It's both more difficult than any private company job I've had and it paid less, but knowing the impact my work had on veterans was well worth all of it. I'm extremely proud of the work that my teammates and I did there.
So many people complain about the government, so few are willing to fight to fix it.
These plays can work. Why? Because USDS employees are government employees with escalation paths all the way up to the very top which gives them a lot of power to break down bureaucratic barriers to modern software development that government contractors & consultants would have no chance of doing. They then can bring in contractors to work in the relatively modern shell that they've created.
For example, here's a project started by the USDS in 2015. It's responsible for managing the complex bureaucratic process of VA legal appeals. (https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/caseflow) It's open source, continuously integrated and deployed with close to 100% test coverage, deployed on an AWS GovCloud VPC, and was built on a fraction of the budget of similar systems.
Active development on this system is now done primarily by contractors now that the relevant bureaucratic barriers were removed.
How do we scale this story? More talented people with the desire to serve their country. It's not easy, but it can work.
I was a member of the USDS for 4 years. Every member of the USDS is a government employee with a fully transparent government salary, most of whom are taking a massive pay cut to serve their country and its citizens.
I'm coming up on having been here for two years, and both of those things have been true. It's been a great experience to work alongside top-notch folks from all over the tech industry on problems that deeply impact so many lives.
It's also the best civics lesson you'll ever have. You get to see up close how the federal government runs, good and bad. There's a lot of nuance on how policy, legislation, and technology all interact that I didn't appreciate before I worked for the USDS.
Wholeheartedly agree. There is a big push do this inside the US federal government right now. I work for the United States Digital Service, and at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, almost all application code we write is open source:
Not yet. So far, email hasn't been a primary channel of communication to clients for organizations we've worked with.
I see it being valuable though. I'm not sure what the best way to implement it would be. An in-app email interface? An add-on to an email client like gmail?
So many people complain about the government, so few are willing to fight to fix it.