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Matt Cutts on the US Digital Service and Working at Google for 17 Years
1 hours 5 minutes 9 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Speaker 1
00:00
Matt Cotts, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2
00:01
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1
00:02
No problem. So, for those who don't know you, you are the administrator of the US Digital Service, and previously you were at Google where you were the head of the web spam team and also the 71st employee in the year 2000. What was Google like in 2000?
Speaker 1
00:18
Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 2
00:19
Oh man, so we had 3 people start that day and that was a new record at the time. Now you've got like hundreds of people starting each week. But the crazy thing is it was a startup back then.
Speaker 2
00:31
So late nights, working crazy hours. I remember 1 of the first projects I worked on was SafeSearch. And so at 1 point at like 2 a.m. I got something working and I was really happy so I was going to head home and I was like speeding because I was super excited I got this thing working, got a speeding ticket.
Speaker 2
00:48
And so I literally remember working every weekend until at some point people were like, oh, 3 or 4 years in, we don't work on weekends anymore. And I was like, oh, now the culture's changed a little bit. But it's super weird to be like, the people who were just folks, Amit or Lucas or whoever, then eventually became entire departments. Sales departments and people who dealt with logs and privacy.
Speaker 2
01:15
But back then it was just a small group of people. Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
01:18
That's crazy. Because I know the story with PB creating Gmail. It's just like a 1 guy goof.
Speaker 1
01:25
Let's see if we can do this. How did projects get delegated and chosen? How did it all work?
Speaker 2
01:31
Paul Matzkoff Well, it was funny because I started out, I did a safe search and then there was this ski off-site. Everybody fit on 1 bus, 1 50 person bus back then. So that was a great introduction to the company.
Speaker 2
01:45
And I was skiing and on a lift with a manager. And she was like, hey Matt, you like doing front-end programming? And I was like, sure, I like front-end programming. And then like, boom, guess what, you're in the ads group now.
Speaker 2
01:57
I'm like, wait, I don't want to be in the ads group. But there were only like 5 people and they needed help, so I was like trying to help out. We did like geolocation, and it took like a year to claw my way back towards ranking. So it was very informal, it was very much like, here's a problem, we got to go swarm and tackle it.
Speaker 2
02:14
Even writing SafeSearch was because there was a partner that wanted it. And so we're like, okay, can we build this in time? Let's see if we can make it.
Speaker 1
02:21
Paul Matzkoff So on a self-hosted version? Yeah, okay. To what degree did you feel like the success of Google was certain at the time?
Speaker 2
02:30
Paul Matzkoff Completely uncertain. I mean, If you go back, I think Google had raised like $25 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia or whatever. And so, as I recall, the dot-com crash happened like March of 2000, winter apocalypse.
Speaker 2
02:48
Everybody was like, this is going to be terrible. And so it wasn't at all clear that we were going to be able to make it. I remember when AltaVista, I was worried they were going to crush us. Because you got a certain number of ranking signals, and if they had twigged and caught on fast enough, they even copied our appearance.
Speaker 2
03:08
They had a little front end that you could set it, where you could be, I think they called it like goofy. It was like rainbow colored, so it looked a little like Google. But they didn't get the quality right. So we were okay from that point of view.
Speaker 2
03:20
But it was nonstop for several years. I mean, trying to make sure that in those early days Microsoft didn't realize how much money was coming from search engines. But also AdWords and later AdSense. David Patton But
Speaker 1
03:32
can you walk through that product development? Because I'm so curious. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1
03:35
What did you start? You're like, oh, this might not be a thing. And then a certain type of ad takes off, or you tried something and it failed.
Speaker 2
03:42
So it was wild, because back then, people were like, do you have salespeople sell stuff, which was the default? So you go to the most profitable folks. And do you sell by CPM, cost per thousand, or do you sell by cost per click?
