Getting IT Talent In Government Will Take Culture Change, Says Google Engineer 166
dcblogs writes: Mikey Dickerson, a site reliability engineer at Google, who was appointed Monday by the White House as the deputy federal CIO, will lead efforts to improve U.S. Websites. Dickerson, who worked on the Healthcare.gov rescue last year, said that one issue the government needs to fix is its culture. In describing his experience on the Healthcare.gov effort, he said the workplace was "not one that is optimized to get good work out of engineers." It was a shirt-and-tie environment, and while Dickerson said cultural issues may sound superficial, they are still real. "You don't have to think that the engineers are the creative snowflakes and rock stars that they think they are, you don't have to agree with any of that," Dickerson said in a recent conference presentation posted online. "I'm just telling you that's how they think of themselves, and if you want access to more of them, finding a way to deal with that helps a lot." Engineers want to make a difference, Dickerson said, and he has collected the names of more than 140 engineers who would be willing to take unpaid leave from their jobs to work on a meaningful project.
It's more than the tie (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the rules, the bureaucracy and the paperwork
Creative snowflakes and rock stars...? (Score:2, Insightful)
I dunno, doesn't fit the engineers I know. Maybe he's been at Google too long...
Re:It's more than the tie (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. If a workplace has "must wear tie" rule, then I assume they have a whole bunch of other stupid rules.
Re: what a douche (Score:2, Insightful)
"Finding a way to deal"...how do you feel coders? Does being labled a delicate "snowflake" make you even want to bother with reading the rest of what he has to day? And who are these masochists that would work for nothing? Let me guess...
yep he is a douche.
Engineers do dress well (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to dressing well, or to reasonable dress codes. They're mostly opposed to stupid dress codes that make them uncomfortable while working for no good reason. Reasonable dress for a meeting with outside customers is different from that for a group of engineers banging out a solution to a code problem, and what's reasonable when you've hauled someone in on their day off to deal with an emergency isn't the same as what they'd wear during a normal workday. Management tends to lose sight of all this because they've got much different jobs from the engineers and the dress norms for them are going to be different from those for engineers because the routine situations are going to be different.
Need to cut down on contractors and subcontractors (Score:5, Insightful)
Need to cut down on the contractors and subcontractors in GOV IT.
They add lot's of over head and can make it hard to get work done as people need to work though layers and layers of contractors and subcontractors to get info from one team to an other team.
Re:It's more than the tie (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget Politics and protection of turf. Air Force doesn't want to reuse what the Army built, Navy has their own ideas, and somebody is always trying to mystify a product or solution to essentially perform a hostile takeover by getting a competing products funding.
Re:Maybe the Prez (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe the Prez could take some time off from his busy vacation schedule and work on some meaningful projects as well.
Nah, he's too busy backpedaling on his earlier taking credit for removing all US troops from Iraq and calling ISIS "the jayvee". Now it's all Maliki's fault.
Great how that reset with Russia worked out, too.
And NOW we find out, "Don't do stupid shit" is really nothing more than an empty soundbite.
Yay HOPENCHANGE!!!
Re:Engineers do dress well (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd note that most software engineers aren't philosophically opposed to dressing well, or to reasonable dress codes. They're mostly opposed to stupid dress codes that make them uncomfortable while working for no good reason. Reasonable dress for a meeting with outside customers is different from that for a group of engineers banging out a solution to a code problem, and what's reasonable when you've hauled someone in on their day off to deal with an emergency isn't the same as what they'd wear during a normal workday. Management tends to lose sight of all this because they've got much different jobs from the engineers and the dress norms for them are going to be different from those for engineers because the routine situations are going to be different.
I'd point out that in the case of web applications for the government, engineers have very little reason to ever meet customers. In that case, the minor arguments for even a business casual dress code fade away.
Government has to think about why IT people might work for them. Higher pay? Not going to happen--government will never match private sector stock gifts. If I'd stayed another six months at Amazon, I would have received stock worth $100,000 if sold at the right time (and still worth $75,000+ if sold today). Taken out to a year, my compensation would have been roughly $280,000. Government isn't matching that.
Better benefits? My benefits were good. I doubt that the government is offering better. The pension perhaps, but what happens when the government goes bankrupt? Hey, it happened in Detroit. The federal government's debt has increased every year since 1958 (this includes the debt owed to Social Security and Medicare). My 401k might be smaller, but it's money under my control. Amazon could go under tomorrow and I'd have everything but the portion in Amazon stock (which I could sell but it's been outperforming the rest of my portfolio).
The only thing that the government has going for it is the possibility of doing good. How well is that going to stack up against lower pay, unreasonable dress code requirements, and exceptionally clueless bosses (neither Obama nor almost any member of Congress has a clue about what is involved in software development)?
Strip out the insulting language... (Score:4, Insightful)
... And process this literally. What he is suggesting is that engineers need to have more control over projects and feel that their contributions make a difference.
The insulting language I believe was put in to get the arrogant incompetent government drones to pay attention to it. See, we can do insulting too.
But strip out the insulting back and forth and see the literal message. He's suggesting that engineers be given some control and leeway to manage projects. He's also suggesting that those projects will be more successful if the engineers are allowed to control the direction of them to some extent.
