Here are the ages of the senior scientists: Oppenheimer: 38 Teller: 34 Lawrence: 41 Rabi: 44 Szilard: 44 Ulam: 33 Bethe: 36 Fuchs: 31 von Neumann: 39
So the younger people would have had plenty of supervision.
> …we know that unilaterally closing USAID is illegal.
[0]: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/lea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/not-confident-trump-...
Not confident Trump will prevail: Scholar on his attempts to take Congress' power of the purse Professor Deborah Pearlstein joins Morning Joe to discuss her column for the NYT outlining some of Trump’s actions implemented in his first few days in office and why she says Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power, but the difference is not just the enormity of his claims, it's that the administration mostly doesn't try to craft legal justifications for its actions.
https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/04/congress-president-tr...
How Congress — and not the president — controls how taxpayer money is spent
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-e...
‘It’s an Illegal Executive Order. And It’s Stealing.’
But they're not spending; they're kind of doing the opposite of spending. And reducing waste is a previously known (for a long time) goal of theirs.
You changed your wording to fit your argument. "To spend" became "to control spending", implicitly acknowledging that the two phrases have different meanings.
Second, as I’m sure you know, and are being deliberately obtuse about, the separation of powers doctrine, which has been upheld by SCOTUS; one example [0] is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer. USAID is codified by law, regardless of its genesis, and as such, only Congress is able to revoke the law.
[0]: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
That of course means drawing upon experience, work and ongoing contributions of people who are around for long. Obviously they would be old.
Getting old is a part of life no? Unless of course some one is planning on dying early.
Oppenheimer was smart, no doubt, but did he have the life experience to warrant 'senior'-level decision making? I feel like the history books show it's emphatically indecisive.
You're questioning whether the person chosen to be the director of weapons development could be called "senior" or not? What? Or are you hindsight-second-guessing the decision to make him director? It's wild to me that you would choose the director of one of the most important and ambitious (not to mention successful) programs in world history to make the point "senior is just a title".
But more importantly, the real issue is regardless of how old they are an unelected individual is doling out hyper-privileged access to sensitive data to folks without any kind of oversight. It's a total mess.
It's hyperbolic to the n-th degree to call these "the best of nerds" as well.
And there's that one guy whose entire work history is as a summer camp counselor.
Think what you will about who came before or after, but everyone involved here should have experience or training in how to handle and secure sensitive information.
Because I guarantee Elon will throw them first under the bus if anything happens
During the WW2 german occupation of France, there were some french people who opted to enthusiastically work to support the german side, and they certainly benefitted short term from the goodwill earned
At the end of the occupation, a lot of them were shot or hanged by the resistance
10/10 no notes
When the shit inevitably hits the fan from the massive amount of orgs they are dismantling, Musk and the DOGE will be used as a political scapegoat by Trump, that's how politics work.
Email me.
Anything to flame Elon another day innit?
His management style is best described as humiliation and abuse.
Or to put it another way, you can build a lot of pyramids when you use disposable slaves.
I don't get how anybody can write "he's not an engineer". It makes 0 sense and kind of proves my point about anything to just rant on Elon another day.
Any score over 100 means no discernable difference in intelligence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
Pack it up boys.
You have it backwards.
There is no control-z in physical systems, especially ones that rely on human constructs and tradition
The better question is why hasn't anyone done this before?
I've worked with a wide range of brilliant people of various ages in my life. Nothing I've seen about these kids makes me think they are significantly smarter than the somewhat-above-average folks I've worked with. Historically, the government has hired people like this (for example the NSA pulls in some number of mathematically inclined graduates every year; NIH has brilliant interns, etc, etc).
And none of these kids skills mean they are particularly well suited to the subtle job of reforming the establishment.
Government employees are the bottom 1%.
I've met plenty of people in the private sector who I could easily describe as "the worst kind of bureaucrats". You really don't know what you're talking about.
unaccountable group who's only mission seems to be uncovering fraud and misuse of taxpayer's money.