Speaker 1
03:55
There
Speaker 2
03:55
was this thing called Overture where people could bid on things. And so there was a whole bunch of shifts in strategy where people are like, let's figure out how to do this. So at 1 point, I was in the ads group and they said, we're going to do this prototype of self-service advertising.
Speaker 2
04:10
So we're going to make some little ads on the right-hand side. And Oh man, I forgot to turn off caching when I ran that experiment and I nearly melted Google at that point, which was not cool.
Speaker 1
04:21
Because they were just dynamically serving them constantly to everyone?
Speaker 2
04:24
Well no, no, this was super, super prototype. So it was like the ads were like pool tables and PlayStation and I forget what the third 1 was.
Speaker 1
04:32
For any search.
Speaker 2
04:33
No, but in order to show enough, you had to have it in the experiment for like 30% of people, because not that many people were searching for PlayStations or whatever. And so I turned off caching for 30% of Google, which radically, like racks were melting down, all this sort of stuff. So I remember we looked at the click-through rate, and it was really low, because we just picked some copy.
Speaker 2
04:57
We hadn't done any A-B testing. We're like, would you like to buy a PlayStation now?" kind of thing. And as I recall, Marissa was like, this is not good for the user experience. And Larry Page was like, well maybe, but I could imagine click-through going up.
Speaker 2
05:12
So let's explore this a little bit more.
Speaker 1
05:14
That surprises me, because I've heard stories about banner ads, for example, in the beginning having crazy click-through rate. So why was that not working?
Speaker 2
05:22
Paul Matzkoff You know, the only thing I can think of is the copy probably sucked, it was off on the right-hand side, people probably didn't know what exactly is this thing over here. And it was kind of fun because there were like multicolor ads back then. Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
05:34
Were you like throwing in pictures and trying to make that?
Speaker 2
05:36
Paul Matzkoff No pictures, but I remember like a 1 pixel darker color boundary. Like they were really pretty ads, but I think people just didn't even know to click on them. And it turns out, having people willing to put in the A.B.
Speaker 2
05:49
Testing makes a huge difference. And the first self-service ad we got for AdWords was I think for a lobster company. Like you could buy lobsters in Maine and have them like, you know, packed in dry ice and shipped to you. And that was the point when we were like, oh, there's this whole long tail of people who want to reach people who are looking for the things that they're looking, you know, selling.
Speaker 2
06:11
Craig.
Speaker 1
06:11
Pre-social media, yeah. Paul. Totally.
Speaker 2
06:14
Did you do like a user study?
Speaker 1
06:15
Did you like call the person in Maine up? What made you choose to do this?
Speaker 2
06:20
Paul Matzkoff I hope that they got in touch with that person.
Speaker 1
06:22
Craig Dobson You'd figure it'd be like a pizza shop in San Jose. Not a lot, yeah. Paul Matzkoff Right.
Speaker 2
06:26
I really hope they got in touch and were like, did you know you were the very first 1? And I remember I went to a search conference a few years back and somebody was like, hey, I was 1 of the first AdWords advertisers and I was like, oh cool, what did you do? And he was like, it wasn't family safe.
Speaker 2
06:41
And I was like, oh, interesting. And he was talking about how he tweaked all the keywords and did all the testing, but people were willing to put in that work because you could get, you could find these little cavities where nobody else was searching, and if you found the right word, you could actually get great click-through rates and a great response. Brian.
Speaker 1
06:59
I think you see it today with YouTube, right? People realize, oh, there's nothing for this kind of flat Earth search, therefore they just fill it up.
Speaker 2
07:06
Yeah, so we used to call that the evil unicorn problem. Or at least I used to call it that. Because people come to Google and they'll search for something like flat earth, right?
Speaker 2
07:16
And there's no good answers because you're looking for the most reputable, useful results to give people. And like there's not that many legitimate folks who are like, Oh yeah, the earth's totally flat. So, but you still have to show 10 results unless you like change the interface to say you're in a, in an untrusted area, which we, we experimented with that later. And, and so like the folks who realize there are people searching for evil unicorns, everybody thinking unicorns are perfect, nice, whatever, but you can still search for evil unicorn, and then you've got to have 10 results for evil unicorn.
