I assume it takes working for the government to fully understand. Risk averse people pile into cushy government jobs. After they shoehorn themselves into that career, they become even more risk averse. Then every few years they see people take risks and get fired for it. The aggregate effect of this is that not only might they be dismissive towards those whom they perceive as risk-takers, they might be actively hostile towards them. This is for two reasons. One is that the "risks" might pay off in a visible way (more on that later), making the other bureaucrats who are vying for a promotion look bad. The other is that they fear the risk will affect them in some way, and they want no part of it. They imagine either more work on their plate (God forbid) or adverse consequences because of this "naive troublemaker who just doesn't get it." To make it even worse, it’s way easier to just promote the people you like in government. Guess who risk averse people will tend to promote? Guess what type of work is made more visible to senior management? So hard work is not rewarded as well as at corporations, unless it’s a very narrow kind of hard work that adheres to the most literal interpretation of one’s job responsibilities. Those are my 2 cents, I could be way off about the author’s intent there.
English is my second language and sometimes it feels like a lot of people go out of their way to make their texts long and convoluted because it's cool. Same in my native language but it's another barrier to get through when it's your second or third language.
Distilling an intertwined set of thoughts down into the single point you are trying to make and then expressing that concisely and clearly is difficult and takes effort. When text is convoluted it's usually because the author didn't know how to do anything different or didn't try because they didn't realise it was necessary.
For those of us for whom English is a native language the problem is less, and I enjoyed the colour provided by the FBI story. You're right though that it muddied the waters of what was actually a coherent and interesting point being made. It is a useful lesson to me that clarity is even more important for non-native speakers.
You have, however, correctly summarized some aspects of my experiences working for the government, more succinctly and dispassionately than I could have. Thank you.
Government on the other hand is always political as their output isn't valued in market terms but in political points.
So yeah - from my experience - big corps (especially those working with government) can be political, bureaucratic, etc. But it's standard operating procedure in government work.
In more monopolistic areas (insurance, banking), my experience has been closer to government. In more cutthroat areas (tech, retail), it's been on the other end of spectrum.
This is why we should focus on increasing economy decentralisation if we want less bureaucracy and less waste of resources.
The main problem is that, once you grow to a certain level, you're big enough too lobby the government into maintaining your market position and be bailed out by the government if you fail.
She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
She sees herself as someone who enjoys the trappings of a job well done and doesn't mind her slow progress of ladder-climbing because she's brave and takes risks that her superiors won't reward with promotions.
I liked and identified with the writing in the second half, and it sounds like she had a good scenario to act as a substrate for her thoughts, but I don't think she did a good job merging the two.
Like you said, they feel like two distinct pieces which got bolted together. I found myself with the scroll bar near the bottom and wondered how she was going to tie back in to the original story, and was disappointed to see that she never did.
I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way.
What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
Ah. That makes sense.
That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat? You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
Yes exactly. Ultimately security is deeply involved with threat modeling. It is likely that the author's boss did not prioritize her pet security issues because they were a low risk in the threat model.
>How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat?
Domain expertise. Frankly I am somewhat surprised that people with what is apparent to be a television soap opera level of understanding of american dissident activity make public posts on the topic with the confidence they do on here. Not you, of course, but others.
Unfortunately, the most believable interpretation of this story is very boring office politics: Our author, having failed to make a case to her boss, drummed up some internet post in an attempt to get her way. We've all known people like this... they have varying amounts of self-awareness. It is characteristic of such actors to manufacture exactly the sort of attack they imagine to be the most relevant. This is likely to be such a case. What gives her away is that this is some fantastical story that makes sense only in pop culture: if there is even one WS cyber attack on an american federal platform for every 10,000 chinese attacks I will eat my hat and livestream it. These are simply not people with competence in the field of cyber security.
Thinking they are “just” idiots is an entirely wrong take if you are trying to play against them.
It’s like saying that Putin is an idiot because he’s against gay rights in Russia. But if he was really stupid he would probably be dead by now.
That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read!
I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.
We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article
https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts...
I seriously doubt that it was the intent of the author to accuse Matt Cutts as someone who spun blame onto others and avoided responsibility.
USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them.
I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).
I'm not sure if it's a good essay, but what I loved was the way she described connecting people as "just" doing her job. She didn't see it as brave. I'm not sure what degree I would need to take, or what job title I would have to have, to see "making connections" as my job.
People are cut out for different things. You have "brave" teachers, and you have "brave" managers. We all recognize them, but don't appreciate them as people enough, even when these breeds are rare gems.
Even for someone shy, with experience and hard work, one might end up becoming a death-defying samurai.
What the text doesn't recognize is that many people just don't feel all that much or have that much empathy. So there's less of a spur to actually do the work to become a natural leader or go into enough depth.
I don't think that's the case, since Matt Cutts kinda had the same role in Google before joining USDS. Or maybe he's gotten used to unexceptional employees there.
When you're bad mouthing your former boss, you usually don't state their name. Even better if you can leave the circumstances ambiguous enough that few people can guess.
If you do name them, that's scorched earth. I'd expect a lot of clear anger directed towards Matt if he was the idiot.
So I read it as her having a good working relationship with him, he was just impressed how much certain scenarios always involved her.
- Some/many workers care more about job stability, as opposed to making a difference at work
- Such workers are suffering from "real psychological damage"
- They are constantly hounded by imposter syndrome, because they aren't respected by anyone else, and they know it
- They often end up as senior bureaucrats/leaders, because of their risk aversion, and because they are trying to overcompensate for their low self-esteem and psychological damage
- They also "end up in startups more often than you might expect" (which seems ironic since startups are far more risky than being at a BigCorp)
At the risk of putting myself out there, I suspect the above conclusions are quite a reach.
I wondered where the conservatism came from given that at a business level the status quo was failure. This seems like a plausible explanation.
> ...he closes the door and takes out his badge. “I have to show you this first.”
This job is not near the level of encountering FBI interviews as an actually critical part of work. "How about we circle back when I have legal counsel present" is the least perilous interaction at this point.
> “Oh wait, I forgot something. Could you raise your right hand for a minute?” Confused. I did so. “Everything you told me today is true to the best of your knowledge?”
I mean, the badge part was enough. The 18 U.S.C. § 1001 anvil has already been suspended over your head for 6 years. This is simply cruel.
Unless you are sitting on some real family wealth this idea that you can just "lawyer up" against the friggin' FBI is just laughable. Might as well advise people to "always call the president and get him on side".
"Always"! Like it's checking tire pressure before a long drive or something. "Oh yeah I always bring a couple of $1000/hr lawyers with me to important meetings. Better safe than sorry. What, you don't?"
Big bosses were paralyzed by the threat of becoming responsible for a coming failure, and were unable to think straight. They didn't even try to think about avoiding failure. They though about keeping themselves away from risk of becoming responsible of failure. Completely incompetent people.
The story with FBI shows that she did try to solve the problem, and that she took the risk of million years in a jail.
> this just seems distasteful, on top of the confusing writing
I agree, it is confusing. It is not enough to read the article, one needs to stop after reading and think. It took to me five minutes to understand. The title is the most confusing thing: it meant to be a generalized question from an average person, not a question the author asks about her boss, but it is not obvious.
(The paragraph ending, "I trusted the FBI to be good at their jobs." The next paragraph jumps right to generalizations, and I didn't clearly understand from her writing what problem did she just cause without knowing it?)
Without that spelled out, I have a hard time really being on board with the rest of the essay. Actually, it's almost like they're 2 different essays broken at that point above.
Anyone else experience the same issue in reading it?