Fixed it for you.
The Treasury has been taken over and barricaded, but please enlighten us Garry with fables of their 10x brilliance.
They also have gone through the military chain of command...
I didn't see Musk's confirmation hearing. OMB's head needs to be Senat confirmed, Musk is giving OMB orders and took over their e-mail addresses. Where's the hearing? Where's the confirmation?
To my knowledge the Chief of Staff does not have the power to coerce other people to do things directly. Any "actual" coercion would have to go through someone like the President, right?
And my dumb thought is if DOGE is going around telling OMB and Treasury what to do (and seemingly is willing to call the US Marshalls on people who stand in their way) and the head of the OMB requires senate confirmation... well what are we doing here?
There's a bunch of nuance you can play at a micro level (for example, Musk messaging Trump to do a thing and Trump giving an OK), though in that case that's also newsworthy and important, because it properly associates who is responsible for what is going on!
Right now we have somebody who seems to be running rampant doing whatever he wants, and this lack of explicit association with the rest of the executive make it unclear who is actually calling the shots here. And if Trump isn't calling the shots... again, where's the confirmation?
The chief of staff can relay orders from the president to cabinet members and department heads, but cannot make decisions of this scope.
I don't really know how any of that is relevant, though. Musk is not Trump's chief of staff, and as far as we can tell, is not even employed by the federal government. He is not empowered to give (for example) orders to the head (confirmed or acting) of the OMB.
Plus that project in particular was more about destroying things exponentially faster, than it actually was about building things somewhat faster.
The faster building process was achieved in a relatively linear way at best, and the only thing built was a tool for destruction, no comparable efforts were made toward building things of lasting value which would need to more than compensate or the tech effort is a net loss.
Or, after destruction is induced, a recovery can not be made since the time required for building has the time it took for destruction in the denominator.
Where’s the proof of this?
Also please point to the last federal employee in IT sector who were highlighted for their "Talent and Brilliance".
> looking at this user's profile shows 0 comments on tech stuff
As opposed to yours, which is even more politically charged with clear bias and scarce technical posts? You must be an ideal HN user with "no bias" and "high reasoning" I assume...
Or, instead, we could stop tinkering around the edges as a nation and think about the structural reasons why current spending on pensions and the healthcare safety net in the US isn’t sustainable, despite providing less to citizens than other comparable countries.
Your other suggestions are good! we should raze those things to the ground as well. They are bankrupting this country, and the second order fiscal and demographic effects far outweigh their first order beneficial effects. We, as a country, need to realize the limitations of government, and our current policies place us well beyond what we should be doing. We need to harden our hearts to the demands of those who chose not to build a life for themselves and live on the public purse instead. We need Seniors to voluntarily decrease the amount of money they receive so that young people can afford to buy houses and start families. Cutting social security etc would also increase pressure to sell housing to cover the costs of being elderly, which directly benefits the housing market, lowering costs. But it will anger the voting population.
- the Social Security Administration, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $395 billion of spending. - the Department of Defense, in the first MONTH of 2025, has outlaid $250 billion of spending. - USAID's annual budget is $38 billion annually, so we could realistically estimate that, if they've outlaid $3 billion this year thus far, they've spent 0.4% of what those other two departments have.
Let's call this like it is: USAID is a bogeyman to Trump and Musk and is a threat to the administration's efforts toward becoming a "hard power" country. If they really cared about spending, they would have gone elsewhere first.
Source: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Their priority is well placed: This org sent a lot of money to shell corps, chosen political operators, and other intelligence operations that was a clear and net negative to the tax payers. It establishes bona fides that DOGE is serious and capable. It gives them experience cutting through the bureaucratic morass on a small target. It's supporters are outed as being in on the take. You are correct that they should move to bigger targets at some point, but those outlays you mentioned are far more favored in the public eye and should be approached much more cautiously and with planning. In the meantime, the intelligence operatus of the American Empire has been off its leash for some time, so cutting its funding will hamper its ability to harm the American people further.