Speaker 2
07:48
And so it's sort of this lacuna, like a lack of information. And so when there's not high quality information, you still end up showing something. And so the folks who realize they can make flat earth content or whatever, we're filling in a gap. Paul Krugman
Speaker 1
08:02
And so at that point you're just like, hey listen, we're a common carrier to a certain extent. Whatever comes through
Speaker 2
08:08
comes through. Craig Dobson It gets really hard with common carrier and publisher and 230 and all that sort of stuff. So there were literally people who sued us because we took action on them because we considered them spammers.
Speaker 2
08:19
Like they were literally selling page rank. Like I will link to you and the amount of money is based on the amount of page rank I have. And then we took action and they were like, that's unfair. And we're like, like, wow, like we rank the search results.
Speaker 2
08:33
And so there was 1 called Search King, and the result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the First Amendment. So that was a useful court precedent. And then there was 1 called Kinderstart, where they were saying, page rank is an algorithm, and so you have no ability or right to 0 out somebody's page rank or to take action. But if you follow that to the natural logical extreme, then you'd never be able to tweak or adjust the search engine or manually say, oh, this one's spam, but we haven't caught it yet, our algorithms aren't ready yet, so we're not allowed to take action on it.
Speaker 2
09:07
And so we won that lawsuit as well. But it was super interesting to see how people thought about search, whether it was like a newspaper, or whether it was like a card catalog at a library, or like a magazine. And people just want high quality relevant results. They don't wanna delve too deeply into, I don't wanna, we tried giving people knobs, where you could tweak how reputable something would be and nobody ever wanted to.
Speaker 1
09:30
Nobody ever used it. They just click on the first 5 or whatever.
Speaker 2
09:34
Typically,
Speaker 1
09:34
yeah. So where do you fall now with things like YouTube? Where you just go deep, deep, deep, and you might not even know you're in it.
Speaker 2
09:42
So I think 1 good thing about Google, having left there several years ago now, is that the people really care about trying to do the right thing. And so trying to return high quality relevant results. And the same thing for YouTube.
Speaker 2
09:57
It's a different silo within Google, but a lot of the DNA is the same. So when you see searches for something that doesn't actually exist, and so spammers are ranking for it on YouTube, YouTube wants to take care of that. And so I think some of the recent stuff where people are getting down a rabbit hole, I'm sure that there are engineers thinking very hard about how do we solve this problem and make it work better.
Speaker 1
10:20
Peter. Okay, I could talk to you about Google back in the day for a very long time. I want to be careful. But I was curious, so being early on the web spam team and then running Web Spam.
Speaker 1
10:33
You've read these stories about content moderators overseas looking at horrible stuff. Were you exposed to that? Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 2
10:40
Yeah, I mean, yes. More so with SafeSearch, where you were trying to detect pornography and non-family safe things. And for a while, so Larry and Sergey shared an office for a long time because they were on the road, and we were tight on real estate.
Speaker 2
10:57
And so for a long time I had the cubicle right outside of Larry and Sergey's office. And this was right when I was working on SafeSearch. And so I was like, trying to see if I could find stuff that had slipped through. And if I did, I would, you know, try to tweak word weights and stuff like that.
Speaker 2
11:10
And so at some point, Colpreet, who was our first lawyer at Google, came by and he was like, hey, Hey Matt, we know you have to like look for pornography. It's part of your job. It's a vital thing that you do, but like, it kind of weirds out when visitors are coming to visit Larry and Sergey. Directly to
Speaker 1
11:27
the CEO's office. Yeah. And there's
Speaker 2
11:28
in your line of sight, It looks kind of like you're looking at porn and we know you're doing it for work, but could you put like a whiteboard up to block it? I was like, okay, I can do that. So yeah, I did end up seeing a lot of stuff, but it was a little bit of a different time.
