> In a good headspace now, right after the first year was feeling lost on where to go next.
Glad to hear. I had a similar experience, people act like "being in transition" where you are unsure what is next is solveable in a month, maybe three months. After that first year I still felt so unsure what I was supposed to do.
I'm in that phase somewhat right now. 30 months in, I'm still kinda unsure what I'd like to do. I know going back to a big enterprise software firm is bit of a last resort at this point, I just cannot convince myself that work is meaningful. Thankfully I'm financially secure (for now, who knows how the global trade shenanigans will actually affect my retirement funds), so there's no urgency to jump headfirst into another job. Yet, despite having plenty to do in terms of side projects, it would be a lie to say I don't feel that I need to do something more meaningful with my time.
DOGE will be an interesting case study in the years to come to say the least. A friend was contacted by them in an attempt to recruit him to help rebuild the nations aviation systems from the ground up as a 1099 contractor reporting directly to Sean Duffy. The recruiter advertised it as a side hustle on evenings and weekends paying an abmysal hourly wage. When my friend pointed out that the comp was far below what he makes, the recruiter countered with the prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.
> prestige that will come with having worked for DOGE.
This seems like a highly fragile currency. If things continue to deteriorate a future administration may end up running its own reprisals trials against DOGE staff.
I mean I think it would be a fair assumption that there’s a very very real chance that havinng worked at DOGE will come with credible threats to your safety in the future. This is a team that is currently in the process of killing peoples grandparents by cutting them off from social security, building databases of immigrants and people with autism among a million other fuckups.
People aren’t going to just let that slide. I really don’t think they should expect to live in comfort and anonymity for the rest of their days if you look at how these kinds of things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples (I.e the East German Stasi come to mind as one)
> things have played out historically with only a few counterexamples
The first counter-example that comes to mind is the "Pact of Forgetting" that happened after Franco died, where basically people agreed to let spilled blood be spilled, without spilling more. Basically hard and difficult questions were avoided in order to facilitate "national reconciliation" when the transition to democracy began in 1970s.
Depending on the political aftermath when this (pointing everywhere) is done, it's not impossible something similar could happen, to try to let things cool down. Or, it goes the way of the Nuremberg Trials, also a possibility I suppose.
That's basically what Obama did with Bush, Iraq and the GFC. I remember him claiming that a bunch of investigations would bog down his agenda.
There was also this take from the "institutionalists" that a compact to not investigate your predecessor was an important part of our tradition of peaceful transition of power. Finally there was a feeling among Democrats that the Republican use of investigations against Clinton had been dirty politics.
I do think that generation of Democrats are being pushed out and I think we'll see a new generation with different ideas. In particular I think the base is finally repulsed by people like Chuck Schumer.
I can't speak for everyone, but as far as I'm concerned, I was willing to "forgive and forget" after the first Trump term.
But then January, 6 happened. And then Trump explicitly ran on the platform of rejecting the validity of the 2020 election and persecuting his political opposition, not to mention this whole DOGE thing and nuking the economy.
So, this time around, no. Anyone who stuck with him despite all that had their chance and they blew it. And this especially pertains to people who aren't just full-throated supporters, but actually facilitated this admin directly.
For the half of the country that's always hated Trump to forget, Trumpism has to go EXTINCT. Like, discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement.
God willing, when Trump finally officially plunges the US into recession, he and his supporters will become pariahs, but my faith in my fellow citizens is so low that I'm not even sure they'd notice.
I don't think that there is much room for forgiveness in a country where 48% of folks are STILL in support of Trump. The one thing I am certain of is that democracy will not die in the US without a fight.
> discredited the way that fascism was after WWII or segregation after the Civil Rights movement
Got some bad news for you there: a large part of Trumpism is explicitly segregationist revival. Those people never went away, they were just under the surface, and they got mad again when action was taken to remove celebrations of segregationists (statues, building names etc) from public life.
Hiring a whole bunch of contractors is almost providing cover. "No, I didn't work on the gulag candidate selection tool, I was just a FAA navigation coder".
During the downfall of ISIS there was a funny quote from a commander in the Iraqi military along the lines of "if you listen to what the prisoners said, you'd think ISIS was entirely staffed by innocent drivers and cooks and never any jihadists"
Yeah, the less tongue in cheek (but even more tragic) version of this is just that they will be very employable by very ideological right wing organizations, and not very employable outside that bubble (unless they write or otherwise highlight a "learned lessons and turned things around" narrative of this period of time).
But most organizations don't, and won't, want to hire people who are willing to behave lawlessly.
It's a great case study of someone having no knowledge of something coming in and saying "we can save half the budget" then, oops - saying maybe they can do 5% of the original promise, lol.
I wonder how much DOGE is going to cost at the end of the day? I hope not literally billions of dollars, so maybe the $100b-200b they save will be net positive after the lawsuits, etc..
Rebuilding something as critical as the nations’ aviation system using underpaid 1099s working nights/weekends is certainly not the way to build a robust and fault-tolerant system. Idiots!
The false dichotomy! Nice. However you still make a good point. Farming out gov work to private industry is rarely a good answer. As you stated, they are normally even less efficient and cost more!
Would doing same work being contracted via big four consultant for 1/10th of the cost with 3x more meetings while moving 5x slower be more prestigious?
Oh wow this is a trip down memory lane. My parents bought me a computer advertised in the classified ad as “includes over 100 games” and that really meant it came with a book over 100+ games in basic. I’d stay up copying the book to play the games in it. Fun times.
I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.
As a tourist, the cost was well worth it. Used buses and rail to get everywhere, booked one DB train from Berlin to Bamberg but otherwise travelled all over Germany during my time there.
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