18F is a Financial Disaster

Comrades! This seems like a good use of taxpayer dollars :-&#x2F;<p>FTA:<p><i>The report said 18F spent about 20 hours or $4,148 on two customized &quot;bots&quot; for Slack, an online messaging application. One of the automated programs would monitor users&#x27; messages for the words &quot;guys,&quot; &quot;guyz&quot; and &quot;dudes,&quot; which could have been perceived as being not inclusive for women. It prompted users to consider replacing those words with 21 options that included buds, compatriots, fellow humans, posse, team, mateys, persons of any kind, organic carbon-based life-forms living on the third planet from the sun, comrades and cats.</i>

&quot;18F is a Financial Disaster&quot; is not the title of the article and is explicit editorialising.<p>On a lighter note, seems like a fun place to work! And the kind of attitudes on display here seem to be the kind you&#x27;d expect from a group of people who have the VC-funded mindset, but the cost-pressures of the US&#x27;s government budget.

Question for anybody with 18F here... do many of your management personnel have experience with consulting (particularly on government projects) or are your hires primarily from product backgrounds?<p>I&#x27;m of the mind that this is about what I&#x27;d expect from people who are generally more concerned with less-tangibles like culture and product, but I don&#x27;t really know if that&#x27;s the general background of the personnel hired.<p>My suspicion is that if you looked at most agencies you&#x27;d see this same kind of apparent frivolity but in a way that makes it less easy to track. It also bears repeating that while some of the stories presented in the article are excessive, 18f has always seemed to me to be more aimed at being a force multiplier for other agencies rather than just boots on the ground. When I worked in government non-profit (of the IRS designation, that is!) we spent quite a bit of &quot;non billable&quot; time doing exactly that instead of providing services directly. Once I started consulting in the private sector though, the billable hour became much more important.

&gt; &quot;At a time when federal departments were cutting budgets, it was funded under a model that envisioned it would earn back more money than it cost to run&quot;<p>I would have interpreted this as meaning &quot;would make net savings by being cheaper than projects outsourced by federal departments&quot;, not &quot;would make a net financial gain&quot;. The latter seems highly unrealistic. I assume they&#x27;re producing value for the government for the $32 million &quot;loss&quot; quoted.

I&#x27;m not sure 18F was supposed to make money. It&#x27;s govenment funded and produces things like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.usa.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.usa.gov&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;collegescorecard.ed.gov&#x2F;</a>

This is what happens when people given little or no incentive to actively create something that another would buy. When someone is trying to make ends meet AND create a product they prioritize necessities and hammer out something usable, when given free reign most just become a drain (some create amazing things given this chance though). Optimally you could hire someone who has learned this lesson.