Speaker 2
11:43
Like SafeSearch was just towards pornography And spam was more like, buy cheap Viagra, loan consolidation stuff. And so it wasn't nearly as bad as a lot of the content moderators had to deal with. There is 1 aspect though, in which once you've seen all the different ways in which people try to spam and cheat and break the rules, you can't unsee that. It's the black hat mindset.
Speaker 2
12:07
Once you realize, hey, here's a thing where people can recycle their conference badges, my mind immediately goes to, what if that's not the conference? And then people have free conference badges that they can then use for their friends on the last 2 or 3 days of a conference. You literally can't look around the world and not think about how is somebody going to abuse that system.
Speaker 1
12:26
Peter. Right, so now do you feel that people are like fundamentally evil?
Speaker 2
12:29
No. Or it's okay? So even, It was funny, whenever we were working with, there's a lot of publishers and websites that do search engine optimization or SEO. And there was a little bit of folks early on who were like, oh that's all evil, that's 100%, you're trying to manipulate things, therefore bad, therefore take action.
Speaker 2
12:48
And there was a VP of engineering, his name was Ors, who really had the right approach. He was like, look, these are small businesses, they're trying to do the best they can to make sure that they rank well because they think they have some of the best services on the internet. So we shouldn't begrudge them trying to rank well. We should give them good things that they can do, like make your site better, make it faster, make it easy to navigate.
Speaker 2
13:12
And so that was really kind of a turning point where a lot of folks who might have been antagonistic towards SEO, saw it more like, this is energy which can be channeled in a positive way. Which I think is critical, because folks are just trying to do the best thing for their business. There's a few that are bad actors. But for the most part, people just want to know, give me the ground rules.
Speaker 2
13:34
Make sure that everybody's behaving consistently by that. If there's somebody I see violating the ground rules, can I tell you about that, and will you take action on that? And so trying to make sure that people know the right positive things to work on and the right negative things to avoid, I think help diffuse a lot of the tension where it shouldn't be SEOs or websites versus Google, or a search engine, it should be working together to give the best results. Paul Wiltz
Speaker 1
13:57
Yeah, that makes sense. Another thing that's interesting about your time at Google was just how long it was. I think the average tenure now is 2 years or less
Speaker 2
14:07
at a tech company. I don't know. Yeah, I stayed there for a month short of 17 years.
Speaker 1
14:15
It's a good run. Yeah, yeah. So how did you think about your work over that long, long period?
Speaker 1
14:22
Because you came right out of a PhD, right? You didn't finish. Yeah. Maybe someday.
Speaker 2
14:29
My dad's like, You can still go back. I'm like, I don't think I'm going to go back, Dan. I'm good.
Speaker 1
14:36
In the beginning, you're an IC, right? How long was it before you were managing people? What did that whole progression look like for you?
Speaker 2
14:43
Yeah, I got to code for about 5 years before they, like in 2004, 2005. Okay, so worked on SafeSearch, worked in the ads group, and then I was on quality. Was on quality for the rest of my time at Google.
Speaker 2
14:59
And it was funny because for a while I was like, spam's going to be an issue, and it was not a popular opinion within Google. Yeah, for a long time people thought Google.
Speaker 1
15:08
David B.: Because they thought the algorithm was so good? Paul Shuffman,
Speaker 2
15:10
PhD.: Yes, they thought Google couldn't be spammed. And it was because I worked on SafeSearch and I found a loophole that I was like, oh no, oh there's going to be a problem here. Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
15:19
Yeah, so you used an example on the history of the internet podcast where someone bought an expired domain, turned it into a porn site, stuff like that.
