> Their claims to "fame" were being interns or working on tightly scoped greenfield projects.

And there's that one guy whose entire work history is as a summer camp counselor.

Who is that?

He's talking about Edward Coristine, aka "bigballs", though it's not the only thing on his résumé: https://bsky.app/profile/jsweetli.bsky.social/post/3lh5hr3hs...

Sure, and there's a sprinter who can outrun Usain Bolt who just happened to become an accountant instead

Probably still better than the non-technical people usually governing things.

As many issues as we have, I’d rather have somebody who understands the consequences of a security breach having access to sensitive information than someone who does not.

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.

Honestly if they were wise as they are with "computer smarts" they would have wanted nothing to do with DOGE

Because I guarantee Elon will throw them first under the bus if anything happens

Why is that? I would bet large sums of money that these guys will have a bright future ahead of them, much of it because of the goodwill they get from working for DOGE.

It all depends on how persistent the new american system is.

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

That is a fantastically chreky comment.

10/10 no notes

And I reiterated that being good with computers is not a good predictor for how things work in highly-politicized government positions

Goodwill from whom exactly?

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.

Forgot the /s

>I would bet large sums of money that these guys will have a bright future ahead of them, much of it because of the goodwill they get from working for DOGE.

Email me.

You say goodwill, we say “consulting” with companies that have directly benefited from their decisions and will benefit from their connections. Going from high positions in government into the post-government life of consulting and leadership positions is neither new nor indicative of the value of their work.

haha, the goodwill of ending up on a different black list, and never working again

As he has always done? Source of Elon throwing young engineers under the bus?

Anything to flame Elon another day innit?

I've come dangerously close to being acquired by one of his companies.

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.

Amazing that people sign up to be verified on Elon's tarpit and they funnily haven't heard anything about how Elon rewarded loyalty and perseverance there (hint: with a boot to the backside)

He’s not an engineer.

Then you've never watched any of Elon's interviews where he lays/discusses out designs of products and production lines of all of his companies in great detail?

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.

One of the dude literally solved a hundreds years problem and won a prize. He coded an AI to decipher an ancient manuscript AIUI. I certainly wouldn't look down on the achievement of that young programmer.

Can you explain why this makes him a good fit for doing government payroll?

None of which qualifies him for anything he’s doing here.

Being smart is a qualification.

There is no such thing as "being smart". You can be arbitrarily good at some things, and arbitrarily bad at anything else. Even the greatest physicists can have laughably naive philosophical positions. Linus Paulding, one of the greatest minds in chemistry in history, was convinced that you can cure virtually any disease with a large enough dose of vitamin C. Expertise, even the extreme peak, in one field doesn't give you expertise of any kind in another field.

This is factually wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

IQ is a grift. It is not a measure of intelligence, but "not stupidity".

Any score over 100 means no discernable difference in intelligence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

IQ is mostly BS. And even if it's not, it only measures the ability to learn, not the actual skills. What I wrote remains true: just because you have skills in one area (AI deciphering of hieroglyphics scroll), doesn't mean in any way whatsoever that you have skills for something entirely unrelated (administrative matters).

Well... there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

Ho we got a random link to a irrelevant article.

Pack it up boys.

I'd rather have people who are smart with experience handling our inner government workings. ;P

Yes it does. He knows how to solve hard problems. Ending the vaste waste, fraud and abuse is a huge spagetti code problem.

To Actually fix the embedded structural problems of an established system requires at least as much wisdom as intelligence. So far I have not seen Elon and his young minions demonstrating deep levels of wisdom

You are being impressed by irrelevant credentials. This is what tools people into a sens of confidence while totally misplaced. he is not helping to solve hard problems or deal with corruption. He is aiding in destroying democracy and enabling corruption and collusion.

You have it backwards.

So would you say that the first step of detangling spaghetti code is to start deleting huge chunks of it without knowing what it does or why it was coded that way?

There is no control-z in physical systems, especially ones that rely on human constructs and tradition

This is not a code problem, and I guarantee none of these kids know COBOL

What a load of nonsense. Expertise in one field does not mean you're going to excel in a different field. There are plenty of people with relevant expertise and equal problem-solving abilities, but these traitors actively don't want them, because they aren't going to say and do what they want.

What would constitute qualifications in your view?

Advanced knowledge of the inner workings of governmental oversight, government funding, and the ability to understand what they are doing is illegal and dangerous.... Enough to know that whatever they have been promised is not worth the unintended consequences of their actions.

Pause any spending $X on a Foreign Nation is not aligned with making America Gooder.

The better question is why hasn't anyone done this before?

Ooh, he won a prize?? Why didn't anyone say so, he's clearly qualified!

None of that prepares him for the things he is working on now, and they have blatantly flouted the law and all security rules to get access to the treasury payments system

or the achievements of the thousands of people who worked on ML before him to help set the stage.

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.

100%

Yes, but look at who their counterparts are in the government agencies - literally the worst kind of bureaucrats largely unemployable anywhere else.

Government employees are the bottom 1%.

Ah yes, let's just make a sweeping generalization about 3 million people.

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.

I'm sure there is the odd person that is above average, but most just sign on for an easy life and a gold plated pension.

Even if that were true, it's far better than an unqualified, untrained, and unaccountable group who's only mission seems to be institutional destruction and theft.

>>unaccountable group who's only mission seems to be institutional destruction and theft.

unaccountable group who's only mission seems to be uncovering fraud and misuse of taxpayer's money.

Fixed it for you.

I mean, Garry Tan has already been on Twitter with his stupid take that there are “brilliant” so it surely must be true. /s

The Treasury has been taken over and barricaded, but please enlighten us Garry with fables of their 10x brilliance.

Government employees are never elected. They are hired by the elected officials. In this case the general public in the US was aware of DOGE before the election and chose to vote for it.

Where specifically was it spelled out that DODGE would remove the free tax filing system?

Did they delete it? Elon said 18F, the group that developed DirectFile, was deleted. DirectFile appears to still be available.

https://directfile.irs.gov/

Right. Why are people so confused about this now?

I don't understand the "unelected" aspect - he funded Trump and Trump got elected. Trump said Elon would get to run a wrecking ball through the ship of state and the magas cheered. He derives his authority from Trump. A lot of people work at the white house and only one of them was elected.

He’s surely the most public bureaucrat in history.

Bureaucrat is a misnomer. Think of him more as a reaper of souls

He's more of a lobotomized Jack Welch imo