Biden Launches US Digital Corps To Bring Young Tech Talent To Government (fastcompany.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company, written by Mark Sullivan: On Monday the Biden administration announced a new program, called the U.S. Digital Corps, designed to attract young tech talent to roles in the government. The Corps offers early-career technologies a chance to get engaged in government via a two-year fellowship focused on major Biden administration priorities, including coronavirus response, economic recovery, cybersecurity, and streamlining government services. The program will begin by recruiting 30 people with skill sets in software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity, and other critical technology fields this fall. It'll place them in one of five agencies -- the General Services Administration (GSA), Veterans Affairs, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- where they'll start work in 2022.
Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios. The program will recruit from "leading undergraduate programs," as well as from "alternative training pathways" such as apprenticeships, bootcamps, and certificate programs. [...] The U.S. Digital Corps is a collaboration between GSA, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It's the "first and only government-wide, technology-specific recruitment program for early-career Americans," says the GSA in a press release.
Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios. The program will recruit from "leading undergraduate programs," as well as from "alternative training pathways" such as apprenticeships, bootcamps, and certificate programs. [...] The U.S. Digital Corps is a collaboration between GSA, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It's the "first and only government-wide, technology-specific recruitment program for early-career Americans," says the GSA in a press release.
Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:2, Insightful)
None. On paper.
In practice it will be necessary to outsource the actual work to whichever h1b house has the slickest bid to answer the rfp.
Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:2)
Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:4, Funny)
Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios.
Leave it to the Biden admin to institute hiring requirements of: must be bright, under 30 years old, preferrably female, with nice smelling hair.
Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it's full of diversity hires, it will be next to useless.
It's a government gig.
Works as designed.
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BS, most government workers are competent. Although some do have a major problem, they have to deal with the public. The public are the ones taking ivermectin, believe hydroxychloroquine is a cure for Covid because they saw some shyster on TV promote it, agree that Jewish laser beams from space are changing votes, etc.
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I did a facepalm yesterday over the story of a man winning a judgment to force the hospital to administer ivermectin. Does that mean I can force a hospital to prescribe me laudanum?
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I did a facepalm yesterday over the story of a man winning a judgment to force the hospital to administer ivermectin.
I did a facepalm yesterday over the story of a woman losing custody of her child because the judge didn't like the fact that she was unvaccinated due to having experienced adverse reactions to prior jabs.
And for the record, Ivermectin has been proven to work, just take a look at the impressive results India had with it. It is pretty safe too, having been around for a long time, it's been very well tested. We would be a lot better off if the biotech companies would stop putting profits before people's lives
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Ivermectin has a pretty good record of eliminating horse worms. I'm not dumb enough to take anything out of India as proof of anything. The Pfizer shot works better anyway, and it was actually *designed* to deal with corona viruses in humans. Ivermectin was not.
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Let me ask you a simple yes or no question: Is Ivermectin Approved by the FDA for any human use?
IF yes, then your post is simply making mockery for mockery's sake, and isn't serious rebuke
IF no, then your post is a lie or you're stupid.
Pfizer shot doesn't work at all like people think it does. It offers NO immunity, and only offers the ability to hide an infection behind false sense of security "I've been immunized" (no you haven't that's not how mRNA works).
There is gaining evidence that the shot itself is
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There's that race card at the end of your post.
Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:1)
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If it's full of diversity hires, it will be next to useless.
Then your company is doing it wrong. Can't blame the government for your company being stupid. They did hire a troll like you, after all.
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Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:2)
It's 30 jobs - what the hell are we talking about this for?
That's 1/10,000,000 of the US population.
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That is precisely what will happen. Wipro, Cognizant, Tata, etc. will do all that dirty work under the covers and you'll see a bunch of "managed services" contracts pop up that these firms will use to bundle those folks for consumption by the feds.
It will be extremely difficult for the government to organically source young tech talent because the pay sucks and the bureaucracy is suffocating.