Speaker 2
15:28
Chris Sennett Exactly, and so after that, I remember having an argument with a very early employee of Google who was like, well that's easy, you just solve expired domains and then you're done. But that doesn't take into account guest books and award programs and fake awards that you'd give just to get links to people and social engineering. And so it was almost like you could see this thing coming down the horizon, and everybody else was busy.
Speaker 2
15:51
They were working on other stuff. Google was great at the time. Like back in 2000, you'd have a hard time convincing people like there was ever going to be spam. So there was some tension there for a little while, but eventually I started working on spam.
Speaker 2
16:06
And after a little while longer, again this 1 great VP of engineering named Urs, he invited me to his office 1 day. And he was like, Matt, bearing in mind that you can't say no, how would you like to manage the web spam team? And at the time I was just a lowly engineer. I was like, oh, I guess I can't say no.
Speaker 2
16:25
So I guess I'm a manager now.
Speaker 1
16:27
Is this that you're managing tactic now for negotiations?
Speaker 2
16:30
That's such a bad tactic. Because if they realize, they can be like, or I could go work somewhere else, or I could just say no. But it actually worked out because you become less productive, but you enable so many more people to become productive.
Speaker 2
16:47
And so really kind of worked on it for the rest of my time at Google, being a manager and trying to guide and help people to partner with them to figure out how to make the quality of the search results better. Paul
Speaker 1
16:59
Wheeler If you were thrown back into Google right now, how would you be thinking about deepfakes?
Speaker 2
17:05
Oh man. So the idea that you can create a video which has somebody, you know, falsely superimposing someone else's picture is a super hard problem. Because like, in theory, okay, you could do content-aware hashes where you could say, this video is extremely similar to this other video except for these pixels.
Speaker 2
17:25
But then people can change the histogram and add some noise and add a chyron or something. So it's fundamentally a hard problem. In general with web spam, the philosophy was do as much as you can with an algorithm. Catch the residual with manual spam people who are well trained and extremely good at being able to catch things, and then use that as the training data for the next wave of algorithms.
Speaker 2
17:50
But fundamentally, when you're synthesizing new content as opposed to just republishing old content, that's a lot harder to detect. It's a tricky 1.
Speaker 1
18:00
That job is not over yet at Google.
Speaker 2
18:02
Paul Matzkoff No, and I think the main thing is just to have policies. Like if you have a good reason to believe that there's a deep fake, how do you handle that process? Because I don't think you'll be able to completely automate the detection.
Speaker 2
18:12
Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
18:13
But that's a problem already, right? With de-platforming, de-monetizing, or monetizing. It's the same issue.
Speaker 1
18:20
So after that quite amazing tenure at Google, what motivated you to join USDS?
Speaker 2
18:27
Paul Matzkoff So it was interesting. I was in Nebraska at the time with my wife because I was working part-time and and my wife had said why don't we do something fun? And I was like, okay you get a pick what's next?
Speaker 2
18:38
Yeah, and She's like, well, my family lives in Nebraska
Speaker 1
18:42
seems great.
Speaker 2
18:42
So I'm like, alright, let's try that And after like 8 or 9 months, I was like, Nebraska is wonderful, the people are really nice, but I also want to try something new for a little while.
Speaker 1
18:54
Did you go to the Berkshire meeting?
Speaker 2
18:55
I did. You did? The Berkshire Hathaway meeting, you buy 1 share of Berkshire Hathaway, which you can buy for like 140 bucks, And then you can go to this meeting and watch them grill Warren Buffett for 8 hours.
Speaker 2
19:05
And they also give you free honey bun treats and all the Dairy Queen stuff. So that was a fun April, May kind of thing to do. But it was interesting because I saw a ton of people that I really respect going to DC to try to make a difference in government. And Mikey Dickerson, who was the first guy to run the US Digital Service, had come back to Google, he'd given a talk, and talked about the impact that you could have.
Speaker 2
19:32
And so at that point, I was like, all right, something interesting is going on here. I want to see what's going on. And had an amazing 6 months. The election happened.
