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Won't argue that doesn't happen, but it's overstated. People from industry go into government for the same reason people join the digital service: because they think that the skills and knowledge they gained in industry can let them do the job better than the government can without them.[1] And these appointments are temporary for the same reason digital service appointments are temporary: people are only so willing to sign on for salary-capped government positions for so long.

The only difference is the intent and motivation you're ascribing to the respective actors.

[1] I think very few people would disagree with the assertion that a Googler knows tech better than anyone in government. The fact is that pretty much everyone in every industry feels the same way. Everyone thinks that the public interest would be served if only the government folks in charge were people who "get it" like they do.



The "revolving door" is all about the fox guarding the chicken coop. How do software engineers working for the USDS fall into that basket?


That's a big ask Googles software requires a different mind set than say correctly calculating veterans pensions.

From googles perspective having 2 or 3% suboptimal query's is fine but that wont pass muster for other types of work.

Try building billing systems for a global Telco and have one of Vint Cerfs reports nudge you and say this had be right otherwise we are both out of a job :-)


I'm pretty sure that a billing error in Adwords would cause a fairly large controversy!


True and I bet that they pay more attention to detail on that but what proportion of googles SE's work on ad words billing.


I don't understand what you mean by "2 or 3% suboptimal query's", or really, in general what you mean.


They don't have to be 100% right but say an accounts system must reconcile.


A google query? What does it even mean for a google query to be "100% right"? I'm not sure that's even a thing.

But I think you misunderstand software engineering and the nature of engineering skill or fields of experience. There may be no such thing as "100% right" when it comes to which hits are included in the result set for a google query, but I have no doubt that nearly any google engineer needs to write all sorts of code on a regular basis that indeed needs to be 100% right with regard to specifications or requirements.


Ah so hobby programmers then and given some of the quality of the published google apis's I am not surprised.

Sorry after having been one of my country's 3rd line osi team I take a fairly hard line on correctness.


what the heck are you on about, man.


Googles code quality isn't all its cracked up to be and you have a least heard of OSI? You know the other networking standard that was at least a decade ahead of the internet back then.


Okay, that's cool, if you want to talk on the internet about how you're obviously a better programmer than anyone that works at Google becuase you worked on an ancient over-engineered standard that basically ended up losing out to TCP/IP... who am I to stop you?

Ah so hobby programmers then.


Calculating a pension and building a billing system is rather basic CRUD work compared to scaling software to handle millions of concurrent users. Google's hiring bar is relatively high compared to any government position in terms of quantitative skills you'd need to demonstrate.


Last year there where 279 changes to the federal tax code.

That system handles hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars.

Calling it "rather basic CRUD work" is incredibly myopic and/or arrogant.


Quite Google can take a relaxed view about things eg getting geoloaction wrong 1 time in thousand on a query.

Calculate 1 in a 1000 tax returns or bank statements wrong and some one will want blood.




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