academia_hack (u/academia_hack)

academia_hack commented on US AI Action Plan ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget

Everyone remotely competent in AI in the federal government that I know has quit in disgust over the past 6 months. I know zero talented AI people who are looking to take a cut in pay, benefits, and career stability to sign up for a new job working for this administration.

As a result, there's zero chance even the sensible parts of this strategy won't just end up coopted into multi-billion dollar Palantir contracts to deliver outdated llama models behind some clunky UI with the word "ontology" plastered on every button.

academia_hack commented on On loyalty to your employer (2018) medium.com/hackernoon/on-... · Posted by u/Peroni

rckt · 4 months ago

I got it pretty early in my career that loyalty for a company is concept to make you work harder without asking anything in return. And the moment the company shifts focus and you are out of it, then suddenly you understand that this loyalty wasn't kind of a credits account which you've been saving all this time. It's simply nothing. You are on your own and can fuck off.

So there's simply no place for loyalty in employer-employee relationships. One side pays money or whatever, the other is delivering the job being done. That's all.

academia_hack · 4 months ago

At least to me, loyalty _is_ the benefit. I can't conscience working for someone I hate or someone who I don't feel like I want to help succeed. I've definitely quit jobs before just because the senior leader in my reporting chain was replaced with some smarmy windbag I didn't believe in.

That's not to say it's _much_ of a benefit, but if the only thing a job gives me is a market-rational amount of dollars and health benefits in exchange for life-hours, the invisible hand ensures I can find that virtually anywhere.

academia_hack commented on A Letter to the American People 18f.org/... · Posted by u/erentz

academia_hack · 6 months ago

Do you think there is a role for the federal government to employ engineers for any purpose? 18F was a general purpose engineering group that built software for many agencies instead of having those agencies pay vast amounts of money to Deloitte/Accenture/Booz Allen etc for a worse quality product.

academia_hack commented on NYC wants you to stop taking traffic cam selfies, but here's how to do it anyway pcmag.com/articles/nyc-wa... · Posted by u/gnabgib

cinjon · 9 months ago

What are the companies you know of here?

academia_hack · 9 months ago

Check out: https://trafficcamarchive.com/ for an example.

academia_hack commented on NYC wants you to stop taking traffic cam selfies, but here's how to do it anyway pcmag.com/articles/nyc-wa... · Posted by u/gnabgib

autoexec · 9 months ago

What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it? I'm sure there are corporations and data brokers quietly collecting info on us using every scrap of publicly avilable data including traffic cams, but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?

If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.

academia_hack · 9 months ago

The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.

academia_hack commented on CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months theregister.com/2024/07/1... · Posted by u/rntn

niij · a year ago

I'm following you on pay. But to act like "unlimited" pto or vacation time is a good benefit is a joke. Unlimited, to me, is 365 days off per year.

academia_hack · a year ago

True that! I use probably 15 days of "unlimited" leave and still manage to feel guilty about it.

The frustrating thing for people in fed jobs is that if you hit your 13 days that's it (during your first 3 years in government). It can be impossible to get PTO until you build up hours again. You have to either quit, negotiate LWOP (often seen as a performance adverse metric on your record), or work. So if you land a sweet concert ticket, see a flight deal, have a friend get married, etc. you better hope you've banked up the leave for it. Since you gain hours every 2 weeks (4, 6 or 8 depending on service) you also start out in government with virtually no leave and can't actually take a 2 week trip until you've been there almost a full year.

academia_hack commented on CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months theregister.com/2024/07/1... · Posted by u/rntn

adolph · a year ago

> If an agency just could hire a few strong web developers directly and then assign them to whatever task is needed during a particular sprint,

Isn’t that what usds [0] is for? I think there’s always an alignment challenge for service needs that are outside an organization’s primary knowledge domain. Without knowledge of what the “strong web devs” can and can’t do then the results are often not great [1].