Speaker 2
19:43
And they needed somebody who could sort of steward the US digital service and make sure it would still be in good shape.
Speaker 1
19:49
Because the person in front of me was an appointed official.
Speaker 2
19:52
Mikey was a political appointee. And so they needed a sort of interim acting administrator. And so I was willing to fill in for that role.
Speaker 2
19:59
You stepped up. Well, and to be clear, a bunch of people stepped up. Like, yes, you know, some folks left. But at this point, something like 75% of the people who are in the US digital service joined during the Trump administration, because we've got this sort of 2 to 4 year tour of duty model.
Speaker 2
20:18
So we're not supposed to stay forever. We're supposed to come in, bring in skills from the tech industry, make systems work better inside government, and then head back out again. And so a fair number of people, there's about 10% of USCS that's been around longer than I have, so at some point I need to find the next person to hand the baton to.
Speaker 1
20:37
Peter. So can you just, everyone maybe has heard about it, but doesn't exactly know what you work on, can you just break it down?
Speaker 2
20:43
Paul. Absolutely, so The US digital service started when healthcare.gov went down, caught on fire, the website was spinning shrabnel everywhere, they'd turn on CNN to see whether the website was back up or not. And it turns out a bunch of contractors had done good work but the integration points when things were supposed to connect were not really all that well tested. And so bringing in best practices like let's get everybody in a room, try to do a blameless postmortem, let's add monitoring, site reliability, engineering practices, those kinds of things.
Speaker 2
21:16
That was what allowed healthcare.gov to make it through the enrollment period. And so after that, people said, you know, we need more technologists in government. How many hundred million dollar boondoggles do you have where you spend a bunch of money, you spend 3 years writing the requirements, then 4 more years writing the tech. And by the time you're done, it doesn't work or it doesn't work as well as you expect it.
Speaker 2
21:38
And so the US Digital Service is, sometimes we're a little like a SWAT team. When a system goes down, US Transcom has a database that's down or something like that, we try to work with them and try to figure out how to get it back up. We also do discovery sprints where we'll come in for 2 weeks and we'll say, we think this is the problem. You might think this is the problem, but it turns out over here is the bigger constraint.
Speaker 2
22:00
And then we'll do anything from months-long engagements to years-long engagements. So we've worked with USCIS to try to help immigrants become citizens faster, Veterans Affairs trying to claim health benefits and everything like that. And so it's fascinating because you are a federal employee, but you come in for a limited tour of duty anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to 4 years. And then a lot of folks head back into industry, but a surprisingly large number of them say, it turns out I'm ruined for private industry.
Speaker 2
22:32
Like, yeah, Once you have helped make a student loan wizard that literally helps your sister fix her student loan and be able to get a car and have a better life, you're like, why am I going to go work on Uber for dog walkers? Or how to deliver weed to people better, which is a fine problem to work on, but you're not saving the world if you're doing that. And so a lot of people are forming startups in civic tech, they're helping to build state digital services, they're doing consultancies, all the way down to some folks who decide to stay in government, which is really exciting because then you've got, you know, people with good emotional intelligence, hopefully good technical ability, who can say that's not the way a computer works.
Speaker 1
23:15
Oh dude, we're going to get to that. That doesn't like the whole Facebook hearing. Oh my god.
Speaker 1
23:21
But I'm curious about who makes up your team. Like do you have people like writing COBOL patches? Like how does it, what does it look like?
Speaker 2
23:30
We do have 1 guy who taught himself COBOL for fun.
Speaker 1
23:34
Really?
Speaker 2
23:34
Yeah, because there's a lot of COBOL in government. Like a bunch. And in fact, I could show you a picture of a, oh man, I won't name the agency, but There's a room where they file bugs by printing out COBOL on paper and being like, the room is sorted by line number.
Speaker 2
23:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's super scary. So we're about 1 third engineers, 1 third designers, 1 third product managers. We also have people who are procurement experts, who help decide how to buy things better. We've got an amazing talent team.