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Re: Wonder how many H1B visas (Score:3)
Biden is funding 30 jobs - are you serious? Do you think those thirty jobs make a difference at all?
Redundant? (Score:5, Informative)
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Maybe people graduate from the corps and go into the service?
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The U.S. federal government already has the U.S. Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/), which was started in 2014 to help fix problems associated with the launch of healthcare.gov, and they've been re-engineering federal websites and services ever since. This new U.S. Digital Corps (https://digitalcorps.gsa.gov/about/) sure sounds and looks like a duplicate agency. Does anyone know how they'll be different?
This will be based out of the Department of Redundancies Department. /s
No, just a memory lapse (Score:2)
The U.S. federal government already has the U.S. Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/), which was started in 2014 ...
Biden forgot he already created such a service.
Not Redundant (Score:5, Informative)
From the link in the summary:
The program may be the Biden version of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which President Obama started during his second term. The USDS invited tech workers from companies like Google and Facebook to come to Washington and spend some time helping the government apply new technology to its processes.
The [US Digital Corps] program will begin by recruiting 30 people with skill sets in software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity, and other critical technology fields this fall. The program will recruit from “leading undergraduate programs,” as well as from “alternative training pathways” such as apprenticeships, bootcamps, and certificate programs.
The USDS is made up of established tech workers acting as consultants to help the government get an idea of best practices from the tech industry. The US Digital Corps is a recruitment program for a small number of entry-level tech workers, probably to get a sense of what would help interest more tech workers to consider a civil service career.
There are pros and cons to working for the federal government. (job stability vs higher pay in the private sector, decent retirement programs, health benefits, paid federal holidays, Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), etc). The private sector has less red tape and regulations, flexible pay, stock options, job mobility, etc.
Not everybody wants to work for the federal government and these 30 US Digital Corps employees might be able to give some incite to what would make recruitment better.
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Re: Not Redundant (Score:2)
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Not everybody wants to work for the federal government and these 30 US Digital Corps employees might be able to give some incite to what would make recruitment better.
Yeah, they'll have insight alright. They'll learn what it means to be naive. They'll learn that nobody can change gov't culture-- it's too big and changes course very, very slowly. Either conform or become extremely jaded. And that's it. It's not a place for young, mentally flexible folks who value productivity and can think outside the box. It's a place where lazy people go to die.
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Re: Redundant? (Score:2)
This is 30 people spread across 5 agencies - wow, this will turn Washington on its ear!
It'll choke on its own red tape (Score:3, Informative)
in a matter of months.
I read in WSJ this morning that private actors operating out of rented cinfetence rooms in DC were arranging flights out of Kabul and escorts to the airport. The US military, which had men and equipment on site, was not.
Government has gotten bogged down. The private sector hasn't. Any attempt to get dynamic and motivated people into government without fixing the structural impediments to that dynamism the are so enmeshed in government as to be indistinguishable from it (excessive process, mandatory "competitive" bidding among pre-screened connected businesses, rigid heirarchy in the civil service) will frustrate and chase away the talent back to the private sector.
Re:It'll choke on its own red tape (Score:5, Informative)
I read in WSJ this morning that private actors operating out of rented cinfetence rooms in DC were arranging flights out of Kabul and escorts to the airport. The US military, which had men and equipment on site, was not.
It's not that the government can't escort people to the airport. The military is really good at that kind of thing. It's that Biden told them not to escort people to the airport.
Re:It'll choke on its own red tape (Score:5, Insightful)
In a sense both of you are correct. The private entities can do more not because the government is physically unable to, but rather because it doesn't have its hands tied like the government. Whether it's renting conference rooms in DC, hiring temporary workers as actors, or respecting unofficial agreements with the Taliban to not send soldiers outside the airport, the government must work within stricter boundaries. That does make the government less effective at certain things, but we have decided as a nation that those boundaries are very important in preventing the government from having too much power.
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The US government evacuated 123,000 people in about a week. How many people did the "private sector" evacuate in that same period?