0. https://usds.gov/

1. https://pmac-agpc.ca/project-management-tree-swing-story

academia_hack · a year ago

USDS is great! I know people who have made a huge impact there and if I personally were to go into government from tech it's where I'd look. They are situated at the White House which allows them to be hired at a higher level than normal federal jobs (up to GS15, though still lower than comparable private sector work) and then they get sent out to various agencies by the White House to try and fix things. In practice though, USDS is a tiny tiny drop in the bucket compared to what federal agencies actually need. Maybe if every agency had a digital service of their own the model could work.

The federal government is an enterprise with 4 million employees (more than half in DoD as military or civilian). So the handful of people at USDS are basically only sufficient to swoop to fix the most dire of dumpster fires.

academia_hack commented on CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months theregister.com/2024/07/1... · Posted by u/rntn

csa · a year ago

While I agree with some of your points regarding salary, this is all just wrong:

> They have expensive health benefits

Hmm… maybe more expensive when compared to private tech industry jobs, but cheap compared to owning your own business.

> 13 days of PTO a year

Starts at 13 days for first 2 years, then is 20 days from 3-15, then 26 days from 15 on.

Plus medical leave.

Plus it’s usually easy to get people to donate leave in the event of a medical emergency.

> put a huge chunk of their paycheck (almost 5%) into a mandatory pension plan

Not mandatory at all. The government puts in 1% for folks automatically. They match up to 5% total.

> that consistently underperforms the market

It literally is the market. They have funds for S&P 500 and Dow total market, plus a few others, all at super low fees.

None of these funds are speculative other than the total market that the fund represents.

academia_hack · a year ago

In terms of benefits, here's an anecdotal comparison with a senior engineer (5-10 years experience) at a mid-level start up I worked at.

* Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup Pay: $150 base + $25 k bonus + equity

* Federal Health Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $2,500/year * Startup Insurance (United mid-tier plan, no family): $0/year

* Federal Leave: 20 days (after 4 years in federal government) * Startup Leave: Unlimited

* Federal Sick Leave: 13 days * Startup Sick Leave: Unlimited

The pension I'm talking about actually isn't the TSP (which is fine, but slightly more expensive than comparable Vanguard funds).

All federal employees must contribute 4.4% of their salary to the FERS now which is taken out of their base pay just like their health/dental/fegli. It used to be 0.8% but congress gutted it a few years ago.

FERS takes decades before it's more than pocket change and the same money invested in the market would yield higher expected returns without requiring you to work 20 years in gov to benefit from it.

academia_hack commented on CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months theregister.com/2024/07/1... · Posted by u/rntn

shrimp_emoji · a year ago

"Improve" government by scaling it back down to where it was when pennies from tarrifs could pay for it instead of 25% Federal income tax that already gives you mediocre results.

academia_hack · a year ago

Counterintuitively, scaling government down goes hand in hand with increasing the attractiveness of the civil service.

Right now if a government agency wants to do something like make a webform where you can apply for a passport, they have zero web developers on staff who can do it. Instead they must pay a team of non-technical officials and lawyers to make and adjudicate an RFP. Then pay a contracting firm to put a developer behind a government computer to do the actual work. Putting this contractor in a seat can easily cost the taxpayer $500k a year despite the contractor only receiving $130k of that money. The rest goes to the HR department, IT Department, C-Suite, lawyers, lobbyists, and shareholders at the contracting firm. The government has their own HR/Lawyers/IT too, but the contractor can't use those so the tax payer ends up double-paying overhead and missing out on economies of scale on every contract.

This is one of the many reasons government websites are always $50 million dollar boondoggles that an intern could have done better. The government ends up spending millions of dollars feeding leeching middle-men before they can hand that money to a mediocre dev deep in the bowels of Accenture's cheapest subcontractor.

If an agency just could hire a few strong web developers directly and then assign them to whatever task is needed during a particular sprint, we'd see a massive reduction in cost and increase in the quality of engineers working on our country's most important work. But most agencies are literally not allowed to spend more than $120k on an in-house engineer, while no one bats an eye on them spending 5 times that on an Accenture contract placement.