Speaker 2
24:10
It's always good to have a lawyer to help you make sure you're not. Rimas.
Speaker 1
24:12
How big is it? How many folks?
Speaker 2
24:13
We are about 180 people. And it's fascinating because you've got everything from folks who have been in government and wanted to maximize the amount of bureaucracy that they could hack, to folks who are like Facebook engineers. We had a staff software engineer come from Google.
Speaker 2
24:33
She could only come for the summer, but we were like, come on down, and let's see how much work we can get done. And it's really gratifying to see people do that. Edith Warren
Speaker 1
24:41
That's cool. So yeah, do you have a different kind of onboarding process given that you know the tour of duty is limited?
Speaker 2
24:48
Paul Shuffman Yeah. Most of the time, if you want to join the federal government, you go to a site called USAjobs.gov. We, if you're interested in joining the US digital service, go to usds.gov slash apply.
Speaker 2
25:01
And you can literally do it in 90 seconds. If your browser has autocomplete, it's like your name, email address, that kind of stuff, and a resume. So if you've got a resume ready, you just upload that guy. What happens then is, if you're a designer, designers look at your resume.
Speaker 2
25:16
If you're a product manager, product managers look at your resume. We actually do 1 sort of technical interview that's like, okay, how good of an engineer are you? Can you write some code? And then if that goes well, then we'll do a follow-up technical interview and 1 emotional intelligence interview.
Speaker 2
25:31
We don't want to hire jerks. It goes to a hiring committee that determines whether this person is minimally qualified. And then we're always hiring. We have sort of this rolling, it's not like we have batches.
Speaker 2
25:43
We're like, the application phase is always open. And it's fascinating because these folks could probably earn a little bit more money, although the government can pay up to $165,000 a year. So not a horrible salary. It's cheaper in DC than in San Francisco right now.
Speaker 2
26:02
And so it's we try to streamline the candidate experience and make sure it's not, you know, as governmenty as it as it often is. Yeah, I'm trying to join.
Speaker 1
26:11
Well, especially after like, yeah, hiring and startups and knowing that what that experience is like.
Speaker 2
26:14
Yes, very different.
Speaker 1
26:15
Yes. Let's go back to the Facebook or yeah, the tech in government. How are you guys thinking about educating people in government about how the computers actually work?
Speaker 2
26:28
Yeah. So, you know, there's Jim Polka at Code for America, which is an amazing nonprofit, I think has said, and there's a lot of people who use this phrase that government is who shows up. And so there's a, you know, there's amazing amount of passionate people on Capitol Hill and throughout government. But I'll give you 1 stat.
Speaker 2
26:47
HUD, Housing and Urban Development, has 8,000 plus employees. According to the statistics, the number of IT experts, like there's a job classification, 2210, blah blah blah, we'll just say IT people. The number of IT people under 30 at HUD is 0. So if you can get 1 good technical person to come in, it can make a huge difference.
Speaker 2
27:12
You can have a huge impact. And so a lot of the times, you might have thousands of people on Capitol Hill, but they have to be experts on a bunch of stuff. Farm bill and all kinds of stuff. And so technology is not necessarily their core expertise.
Speaker 2
27:30
And so getting some technologists who are willing to come and say, you know, this particular product is actually snake oil. Or we evaluated this and it looks great. People are, even if it's just the process of selecting a contractor. Like The dirty little secret is the government doesn't do as much work as the contractors who they bring on board to do stuff.
Speaker 2
27:55
And so if you get a bad contractor, or if you don't know what good looks like, because they write Agile, Agile, Agile all over the requests for procurement. Yeah, Scrum. I'm a certified Scrum Master 9000, or whatever it is, which I'm sure there's great, I'm not saying it's bad to be certified. Some of my best friends are Scrum Masters, that's right.
