People send me breathless articles like this about importing Silicon Valley disruptors into DC. Intelligent people send me these articles -- people who mean well.
I love Silicon Valley. I reject the premise of these articles out of hand. The wrong idea that hackers are somehow the choicest fruit from the Valley sets the stage for a new round of water shaming that will make almonds look good. They take just one gallon each. Any idea how many gallons it takes to bring a mature hacker to market?
I reject also the idea that Valley culture travels well. Take some actual cultures for example. Boudin, San Francisco's famous sourdough bakery, claims to still bake bread from the same starter cultured from wild yeast during the Gold Rush. For a time, Boudin sold starters derived from their master line. The experiment was a failure. These starters, once transplanted, were quickly colonized by local yeasts and lost the distinctive character of the original.
Yeast and hackers are alike in many ways. Perhaps this is why we find Conway's Game of Life so interesting. My experience is that local hacker cultures transplant about as well as sourdoughs. Olin Shivers wrote what remains the best exposition on the topic in 1987 -- though it seems less funny by the year.
I don't care for the idea that Washington, or government, hacker cultures want for anything. I worked at NASA in the DC area as a student and as a student I attended some of the earliest meetings of the DC Linux User's Group in 1994. This group included serious hackers. One, Donald Becker, wrote some of the earliest and best networking drivers for the Linux kernel. Several of those bear the copyright notice "Copyright 1993 United States Government as represented by the Director, National Security Agency". NSA would keep plugging away at Linux and follow up this GPL release in 2000 with the GPL release of SELinux. The earlier release may be one of the earliest releases of government code under the then-new second version of the GPL.
Becker himself became the hacker-in-chief of NASA's Beowulf project and released GPL code from NASA from 1994 to about 2000 before doing a cluster start-up.
These clusters and the genuine hacker spirit that made them go proliferated at federal agencies before anybody knew what a google was. Hackers have been at it in DC since the surveyors packed away their chains. DC was definitely a gelato desert during the worst of the Marion Barry years. DC didn't have a proper bocce bar until well into the 21st century. DC has never lacked hackers.
I can't argue that the U.S. Digital Service or 18F aren't doing something. I can argue that bringing hackers, or the Valley, into government isn't it. A better discussion in the press about what they are actually doing will make it possible for government to retain whatever the benefit when these particular hackers finish their hardship tours in DC.
Will they go? I don't know. I know that OPM put out a recruiting brochure in the late nineties with the title 'Look Ma! I'm a Bureaucrat'. It profiled just the kind of young folks in government that USDS and 18F would presumably like to recruit. A journalist who dug into these profiles found that a surprising number of these kids had already moved on from government service when he came calling. Maybe more will stay this time.
I left my NASA student gig in Greenbelt without ever thinking about a career there. I may not have looked back but I often think back to the strength of the hackers I met in government.
Long before OPM'S 'Look, Ma!' was a thing, the Department of Commerce ran the 'Experimental Technology Incentives Program' in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. A team of policy wonks performed actual experiments within a number of federal departments to encourage tech transfer or tech stimulation from government to industry -- the reverse of USDS and 18F. Perhaps a real experiment can be done with these new programs. Someone could build a control program and staff it with folks who already work for government and invent Silicon Valley resumes and identities for them and set them loose inside as a pack of disruptors. I hypothesize that people labelled 'disruptor' rise to the role.
I think it's OK that the young people in 'Look, Ma' didn't stick around. These proto-millenials were at the head of a generation that, so far, appears to not stick around.
I think it might be possible to build incentives that let government capture the best and brightest for multiple engagements over the course of their career instead of once, or never. Our legislative and judicial branches do not seem to lament their clockwork turnover of clerks and staffers.
On an unrelated note, mathematicians have the Mathematics Genealogy Project to trace their academic lineage. Hackers have no such resource (unless your last name happens to be 'Hacker', in which case the whole of Big Genealogy stands ready to help you find your relatives).
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