Now, who here disagrees that that would be a bad idea? It is precisely the lack of that that makes those sorts of jobs intolerable. You're often dealing with a badly designed system that wants to be upgraded into an even more badly designed system and you're being judged on how well this badly designed system works.
On top of that, the system whether well or poorly designed isn't doing anything interesting or often even useful.
So yeah, I think the stuffed shirts have every reason to express their needs in a vague sense. Because they don't actually know what they want specifically. But the actual implementation and specific design should be handled by the engineers with a great deal of flexibility.
Re: what a douche (Score:4, Insightful)
That's great. I wouldn't call him a douche, at least a douche serves a purpose. Exactly who the fuck thinks of themselves a creative snowflake or a rockstar? It sure as fuck isn't any engineer worth their chops that I've known. It's usually some middle-managing do-nothing gladhanding their way to the top on the backs of good designers, engineers and architects that they label "creative snowflakes" and "rockstars" (usually preceded by the word "my").
Would anybody want a handful of these so-called "rock stars" on their team? Imagine a thousand people who all think they're the best at what they do, all working on the same project. Each one unique and just a certain that their way of doing things is the best and only way!
Re:Engineers do dress well (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're definitely on the right track: It's much less an opposition to dressing nicely. Rather, engineers tend to oppose things for which the only rationale is "because that's just the way we do it."
Professional business attire is acceptable when dealing with clients/customers. Makes logical sense. No opposition. ... makes no sense. So you'll get push back.
Suit and tie, to sit in a cube and churn through code all day
Anecdotally, I've noticed that this tends to be more common back east. DC to Boston, random working stiffs rocking the jacket and tie every day for no adequate reason. I worked for Intuit out in San Diego for a few years though, and engineers would quite often come to work in flip flops and board shorts (we were 10-15 min from the beach, so a long lunch of surfing was fairly common). You might be khakis and a polo shirt for important meetings. Maybe.
Re:simple! all it takes is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice. I can see you have about zero useful experience in working for government. Good move with the stereotypes and right-wing propaganda though. I'm surprised you didn't mention unions in there somewhere. You missed that one on the checklist.
The whole process over outcome thing is probably your closest point. That happens because if you DON'T do that and anything news-worthy happens then you and everybody anywhere near you will be roasted in the media for being secretive and not "accountable" (whatever that means to people who don't understand what you do anyway). The public wants lots of records so they can come in and find the waste and abuse that they just KNOW all these un-elected people are committing every second of every day (when it's actually the elected ones that they put in office who are the problem.)
Oh, and while you're worried about outcomes, how about this: we need a public that stops demanding 100% success at absolutely everything. See, in actual government jobs for the most part innovation is hard because it doesn't carry any rewards but carries loads of potential badness. Some states have passed laws to provide financial and non-financial rewards for people who do useful things, but any time anybody actually gives one out it gets blasted in the media, so for the most part nobody bothers. On the other hand, if you try something innovative and it doesn't work you'll hear all about THAT too, complete with a hyperactive accounting of how much money you spent doing it, so once again the people are getting exactly what they demand. Maybe they don't know they're demanding it, but that's what they're doing. I'm not talking about healthcare.gov type failures, which were mostly private sector at it's best as usual because outsourcing, I'm just talking about regular "hey, I have an idea of something we should try" kind of stuff. If that "something" doesn't come with an almost 100% success guarantee you're going to have trouble because the price of failure in government is actually pretty high for most un-elected types and the reward for success is nonexistent.
So yeah, culture has to change. Specifically, the culture of the public who demands the impossible. In the private sector your every last move isn't subject to some public inquiry and guess what? Sometimes you try stuff that doesn't work and it's OK because others of those things are out of the park successes.
Re:Need to cut down on contractors and subcontract (Score:2, Insightful)
> Well, in many cases if you got rid of contractors, all that would be left would be managers and interns.
Duh. That's his point - hire developers as permanent employees. The whole outsourcing of government work (not just IT, but all departments) since Clinton left office has just been a hand-over of cash to the owners of contracting companies. Once they get entrenched the contractors are just as permanent as regular employees because they've got institutional knowledge but now with the additional costs of contractor management. You get the worst of both worlds - low-paid employees but high costs.
not the clothes (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked for the government in a scientific job, with a lot of IT folks. It was probably the most relaxed atmosphere I've worked in. No expectation to dress better than business casual. No expectation to work overtime. No expectation to really get anything done.
It's that last one that's really the killer. If you're not focused on getting projects done, first and foremost, then you're not going to attract good people.
A good engineer isn't necessary when the jobs at a government office survive only by making the right political and budgetary statements at precisely the right times. With very few exceptions, technical success or failure just doesn't have much influence on your career in the government.
Lastly, 140 engineers will make no difference. The federal government is huge. The office I worked in was a backwater, nearly forgotten location. We had a staff of 5000 people, about half of them engineers and scientists. There are thousands of engineers in the government right now who would love to work on meaningful projects. It's not a lack of talent or manpower that keeps those projects from happening.