"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it"
This applies equally to institutions and individuals, so from investors to CEOs to politicians to tech community leaders to individuals picking where they work, this is a very "interesting" time
Both the USDS and PIF programs were inspiring to me as they were almost like a New Deal for digital natives & coders. They did a good job of attracting smart hard workers to be underpaid for unglamorous & often-frustrating but impactful work. A lot of good people!
Yep. I’ve been subscribed to get emails when application to their jobs open, because they really represented a portion of the government that I thought was doing good work and was an area I could contribute meaningfully to (given my skillset). I never made the jump, it was such a large paycut and iirc looked like it’d require relocation, but I’d like to think I might in the future (if it ever comes back).
The people I met at USDS took that kind of pay cut for the mission, which I was in awe of. Senior, Staff, Principal engineers from big tech who likely had been making twice as much as top government salary.
They're behind U.S. Web Design System (USWDS)? This is going away?
USWDS have a cool palette system where color pairs from their palette have predictable WCAG color contrast (unlike in e.g. Tailwind's default palette), but I rarely hear of projects using USWDS colors:
That’d be something for sure. Section 508 accessibility laws are built into most federal IT contracts. DHS has an entire trusted tester certification program around it. The changes required to existing federal contracts if they do this are staggering.
> Sec. 3. DOGE Structure. (a) Reorganization and Renaming of the United States Digital Service. The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.
I wanted to work for them since Obama announced it, but they didn’t pay as well as a big funded private corp startup. If I was a bit older and more comfortable with my savings I would have.
I would have loved serving my country and working on software as a way to give back.
I talked to some people at USDS during my time in govt. They took a 50% pay cut to serve their country. Wish more people understood a lot of civil servants often do it for the mission.
There is a sad side to my desire, I’ve told people this before in social circles and most people respond with confusion as to why I would want to do that.
The general expectation with USDS and others was that you only stay for 2-3 years. So it’s more like a temporary tour.
At least that’s what was pitched to me a few years ago when I spoke to their counterparts in the US gov. Incredibly smart, no-BS people that wanted to do good work and have high impact.
Still the only job I regret not taking in all my career.
I wanted to join them a few years ago but I wasn’t in the right life position to do so. I was hoping to one day in the near future. Maybe that day will one day come again.
I never really saw anyone bad mouthing USDS even here. Can you explain why you think people didn't like USDS?
I'm sure there was some resentment from other agencies that USDS helping them implied they didn't know what they were doing or something, but on HN it has basically been non-stop positive from what I've seen. Echos of the same things in this thread: that they wish they were in a position to sacrifice their pay in order to contribute meaningfully to the government where they have the most chance at impact.
IIUC Login.gov and the much more unified design system based on Material Design for government websites came from USDS.
I updated my comment with response to your deleted comment. The last line specifically about emotional anecdotes. However your example has a lot of other comment threads that do not support the “usds is disliked” conclusion.
What is disliked in your example is bureaucracy and domain guarding which can be found inside and outside of the government. That does not mean USDS is a bad or disliked program because it has inefficiencies. It also does not mean we need to audit and dismantle services and programs as a way to root out inefficiency.
Not sure I understand what you're asking. Your post was fine and was not penalized (edit: sorry, this was not true—see below)—it's true that we downweight dupes, but once a year or more has gone by, we consider reposts to be dupes any more. Does that answer your question?
Edit: Oh, I get it now. Yes, I downweighted this thread as a follow-up, because it's obviously related to the Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) of Doge etc. In cases like that, follow-ups aren't the greatest posts; usually it's better to post the link as a comment in one of the other threads.
You can find lots of past explanation about this here:
I have never seen this before, and it is both interesting and generally useful to see how others put this sort of content together, but it got me thinking: is there a UK version of this? I found the following.
It depends on why you want this - not building government sites, but it is still valid for general use as well.
Or is it 20-30% of the country will be in the mood to feed you bullshit that they don’t actually believe initially? 20-30% have something they’re willing to be pedantically spiteful about.
