This is a pretty intriguing contrarian view. I recall fielding many such inquiries during my Google days.
Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.
If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.
If folks are looking for another Tracy Kidder book, I'd recommend _House_. It's the story of building one house in Massachusetts in 1985 or so. Kidder goes into the life of the buyers and the builders, and the result is surprisingly compelling.
I know what you're thinking: why not _A Truck Full of Money_, Kidder's book about Paul English, the founder of Kayak? It's a fine read, but I found _House_ to be more contemplative and open up wider vistas (for me, at least).
Kidder is a great writer. I think people might enjoy _House_.
I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google's family filter. That led to the insight that Google could be spammed. That led to fights with Google's founders--Sergey thought Google couldn't be spammed, for example.
Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google's rankings from being manipulated.
I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.
Most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.
The first article includes this snippet: "If there is reason for optimism, though, it lies with the medical background of Oshmyansky, the company’s co-founder and CEO, according to Gewanter.
'The radiologist Cuban is working with knows the business,' Gewanter said. 'Between the two of them, it is not difficult to imagine that they will figure out where the gaps are and how to exploit them. We can only hope that when they do, our patients will be the beneficiaries.' "
I think YC made a fantastic choice including Alex's company in YC, and it's been a pleasure seeing what Alex has done and is doing. I'll stop there for now.
For data science, we've seen things from looking at disability claims appeals of Veterans and how those are handled, to looking for anomalies and malicious attacks on login.gov, to looking at Medicare payments and how to improve that process.
The data that the government has is often smaller scale than industry, but it usually represents people who are genuinely in need of help.
If you wanted to try a short tour, now is a very good time; things are quite remote-friendly right now. Then when the COVID situation is better, you'd have better information about whether the DC trade-off is worthwhile.
The work we're doing helps everyone from Veterans to medical patients. Making government services responsive, accessible, and transparent is really important right now.
Please consider applying, or just ask here if you have any additional questions!
I mean, if you wanted to do a short tour (~6-9 months) right now, you could probably start and stay remote for most of that time.
In general, it's really useful to be around the table with stakeholders. In a COVID world, that's less important, but when we get through this, it really does make a difference if people can be in DC.
That said, these times are definitely an experiment in how to do remote work well.
USDS has been doing a lot of impactful work lately, and we need more engineers, designers, and product managers to help improve US government services for the public.
Just to give some examples of the sort of work we're doing recently, we've been assisting the CDC with user research to improve their pages about COVID-19, we've worked with the SBA on their disaster loan assistance program, and we've built tools to provide more granular data to the coronavirus task force, not to mention the USDS folks working at specific agencies like Veterans Affairs to help ramp up capacity.
There's a lot of government systems that are facing high levels of load/stress right now, and we need the US government to work well right now. If you're an engineer/SRE or designer or product manager, please consider applying.
I appreciated the allusion to Conway's Law here. I will say that in a government of 2M+ people, there's a ton of problems that are completely non-partisan that everyone would like to solve where technical expertise can make a real difference.
Fun fact: the reason that USDS applicants (who would work within the Executive Office of the President) have to take a drug test goes to a Clinton-era legal battle that went to the Supreme Court: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-03-mn-24917...