I hope it gives you the tingles, and color on the people doing the hard work. Michael Lewis knows how to spot colorful characters and frame a thesis of a bigger idea around them. But there's lots of people like this in government, finding ways to nudges to be a "more perfect" version of our country — often exhaustingly facing headwinds to do so.
I'm an acquired YC founder (S11 → Launchpad Toys → Google → Led early LLM efforts there), now serving in federal government at the U.S. Digital Service. It's the White House's technology arm where we bring people from technology and industry for 2 year "tours of duty" and help to modernize our systems and make our digital experiences better (Fixing Healthcare.gov, and recently shipping IRS Direct File are some of success stories).
Your country could use you.
We need experienced technologists across eng/product/design/business – people like YC founders and HN readers here.
I've taken an honest look at USDS, but I decided I couldn't afford to work for them, even though I would love to. I live in one of the most expensive cities in the US, and salaries + total comp form USDS are far lower than what I'm earning now, even at a (well-funded, non-ai) non-profit. I'd have to start at salary grade 15, the highest one, to even begin approaching what I earn now.
I'm not even living a life of tech-bro luxury. I've got a mortgage, bills to pay, retirement to save for, groceries, transportation, etc that take a significant plurality of my take-home pay. Sure, my standard of living is a bit higher than average (I have a penchant for expensive bicycles...), but that doesn't add up to the pay cut I'd have to take to work at any salary grade besides the literal highest one.
I would adore working for the government on technology. I work at a non-profit for its social impact, and I can't see myself working in ads, ai, finance, or other place that doesn't contribute to the social good. I wouldn't expect to be paid at FAANG/MAMAA/whatever levels, but something competitive with what I see private companies offering would get me to sign up in (almost) an instant.
Government jobs have a fixed pay grade that isn't changing. It doesn't afford an upper-middle-class life in an expensive city. You may find yourself wanting both, but you can't have them. If you already get that, you're not missing anything!
If you have a deeper question about why the US government chooses this outcome, here is the answer: It is ideologically closer to Mondrian than to other US corporations. This ideology makes it hard to hire for certain higher-wage skills; they have to find workers who will accept a pay cut. (Mondrian's maximum wage ratio -- the wage of the CEO divided by the lowest-paid worker -- is six. Private sector CEOs might get 10x more than Mondrian's CEO; Mondrian's CEO makes ideologically-motivated sacrifices. Something similar is happening for high-skill devs at Mondrian and the USG.) To some degree this ideology is thrust upon the largest entities whose workforces tend to unionize and lobby for similar outcomes; to some degree it is an emergent outcome of principled and political choices by legislators and executives.
Go USG! Such an inspiring organization. I can understand why people are cynical -- it's too much to understand; anything big has lots of ugliness; much of the Rep party has been ideologically opposed to Mondrian; etc -- but I just think it's so beautiful.
As someone not in the third trimodal tech pay-hump (I can’t possibly pass the interviews, I’m all used up for the day after 90-120 minutes of far-less-stressful ordinary interviewing) I’d considered it, because the pay cut would be fairly small, I find the mission appealing, and federal government benefits and retirement are really good…
Then I noticed the “term of service” stuff and nope’d out. Without the retirement, it’s a terrible deal even for me.
From the lens of a Product Manager working in ML / Large Language Models...
The Alignment Problem
By Brian Christian
How do we tell the computer to do all the things we want it to do, all the things we don't want it to do, and all the things we didn't realize we want it to do or not do? How do we capture the rich implied and inferred nature of humanness? That's the Alignment Problem. The book dives into this broadly – but also gives an excellent non-technical survey of the evolution of machine learning.
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Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
By Scott McCloud
This is magnitudes more than a dive into the perhaps easy to dismiss artform. This book is about storytelling and why great stories resonate. It's one of the best pieces of media, on media, period.
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An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
By Will Larsen
When I my company was acquired by a very-big-Giant, my personal antibodies reacted negatively to the how the big G's way of thinking and doing – I was harmfully autoimmune. To some extent I had to accept things, to another extent I needed a different perspective. This book helped me transition and it's one I push on all of our leads. While we as PMs don't manage people directly we architect the whole system – and this book is an insightful (I buy it for all the team's leads) lens on how big teams where personal alignment and corporate alignment problems need to be negotiated.