Please have an excellent day.
As someone whose organization has benefitted from USAID grant funding, I should make it explicit that not everything is as you see or hear through Elon's Twitter feed.
It is deeply unwise to eliminate an organization entirely without exploring its net effects.
Also, that was during WW2 which would likely skew those #s (though I would actually expect to much older, as in not most-fit-military age)
> Despite this leavening of older men (Oppenheimer was thirty-eight), the group's average age was only twenty-four.
The age of modern quantum mechanics started in 1925. Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize for his 1927 work on the uncertainty principle in 1932 at the age of 31. 10 years later the Manhattan Project started.
There just weren’t that many older scientists with training in the field. Young PhDs were only a few years removed from the first discoveries that enabled nuclear physics to leap forward.
It's a shame Wired is behaving this way.
Getting named and shamed as hard as possible is the least that should happen to them
These guys are the modern equivalent of name any destructive revolutionary group looking for stuff they don't agree with.
I don't however refute that you can be a brilliant mind and active contributor at any age. Just that these guys aren't anywhere close to the same page as our greatest minds.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
Young people tend to be more ideological and ready to fight for what they care. The older you get, the more problems you have (bills, health, children, etc) the less you care imho.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/not-confident-trump-...
Not confident Trump will prevail: Scholar on his attempts to take Congress' power of the purse Professor Deborah Pearlstein joins Morning Joe to discuss her column for the NYT outlining some of Trump’s actions implemented in his first few days in office and why she says Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power, but the difference is not just the enormity of his claims, it's that the administration mostly doesn't try to craft legal justifications for its actions.
https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/04/congress-president-tr...
How Congress — and not the president — controls how taxpayer money is spent
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/trump-e...
‘It’s an Illegal Executive Order. And It’s Stealing.’
"The government can say we want to spend $1,000,000 on hammers but it doesn’t mean you have to spend $1,000,000 on one hammer."
This isn't the level of detail we are concerned with. Congress says that USAID gets $5 billion a year then the Executive branch HAS to transfer that money or else it is in direct violation of the US constitution. Your entire argument is nonsensical and irrelevant.
Yes they are
"They are literally cutting funds that were NOT explicitly approved by congress only."
This is false.
You really need to realize that Musk is a liar who lies all the time and he is lying about what DOGE is doing.
Also, a later act of Congress (The Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, 22 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.) established USAID as its own agency.[1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_...
[1] https://www.justsecurity.org/107267/can-president-dissolve-u...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of_the_purse#United_Stat...
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/04/congress-president-tr...
How Congress — and not the president — controls how taxpayer money is spent
That’s obviously arguable. Did the weapon and its usage cause more or fewer deaths and destruction than without it?
If you knew a country wanted to build a weapon to cripple your own country, and you had the necessary skills to build that weapon, would you feel come compulsion to try and build it first in order to protect your family and friends? To protect yourself?
DOGE and the Treasury Department are both part of the Executive Branch and derive powers from its head, aka the President.
This is essentially President Trump telling President Trump to hand President Trump the keys to the payment system so that President Trump can check WTF President Trump is spending money on.
Maybe you see the inherent problem with the setup where President Trump is in charge of checking up on what President Trump is spending money on.
Congress as the Legislative Branch has no authority to Execute.
It does not. In fact, limiting this benefit of the doubt has been a major goal of the conservative legal movement in recent years. If what you say was true then Biden would have had no trouble forgiving student loan debt and requiring generation shifting.
In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).
The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power.
As a veteran of startups, this puzzles me. I assume it's a perception that successful startups are the majority of startups. (They are not.)
Among numerous other laws listed in
https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/1-Complaint-7.pdf
People need to do work. And when bad things are happening, the principle is that you can not simply let bureaucratic rule protect criminals.
You're making things up.
FTFY
Not that that is sufficient for allowing legal access to all data in every case. But see the next part.
