From Fast Company:
Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech.
The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ...
“The reason I [Lavingia] did it is, I think, the impact I can have,” he explains. Lavingia says that in the private sector, technical employees can have between six and seven figures of financial impact over their lifetime. If they’re a successful startup founder like he is, maybe that number is larger. “But in the government, I really believe that I can have billions of dollars of positive impact just by being technically minded.” ...
Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.
“In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.”
Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might.
“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.” ...
6 comments:
You mean an extremely competitive merit-based hiring process and decades of being told to do more with less and less funding hasn’t resulted in a lazy, incompetent, inefficient and underworked workforce?
I’m not actually surprised, of course, because I’m not even half as ignorant or stupid as Elon “fully ret***ed” Musk or his even dumber friend Donald Trump.
Oh you mean like SSA who has been operating with ductape and the goodwill of their employees? We were lean before it was cool and now the patient is severely malnourished. These DOGE people don’t understand us.
Unless you have worked at the agency nobody understands. SSA will touch every single citizen at least twice in their life. Enumeration and death. They will process those every single day of the work calendar. No company pays 1 in 5 Americans every month, none. And does so with an error rate as low as the agency. Those are just the simplest most basic things SSA does. All with a staff that is minimal, smaller in fact than most companies that so called leaders come from. I am proud of the work I did at SSA, but I am happy to not be there. I use the knowledge gained there to aid people in getting through the problems with agency.
"I was hoping for more easy wins.” about sums up DOGE approach.
Years of watching Fox and OAN plus low IQ, zero critical thinking skills and a heaping pile of racism and sexism pretty well sums up how we got DOGE and the Trump administration.
There's interesting layers here. You have intentional bad actors who want to kill Social Security for profit or ideological reasons. They co-opt politicians who attack SSA with a strategy of death by a thousand administrative funding cuts, and false claims of pervasive fraud and waste to undermine the public's strongly favorable opinion of the program. Now we have the Trump administration's more aggressive attacks on SSA's infrastructure through major staff cuts, with no good proven systems in place to replace the lost expertise and work capacity. Idealistic foot soldiers are hired, like the DOGE employee featured in the article, who still does not fully realize that her true role is to aid in the crippling or destruction of the program that she was told she was hired to improve. What will she think when she learns that she was duped? You can see her working towards, but not yet reaching that realization in the article.
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