Re: It'll choke on its own red tape (Score:4)
Of those 120k people, something like 80k were Afghan nationals who had been waiting on their visa applications for nearly a decade.
And guess what...legally they're still waiting, except they're waiting on a military base in middle of nowhere Montana.
There's no way to spin this except as yet another example of government choking on its own process.
Now...I'm a fan of rigor and process and government limited to a circumscribed set of responsibilities past which it dare not set foot. But I'm not at all a fan of rigor as an excuse for inaction in an emergency*, process as a substitute for competence**, and a wholesale dereliction of those circumscribed responsibilities.
*Like the fda and cms telling labs to stop testing for covid in Feb 2020 and as recently as last spring telling New Trier high school that their covid testing protocols didn't dot the appropriate i's and cross the appropriate t's, so cease and desist!
**"We're not sure the f-35 needed a second engine, but we are damn sure that we followed all the relevant procedures and made all the necessary paper trails according to the FAR in sourcing one, so our asses are covered!"
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80k were Afghan nationals who had been waiting on their visa applications for nearly a decade.
There are parts of the Gov that are just broken, and immigration is one of them. Despite all the homeland security funding it still took ~6months for my daughter's (A US citizen) passport renwal. No matter how much I think about it I can't see how it is anything beyond an automated database check to see if they are going to deny it, and then a printer/programmer should be dumping the thing out and putting it in th
Re: It'll choke on its own red tape (Score:2)
They shoved 500 people in cargo planes, 100,000 are random Afghans, 5,000 are Americans, and about 20,000 are SIV holders.
They simply shoved bodies in planes in an effort to hide the fact that they screwed the pooch. This deal was in effect since Feb 2020, almost a year before Biden took office, why did they only start moving people out of Afghanistan AFTER the Taliban took over the country?
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The best way for better government is ⦠(Score:2)
⦠more government.
More featherbedding. This will end well.
30 People? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Re:30 People? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, would you rather they try a pilot program with 10,000 people or start small and see how it goes?
Re: 30 People? (Score:2)
I'd rather they not treat 30 internships as a revolution in government.
Big deal, 30 jobs.
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6 IT people vs 11,000 normals (Score:2)
IT is a force multiplier. Potentially, a cost reducer.
6 IT people unleashed can automate and replace 1000s of normal workers; not full replacements simply boosting productivity would result in more redundant employees. Naturally, getting rid of employees is going to take an extreme effort but that ball is not in the court of the IT people.
The impact upon other employees is probably no greater other than for upper management.
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6 IT people unleashed can automate and replace 1000s of normal workers;
Thousands of normal workers can sabotage the automation created by six IT people faster than they can build it. And oh boy are US government workers good at sabotaging automation.
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Pay (Score:2)
I wonder what the pay scale will be for these government jobs? Government jobs tend to pay terrible wages to tech workers, well under what can be found in private industry. I don't think Biden's scheme is going to work unless they're paid a decent wage commensurate with the skills they bring to the job.
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Perhaps the US tipping system could be applied to minimum wage tech workers as well.
Pensions pension pensions (Score:2)
The reality is that the gold standard pensions and benefits that government service often offers, based on salary and years of service and inflation protected, means that the 'real' salary is far higher than the stated one. It's also less likely be precarious - government staff are seldom laid off - and you probably won't be pressured to work over your contracted hours. As long as you trust your government to keep paying your pension etc, it's not necessarily a bad choice.
Re: Pensions pension pensions (Score:2)
I agree 100%. For your average worker the benefits beat anything the private sector offers, as long as you're coming in near the top -- GS-12 or higher. However, for the top talent it is a different story.