There’s no evidence that the wild claims about improper access to data are justified. Claims from people who have proven to be the opposite of truthful. For instance to shut down payments temporarily you don’t need to access data; you just need a cable snipper to cut the right wires. Reference the Twitter Sacramento data center solution implemented after the Twitter purchase. Or it can be done any number of other ways with changing passwords, etc.
Don’t believe everything you hear and read.
Interesting you say that.
All I know is that confidential payment data is apparently being handed to specific individuals, known to be partisan actors, who lost a bunch of lawsuits in court of law recently? Am I to just ignore that?
Yes there are multiple things happening at once.
Information coming out is a good thing, luckily.
As some one who just turned 40. This does make sense. Perhaps the biggest deal about aging especially in the downswing is the countdown to death keeps getting closer as you go. You do tend to care less about things around you.
Im beyond the point I would take offence on anything, but Im also beyond the point I would do something to impress somebody. There is no trying twice from here. Things either work with something/somebody or you move on to something/somebody that does/do.
I definitely was more tenacious as a young man, with projects and relationships. I'd move heavens to make something work. Now they have work or something new is sought. As an aging person I care more about less noise, bullshit and more stability. Guys like me are needed for continuity of life. Whereas younger men are needed to bring about big leap frog changes.
The world needs the young and old for both progress and sanity.
> Perhaps one reason startups work so well…
Startups as a whole produce a lot of innovation because there is this extreme Darwinian process where the vast majority fail and a few succeed but you have a huge amount of risk-taking in parallel in a very compressed time frame.
Government generally doesn’t have the luxury of failure because the consequences for people’s lives are too extreme. So by definition government is going to be slower-moving and more risk-averse. They are essentially paying to reduce the standard deviation of possible outcomes because they can’t afford the risk of the extreme negative tail.
Im guessing they will eventually discover why bureaucracy even exists. That is to move slow enough to ensure big mistakes become impossible and provide stability for newer things to happen at their own pace.
Im guessing any chaos inside bureaucracy for as little as a decade could cause a lost century to a country. The cost of stabilising, course correcting, recovering and then going on upwards could take decades.
Education, physical and mental health, cost of living, healthcare, wealth inequality. They've all gotten worse the past few decades, would you agree?
The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.
The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"
USAID literally set up fake AIDS prevention workshops to topple foreign governments https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/0...
This is a small sample of the extreme waste, fraud and abuse, while we have very serious issues here on the ground that are systematically ignored. For DECADES. Unaddressed.
Fixing this is what the majority of voters voted for and are rightfully thrilled to see these brilliant young tech nerds untangle the beurocratic leviathon. There will be, and have been, mistakes, things deleted that shouldn't have been. Anything important and that the people actually want, will be added back in. DOGE was upfront about this process.
Furthermore, why should i trust a billionaire who has spouted lies more and more times?
What about data protection? We're giving billionaires and their team access to federal workers data. Project 2025 emphatizes replacing federal workers for loyal one, why shouldn't an american feel threatened by this? https://www.muskwatch.com/p/musk-associates-given-unfettered
And why should i care about saving all these money if the middle class is gonna get screwed with higher taxes?
See: their demonizing adequately funding and modernizing the IRS
Instead of just blindly rattling off a bunch of buzzwords that you know nothing about maybe select 1 or 2 of the things from your list you actually have experience in.
Wilfully choosing to work for DOGE/ current Musk certainly isn't "the best of us".
Inexperienced people imposing disruptions due to lack of experience is why young people may succeed at startups but fail at establishing companies. Likewise, government is not a startup and you really don’t want government to fail.
My understanding is this is DOGE getting some analysis software in place so they can find out where the money goes and start their cuts, which I understand there is an executive order for. And my understanding is that the executive does have the power to do that sort of audit.
Where has my understanding gone wrong?
My understanding from online reading (... but we know how that goes ...) is that that executive order cannot be given without approval and that approval was not given. But would love to hear someone with more knowledge to chime in as all the left-ish to even moderate right media are shouting all of this is illegal and overstepping.
