private sector organisations is their motive: Private sector makes money. Public sector avoids being front page of the news. The behavior of each organisation often maps directly to these motives (albeit also, sometimes, perversely).
Secondary to that you have the fact that startups (and other private-sector organisations) fail and disappear all the time. Public-sector organisation's are enduring. If your defense force screws up and waste 100 billion dollars, there will still be a defense force the next day. This explains differing priorities around enduring, consistent activity and focus where in the private sector you might see full-blown pivots.
I like some of the stuff in the article's table but some of it is presented as a bit more immutable than is the case in reality. For example, fixed requirements on government projects versus agile/testing/story/feedback based delivery? Not true as a rule, lots of that kind of thing happening in the public sector. But fair as a broad generalization.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|6 years ago|reply
I've worked for defense contractors, but most of my time has been spent at a very conservative, results-driven, constantly-in-ship-mode commercial corporation.
It has taught me to make software that actually works; not software that looks like it works.
I don't give pitches; I give demos. I quickly learned to never try selling a pig in a poke. It had better work.
The problem with that, is that it takes more work and time to get to that phase, and, possibly, more risk.
It taught me to carefully evaluate projects, and plan for the long term.
I'm often painted as a "naysayer" because of this.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I plan to succeed. That means shooing the unicorns and pixies out to pasture, and concentrating on the raw materials, and how we will get from here, to there. That often requires resource husbandry, and compromises.
I also NEVER assume that the MVP will be a "one-off." It WILL be the seed of the product for the long term, so it can't be rushed, and it must be of the highest quality that can be reasonably achieved. I generally optimize for quality over features for early-stage releases; knowing that we probably will never be given the chance to "go back and fix it later."
In that respect, the corporation was very much like the defense department. There's a story about Hyman Rickover, and how he'd deal with tech salesmen, coming to his office with sample kit. I'm not sure if it's true, but it is fun:
He is said to have taken the kit, walked over to his second-story Pentagon window, and dropped the device out onto the ground below.
"If it still works, I'll consider it." He is reputed to have said.
[+] [-] sailfast|6 years ago|reply
The answer here for me is to create a culture of experimentation and hypothesis testing whose results can be rapidly incorporated into the operations of the agency. Allow for testing off the critical path. Allow for smaller-scale experimentation to prove a concept that has an on-ramp into your day-to-day operations
This works for technology approaches, this works for regulatory approaches - it even works for opt-in citizen services IF you create the framework that supports it. (Director signs paper saying citizens can opt-in to test practices and those that do have X rights in the normal process, get the language cleared by legal, and you've got something that can last for a bunch of use cases)
Reduce the burden to get something started at a low level when your staff know it's a better way. Continue to reach out to line employees to ask what they would like to try out / attempt to make the organization better.
So much of government stagnation is the sheer burden of getting any sort of experiment approved / blessed, so you miss out on what's already in the building, let alone what can be gotten from outside. Maybe what I'm describing is "lean enterprise" type stuff.
As for Why Government Isn't a Startup and the original premise. Well... why isn't IBM a bigger version of a startup? Imagine dealing with all of the cruft ever written by congress since the formation of the country as your basis for operation. :)
[+] [-] archgoon|6 years ago|reply
Without a clear explanation of why this had been done, startups,..."
I don't think that lack of understanding of the reasons for surveillance is the problem. It is quite common for people to understand the desire to fight terrorism and prevent another 9/11, and still understand that the NSA's methods are ripe for abuse. Lying to Congress about the nature of the program (the what, not the why) doesn't inspire confidence that abuse won't happen.
I find the idea that the reasons for surveillance was simply not explained very well to be ahistorical. Perhaps that's just the bubble I've been in though.
[+] [-] SQueeeeeL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] natmaka|6 years ago|reply
Technocracy is another one. The Dilbert principle/Putt's law/corollary ("Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand"/competence inversion) is everywhere at play, however startups are too young and not big enough to really suffer from it.
Raw power, coupled to inertia, is also a reason. As J. Ousterhout pointed it out "The most important component of evolution is death. it's easier to create a new organism than to change an existing one. Most organisms are highly resistant to change, but when they die it becomes possible for new and improved organisms to take their place" ( https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php ). A government is very powerful and has huge inertia, it won't easily evolve or die.
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tabtab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|6 years ago|reply
The kind of risk-avoidance that pervades the public sector (really, all sufficiently large organizations) is actually one of political risk avoidance. It's perfectly OK for systems to fail for reasons that were forewarned, because management's ass is covered. If something is working, then don't fix it, because all change is political risk.
This happens because ultimately, at the end of the day, public sector organizations are led by politicians. The "deep state" is not genuinely independent from politics - the attitudes of leadership trickle down the chain. No matter which policies are currently favored by the politician serving at the head, the process of advancing your interests is largely identical.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] classified|6 years ago|reply
That doesn't seem right at all. Shouldn't we all be equal before the law? Or has it become the norm that the foundations of democracy are being vanished one after another?
[+] [-] throwaway936482|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|6 years ago|reply
A startup can't coerce people to become its customers. A startup has to convince individuals to part with their money voluntarily.
[+] [-] gatestone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngcc_hk|6 years ago|reply
We can have a lot of startup and we hope we will so some can fail !!! May be we want some government to fail as well but not most of them.
[+] [-] classified|6 years ago|reply
What? Is violating the Constitution on a massive scale just a casual pastime like pepper-spraying a protester?