The big problem is working for the government, especially in IT, can be soul crushing. Endless meetings and bureaucracy means it takes forever to get anything done, and it never stays done. I spent 10 years doing this, mostly as a manager in IT Security (2210), and the biggest reason I left was a combinati
My experience was far better (Score:2)
Working for a significant public sector organisation, I was blessed with attitudes that enabled us to get the job done reasonably well. The senior management was poor, but my immediate supervisors were fine and I had a generally good time. I'm sad your experience was so dire. But yes, I definitely traded lower pay for less stress and better pension and conditions; being now in receipt of the defined benefit inflation proofed pension, I am certain I made the right choice!
Freedom to express talents (Score:2)
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Average annual income in DC is $69k, so you can see how high you have to get before you are making the local average.
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I would modify what you said to add: Government jobs pay a lot less than the private sector in *all* areas, not just in IT. This is balanced out by the often really, really good health and retirement benefits.
Government jobs can be tasty (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why they're prized and the Federal workforce clings on until vesting retirement and often beyond. They're often a well-kept secret since the public have NFI how government really works. As the workforce ages out it opens potentially desirable careers.
Because the public only notice failures (that's how the 100 IQ crowd are wired and will never change) they're incapable of understanding the value of government and reflexively hate what they can never care enough to learn about. This can be useful from a career POV because fewer potential competitors will consider working for Uncle Sugar.
Re:Government jobs can be tasty (Score:4, Insightful)
And when the current Fed. workforce retires, the American people will wonder what happened to their SS and Medicare. For a taste of how that works, look at the IRS. Attempting to get any information from them is like pulling teeth. It isn't because they don't want to give it, it is that they are understaffed and Congress has been stiffing them on their budget for years, so their equipment is old. Now extend that to SS and Medicare.
Your food supply is tainted? Gee, if only we could hire enough FDA inspectors to replace the ones who retired. The stream running by your house got polluted. If only we could hire enough EPA personnel to crack down on that nice company a few miles away that did the deed. Your car's autopilot decided you would like to launched at eye-watering speeds at that tree? Where's the NTSB to test those devices? That drug you took because some nutjob on talk radio said it was good for you, and the FCC and the FDA didn't have the personnel to put a stop to it and its revenue streams.
Hey I know some willing recruits! (Score:1)
I'll bet if you go back for them, there are a few hundred Americans [thehill.com] that might be interested in joining the U.S. government instead of hanging from a Huey [twitter.com]!
All you gotta do is go back for them and this time let them in the airport [twitter.com].
Re: Hey I know some willing recruits! (Score:3)
But I want to know is who the hell these people are and why were they there to begin with? This is an embassy staff. Who are they?
It isn't like this snuck up on them. We've had a deadline of pulling out of Afghanistan for months. Hell the deal was announced by the Trump administration, last year. Who are these American citizens that were there to the very last day and what were they doing?
Re: Hey I know some willing recruits! (Score:2)
Crappy voice recognition and me not previewing.
NOT embassy staff.
So are they gonna be like the Space Force? (Score:2)
Will they ask for silly pretend-soldier uniforms, billions of dollars and a permanent base in Colorado?
Bring young tech talent to government? (Score:2)
Some things I don't get (Score:2)
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In other words, it doesn't.
Executive Ignorance (Score:1)
"Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women..."
So, the hiring priority will be women of color lacking any real experience? Why, because that worked out so well for the American Vice Presidency?
I swear, it's like we can't stop flying the Fuck It flag, and every ship is called the Titanic.
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But be fair. Harris' prob
Yep (Score:1)
And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios.
"This will be a bit tricky, of course, given that there is actually no such fixed thing as a man or a woman. But we will create a task force to sort out such trivial issues. "
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P1 - "There must be gender equality"
P2 - "Gender is imaginary"
Conclusion? Paralysis. Every possible arrangement of the constituent terms of those premises results in a divide by zero error. Either gender equality has already been achieved because gender is undefined or it can never be achieved because gender is undefined. Either way you have an irreconcilable conflict betwe
Young, talented techies *love* bureaucracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who has worked for the government can tell tales of bureaucracy and office politics. Maybe there are a few exceptions, somewhere, due to exceptional managers, but in general: being a civil servant is unlikely to be attractive to the kind of talent they claim to be looking for. Pournelle's Iron Law has long since taken over essentially all government offices. To fix this, take the fourth priority "streamlining government services" and actually implement it: fire 90% of the current bureaucrats and start over.