If Biden creates a new program by executive order and puts a non elected person in charge, republicans will cry. If Trump does the same, democrats will yell.
It’s just the polarisation of the debate that is higher than before.
DOGE is not a department authorized by Congress to exist. Elon's appointment at the head of it was not confirmed by Congress, usurping its right to 'advise and consent' to the executive. All government employees have strict rules they have to follow about conflicts of interest, which Elon's companies many government contracts would put him in violation of. Congress dictates what and how the government spends its money, and the Executive is tasked with carrying that out; Elon has placed himself in the middle of that, and has been saying he will now be the one that chooses how that money is spent. There are many laws in place on how the government is to handle personal information, and there is no indication or oversight of DOGE to verify those laws are being followed. Elon was locking employees out of their workplace, despite having that authority (since he was not confirmed to Congress to be in charge of that department).
There are probably quite a lot of other ones too. A lot of the strategy seems to be moving faster than the courts can keep up.
The cuts are already preceding the actual analysis, and once the authority of the executive to do whatever they have done is decided in court, the damage will have been done. It is the “stop me if you can, I’ll be done before the Supreme Court stops me” approach that is terrifying.
bingo, take developing minds with high risk tolerance to do the illegal work someone older and wiser would refuse.
When dealing with organizing and managing a great number of people or resources, I have never seen a young inexperienced human performing adequately, even remotely.
Old age and presumed experience is not at all a guarantee that someone would be good in such roles, but from what I have seen, young age and the associated lack of relevant experience pretty much guarantees failure in such cases.
I used to scoff when people said “TDS” was a real thing, but having observed the same with Elon over the years and then listening to hours long talks between him and others, I realised “EDS” is clearly also a thing. And lo and behold: Listening to full long-form talks with Trump revealed a person wholly different to what media portrays.
And as a disclaimer, no I don’t agree with everything they do or say. But they’re not the monsters the monsters in the media machinery spin them up to be either.
The real monsters are those that purposefully trim and clip and stitch together falsehoods out of context, and then believe their own lies until they’re willing to throw other citizens under a figurative bus just because they work with or for “those people”.
I mean… Yeah I’m not even going to bother.
They can easily be both. They're definitely the latter
The NYT just reported that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone.
The US GAO says "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud"
What Musk is doing is what the majority voted for. To finally put an end the unbelievable waste, fraud and abuse. This is exactly what he said he would do and most Americans are relieved and see hope for the first time in a long time.
Did it ever occur to you they might not be?
Do you understand that this is just a constitutional crisis? I reckon musk ended up appointing kids because they also did not understand the political and ethical implications of all this.
Naming and shaming them is good. No one forced them to take this job. With the skills you list they could have done any number of good or neutral things instead.
For the next eight years he did groundbreaking work in developing rockets. In 1945 he and his youthful engineering team were actively recruited to continue their work for another country with great ambitions in space. A tremendous success for his personal career, even though the party he served fell a bit short of their goals.
He was clearly "the best of us nerds". Never mind that his genius was built on slave labor and oppression. He disrupted some governments, made good money and got to work on awesome rockets! That’s what counts in life.
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.
Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
(While I'm at it, there's nothing special about age here. Plenty of 25 year olds are actually doing productive things for humanity. But many 40 year olds are doing it too. The difference is that they are competent and empathetic, not random guys who Elon happens to like.)
Their youth and technical ability isn't the problem. What are problems are their inexperience and recklessness and evident lack of awareness. Government and the administrative state are serious undertakings. Move Fast and Break Things is extraordinarily dangerous in this context.
So, who's the VC that will fund the 4-9 failed governments we'll have to go through until we get a unicorn?
The danger of the vision is the power of the vision, fix what’s broken in the bureaucracy, it’s not being fascist it’s just easier to ask forgiveness than permission!
We’ll see!
Since when do startups "work well"? Some startups work well, but famously >90% of them fail. Imagine if 9 out of every 10 fires was just left alone because the fire brigade was replaced by a startup, or if 9 out 10 bridges fell down within a few years. Startups are just one of many models of running things, but they are not appropriate for everything.
