[smackay]

I'd be very interested in learning more about how DOGE got staffed.

If your goal was to dramatically cut government spending, then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it, otherwise you'd get bogged down in details since there was probably a good reason, at least initially for the said spending.

However, if you really, wanted to make a spectacular mess then hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later would be the way to do it.

Somebody, somewhere, thought this was a good approach. How could they not know it would turn into a massive clusterfuck. Hubris?

[rsynnott]

They seem to have gone for option 3, based on the article; hiring _staggeringly incompetent_ people with no prior experience. No-one bright would be saying, to paraphrase the article "no-one should have acted on the output of my shit software, but also it would have been cool if other federal departments had adopted my shit software".

(It's very characteristic of a certain type of AI booster, though; "it's fine as long as you don't use the results for anything, also you should buy more".)

[crypto_throwa]

I'm in a chat with one of the engineers on DOGE (young college dropout), and they're trying to recruit more young college dropouts to work on DOGE.

I would characterize some in this group as believing they're smarter than everyone else or anything that's been done before, so yes I think it's pure hubris.

There are a lot of bright people in the chat working on very important things, but they're not the ones joining DOGE.

[polygotdomain]

To start, it was clear that many were Musk fan boys. I don't think "bright" was a driving force, but "young, with no prior experience" would be great if you wanted people to make decisions that have the potential to negatively impact millions of lives. You need people with a lack of context to realize those are the stakes at hand. Since it was also clear they were going to "throw AI at it", I also doubt they were looking for anyone who acknowledged the shortcomings and pitfalls of an all AI approach.

I think this approach got them exactly what they wanted. Musk clearly wanted access to as much data as he could get his hands onto; legally or not. There were contracts and investigations into Musk's interest that he wanted control over, and got. Overall, chaos is not seen as an issue for those in this administration. The attitude from the top was clearly that these agencies and contractors "deserved it" for some reason, even though they have no idea what they really do or why they're doing it.

[cwillu]

Searching the page for “hiring bright, young people, with no prior experience, who axed first, and asked questions later” shows two results, was that intended?

[smackay]

Not at all, the slightly snarky wording, was typed on the spur of the moment. Incidentally, I tried the same terms on Google and the AI-powered answer was rather informative with the pros and cons of the approach. Indeed the cons seem to be playing out before our very eyes.

[TrackerFF]

Here's one guy that posted about his short stint with DOGE, when it was still in the planning stages

https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873

"When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.

Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency

Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.

The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.

I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.

So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii."

[rsynnott]

> So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii.

These aren't serious people.

[sumeno]

> The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to

This kid needs to talk to more people

[quickthrowman]

I remember reading this when it was first posted and being amazed it wasn’t satire.

[spaceisballer]

You have to demonize the government in order to come in and start trashing the place. Obviously there is going to be some waste to trim. But instead they came in, asked zero questions and started arbitrarily cutting contracts and jobs. In the end all the cuts will just make the government dysfunctional and cost us more than it did before.

[insane_dreamer]

Serious amount of Kool-Aid being served up here.

[ujkhsjkdhf234]

All of these people sound like naive psychopaths.

[antisthenes]

Sounds like a micro-dosing narcissist nepo-baby who got rich working at a tech company and doesn't know what to do with themselves, because they assume everything in life is going to be so easy as to not worth doing seriously.

[techpineapple]

I imagine it was always a weird conflict of intentions.

On the one hand if you're really trying to disrupt an industry, you want to hire at least a good percentage of people who don't understand the industry, so they're not biased by the set of circumstances you may be trying to disrupt - and Thiel and Yarvin and maybe Vance and Elon certainly wanted to disrupt the government. Like Thiel and Yarvin probably don't want people who understand how to renegotiate government contracts, they just want people who know how to burn them to the ground.

But I imagine there were very few people in government, including some of the people "over" them like the senate and house wanted real disruption, and certainly most of the population didn't want real disruption, and Trump and his administration probably didn't want real disruption that would impact their popularity.

So it was probably doomed from the start.