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Exhalation Stories
By Ted Chiang (also recommend Stories of Your Life)
The author has an absolute magic way of taking a kernel of an idea and spinning not only a whole world, but a whole new way of looking at the world – all in the span of a short story. You can't get any closer to home than "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" where the protagonist rears an artificial intelligence from "pet" to a human-like mind.
—
The Pragmatic Programmer
By David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
PMs need to get things done. Even if we don't code, we need to think deeply on how it's built to ensure it achieves our goals now, and what we project them to be in the future. As the title suggests, a pragmatic take on building code-driven systems.
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Design of Everyday Things
By Don Norman
The OG design-thinking before IDEO corporatized it.
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Principles
By Ray Dalio
"Principles are ways of successfully dealing with reality to get what you want out of life." This book influenced me to distill how we take action and prioritize and how we decide as a team. I'll admit some of the set up of the book irked me, but the distilled world view that form the Principles in the second half of the book generally resonates; the world works a certain way, find those patterns, use it to your advantage (and for good).
—
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
By Edward Tufte
You could jump into any of Tufte's books, on any page, and come away with new ways of looking/thinking/telling stories about data. ML problems are data problems – let's think well beyond raw dumps and tables.
Principles is a thought provoking book in that it gets one to think of running a business like running a machine. Invest in computers and programming to perform checklist tests constantly so you can ensure your business is operating in the manner you expect. This will require you to think hard about how you expect your business to work. It will also allow you to identify what activities really require your attention.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Data is great as it gets you thinking about different ways to present ideas effectively. The map of Napoleons march to and from Russia is exquisite.
Nice list. I looked at "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" and think i found my next read so Thanks.
+1 for Principles (disclaimer - I'm a former BW employee).
Having worked at several large banks it is clear to see how they would benefit from basic rules like "no water cooler talk" and a clearly documented culture.
Well he isn't able to use a computer or even complicated mobile phone. And now he has a bad sight and his hands are shaking.
So the ability to talk to device, to get on the internet, to get weather forecast, news, music he likes (he obviously doesn't like modern music), get some videos from YouTube on TV screen or call someone is a revelation. Plus the fact that it just works and is really cheap.
Undoubtedly this will lead to Space Pirates of the Mark Watney (The Martian) kind:
“I’ve been thinking about laws on Mars. There’s an international treaty saying that no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. By another treaty if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law aplies. So Mars is international waters. Now, NASA is an American non-military organization, it owns the Hab. But the second I walk outside I’m in international waters. So Here’s the cool part. I’m about to leave for the Schiaparelli Crater where I’m going to commandeer the Ares IV lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can’t until on board the Ares IV. So I’m going to be taking a craft over in international waters without permission, which by definition… makes me a pirate. Mark Watney: Space Pirate.”
Amen. Last time I used it, it was a mess beyond belief. Code intermingling with presentation layer. Dependencies upon dependencies. A case study of bad software engineering.
I wonder how much they took people still using their cell phone number from an area code they no longer live in. Would be cool to see an interactive version of this map too.
I'm not seeing anything that indicates whether they differentiated between area codes/numbers and geographical locations of the caller and callee.
I suspect, however, area code/number analysis would be easier. Example: Alice lives in Atlanta, but kept her St. Louis number so that her mom with a land line can call her without long distance fees. So when Alice calls mom from Atlanta, it's a call from Atlanta. Bob lives in St. Louis but travels to Atlanta on business. When Bob calls his wife in St. Louis on his St. Louis number from Atlanta, should that be a call from Atlanta back to St. Louis?
I hope it gives you the tingles, and color on the people doing the hard work. Michael Lewis knows how to spot colorful characters and frame a thesis of a bigger idea around them. But there's lots of people like this in government, finding ways to nudges to be a "more perfect" version of our country — often exhaustingly facing headwinds to do so.
I'm an acquired YC founder (S11 → Launchpad Toys → Google → Led early LLM efforts there), now serving in federal government at the U.S. Digital Service. It's the White House's technology arm where we bring people from technology and industry for 2 year "tours of duty" and help to modernize our systems and make our digital experiences better (Fixing Healthcare.gov, and recently shipping IRS Direct File are some of success stories).
Your country could use you.
We need experienced technologists across eng/product/design/business – people like YC founders and HN readers here.
Consider taking a look: USDS.gov