Counterpoint - they don't have the wisdom and experience in the domain they are working in that older, wiser heads do. I've seen a LOT of stuff from both 'tech bros' and programmers who are new to a domain where it's clear they are 100% confident they are right, despite consensus to the contrary. And when their plans are implemented, all the things they didn't think about come into play - such as Tesla service which is terrible.
These people may all be brilliant engineers. But not all problems are engineering problems, and while these people may be able to engineer a system to reduce costs drastically, they may not understand where to cut costs and where efficiency can actually be achieved.
Don't forget that most of the new tech economy that people harp on about (Uber, Amazon, Tesla spring to mind) is built on the erosion of workers' rights and lowest-common-denominator treatment wherever possible.
It feels a bit like that famous Joel on Software post - when faced with an existing code base - it looks over complex and you can't understand it - so you decide to re-write - only to discover during the process why it's so complex in the first place.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Sure it's important to challenge the status quo - but it's really important to approach it with humility and to seek to understand why things are the way they are, not just to assume you know it all.
This over arrogance of us techies thinking because we're good with computers we're the best at everything is what people are annoyed and, justifiably critical of.
You're going to be responsible to assess and dismantle a government agency with thousands of employees and billions in budget being in your twenties with ZERO gov experience is indeed a huge red flag and not merely putting a target because they're young.
We've all met incredibly accomplished people who are not to be trusted with sharp objects. Expertise in one area does not translate to another easily.
I’m some sort of off-brand late comer Scots Canadian so my opinion is essentially alien and invalid to people like you but I’ve got to ask:
Why does the incestuous name dropping qualify anyone especially?
Peter Thiel is expressly trying to (and vocally so) speed run everything into the apocolypse and is very worried about the anti christ (apparently). He’s also running a massive surveillance dragnet and wants power and money above all. Again, his words.
How in the global fuck does working for or being awarded by a person with those ambitions qualify anyone for anything?
You may as well have said they attend church every sunday as their qualification.
If you said, well he has spent 10 years developing high availability systems and invented novel algorithms or implementations for managing high volume data flows or something then maybe there would be something to talk about.
But I’ve seen baby faced juniors elevated to senior and management roles and bungle them SO badly that it alienated all the actual engineering talent again and again because they were little more than virtual blood boys.
It sounds more like this latter scenario is the most likely.
Its just all goddamned hype men and their blood boys up and down this grotesque beast of what was once an industry.
With those words you don’t work in an industry, you serve a new segment of technolords and their only goal is to eat everything.
Maybe that had something to do with why they were chosen?
What I'm hearing from my friends - many of whom have helped build and scale some of the most successful tech companies on the planet - is that no engineer is an exceptional one without a modicum of ethics and wisdom.
These seem to be in short supply at DOGE.
Such rhyme. Much knowledge. Wow.
People around here love to talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect, but seem to be of the mistaken belief that it is about smart vs dumb people rather than people with domain expertise vs people without.
The youngest scientist or engineer was Richard Feynman who was 27 years old at the time.
Average age of scientists/engineers on the Manhattan Project was closer to 37.
25 sounds so absurd I don’t know how you didn’t double check your sources. The rest of your post makes some claims about NASA but stopped reading as it has to be BS as well.
Our current gerontocracy is ahistorical.
Perhaps one reason startups work so well is they are one of the few places that still let young people exert agency.
The average age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— they put humans on the moon. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.
The guys featured in this gross and irresponsible hit piece by Wired, by all accounts, are brilliant engineers. Top 1%.
- one decoded the Herculaneum Papyrii at the age of 20, winning the Vesuvius Challenge
- another built a startup funded by OpenAI
- one interned at SpaceX and got a Thiel Fellowship
- another was a top engineer at a major AI firm
This is who they are bullying and putting a target on. The best of us nerds. https://x.com/anothercohen/status/1886480470185001025