Housecleaning personnel is something that happens regularly in private industry, for one reason or another. The cases where is does not happen, you get a moribund company that loses market share to the competition. The problem with government bureaucracy is that housecleaning never happens. Useless personnel are retained and given make-work - after all, retaining them still raises the headcount for their managers, and inability to get the work done is just a reason to ask for a budget increase.
Militarize ALL the things! (Score:1)
That is how this makes America sound again. ^^
Especially "wonderful" if it is to turn humans into good little worker robots again. ;)
(At least until they are replaced by their creations, and go on to do even more bullshit jobs [wikipedia.org] aka the capitalist edition of job creation schemes in an economy where most wealth is already free and created by machines, yet people who don't work "hard" are still shamed like it's the freaking 1800s, by those who already work smart by using robots, fleshy and metallic.
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Despite the idea sounding a bit stupid, you're reaching if you think it "militarizes" anything. May as well complain about the Peace Corps while you're at it.
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I've met people who were thoroughly indoctrinated while being part of the peace corps and had no clue on anything useful or awareness of the kind of stuff wikileaks revealed.
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Were they . . . militarized?
Why work for someone (Score:2)
I am pretty the later is screwing it up a lot for them.
Young, Impressionable, Clueless.. (Score:2)
Better hiring young people you can institutionalize into thinking their activity is 'good' than an older, wiser person who can understand that what they are doing is bad.
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This...so much this. Hire people who don't know what they're doing so you can teach them the wrong way and ensure that, in the unlikely event you get someone who does know what they're doing, they're so junior that they have absolutely no authority to promote change whatsoever.
No Experience (Score:3)
So they're recruiting paper security professionals with no actual experience.
The one thing they actually need - accountability - is the one thing government agencies will never adopt. I'm not talking about this, "OMG WE HAD A BREACH FIRE IT LOLZ" attitude that has been cropping up, I'm talking about developing and capturing metrics, requiring people to perform, not allowing people to develop personal fiefdoms that work against the objective, hiring people with experience running a good IT shop rather than just a shop with a good bottom line, etc.
Reasonable levels of cybersecurity are not some mysterious fantasy land that no one actually knows the location of. I've been at security conferences where security people talk about how compliance is just the minimum and we need to go beyond compliance. OK...but you need to achieve compliance first before you go down that road. There are well documented standards and best practices to get you to a baseline, after which you can start looking at going further. Amazingly, the US government publishes an absolutely fantastic set of those standards...now if we could just get agencies to implement them...
Diversity...not (Score:2, Interesting)
The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios.
Specifically discriminating against white males is not diversity. It's sexist and racist.
It's too bad (Score:1)
It's too bad the private sector spend the last 3 decades offshoring as much as they could, as well as automating and hiring "consultants" and H1b's. I mean, why the hell would anyone go into IT for a living if that's what the scene is? And so where does management think that talent is going to come from?
U.S.A. Conscription (Score:1)
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Meanwhile... (Score:2)
30 people? (Score:2)
What the hell, why are we talking about 30 jobs?
I'm a little more curious about the 87,000 IRS auditors the Administration wants to hire...
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) (Score:1)
Judging by the icon associated with this article, they are going to have a heck of a time hiring young talent if they are looking for expertise in equipment made by a company that went out of business in 1998.
Ronald Reagan (Score:2)
"The best minds are not in government. If they were, business would hire them" --Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
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How are they going to unite when they can't even spell it properly?
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"one thing for sure he is not Trump" Yup, he's not attempted to feed us any fake cures for Covid yet.
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It’s refreshing to see a president working instead of shit posting on Twitter all day.
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https://www.state.gov/wp-conte... [state.gov]
Who was president on February 29th 2020? It wasn't Biden...