Speaker 2
28:15
But it is, I'm going to start using that line if you don't mind. But it's also the case that like for 1 procurement we said okay, instead of writing a pile of paper that says how good you are, why don't you submit some code to us and we're going to have engineers actually grade the quality of your code. And so if you get better contractors, you get better results whenever the finished work product is done. Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
28:37
And have you figured out a way to give someone a feedback loop that's fast enough that makes them feel like they're having an impact? Because like, all right, let's just say I'm like, I'm amazing. I'm the best software engineer at Google.
Speaker 1
28:49
I'm going to go join HUD. Am I not just going to be pushing a rock up a hill for my entire career? Paul Willsher
Speaker 2
28:55
Okay, so there are definitely days where you feel like in government you are pushing a rock up a hill. We sometimes use the metaphor of paper cuts. So it took us 4 years to get access to Slack, for example.
Speaker 2
29:09
Get permission to be able to use Slack, at least within our particular group. But Every so often you have those breakthrough days where you're like, oh we actually convinced this person that this policy doesn't help people and actually hurts people. Or, yeah. And the
Speaker 1
29:27
scale of the impact is large.
Speaker 2
29:29
It's huge. Like If you can shift the ship of state by 1 degree, that's tens of thousands of veterans who are getting benefits, or tens of thousands of small businesses who are getting certified faster and more accurately. And so yeah, there's hard days, but it is super deeply meaningful.
Speaker 2
29:47
And if you absorb a few of the paper cuts, you make it a little bit easier for the next person. So like if by the time they show up, they can get a good laptop on day 1 that has access to some modern tools. They're like, oh, you know what? Working for government's not that bad.
Speaker 2
30:01
I'll take the next 3 paper cuts and then the person behind me will have an easier job.
Speaker 1
30:06
That's great. Yeah, I remember hearing that VA story about you need to downgrade your version of Acrobat to use this product.
Speaker 2
30:12
It's so sad. But, so, and I have to say, the 1 thing that I try to avoid, and I've not done it well so far in this interview, is giving more credit to our federal partners. Because what you find is people who know the right answer, or who are deeply dedicated, committed, passionate, but for whatever reason don't always have the power to like get the right answer to the right level or, or to push through some, some regulation or, or, you know, or overcome some resistance.
Speaker 2
30:42
And so if our goal is to come in and find those amazing people who are trying their darndest to try to make sure that the right thing happens and give a little bit of extra wind beneath their wings, like that's a fantastic model. Because we're not the world experts on how this part of government works. Paul Matzkoff We're also
Speaker 1
30:59
180 people, so it's like you couldn't. Exactly.
Speaker 2
31:02
And that's why just being able to find the leverage points where we can enable good things to happen and work with and collaborate with federal partners who are the true subject matter experts and the real heroes in the story, That's when things really go well. Paul
Speaker 1
31:16
Matzkoff Okay, so sometimes you kind of drop in and you're like a PM basically, making that happen. Okay, gotcha. All right, there are a bunch of questions for you from the internets, so we're going to just knock some out.
Speaker 1
31:28
Okay, so Michael Wang asks, how does USDS decide whether to outsource something to a private company or build the software in-house? Paul
Speaker 2
31:35
Bateman Yeah, that's a great question because it kind of goes back to this last thing we talked about. Fundamentally, that's going to be the federal partner that we work with that's making that decision. And so it's like, Do you buy, do you build, can you use something open source or off the shelf, commercial technology?
Speaker 2
31:51
And so it's rarely the case that US digital services making that precise call. It's more like we might do a discovery sprint, dig into something for 2 weeks and be like, you know what, this off the shelf software as a service product will work just fine for the 90% case. And then sometimes it's like, no, you have to build your own grants management software, but we'll help you find a good contractor, or help vet them, or help make sure that the contract is written well, those kinds of things. And so if you can just buy something commercially or repurpose some open source, great.
Speaker 2
32:25
You should not reinvent the wheel. But if you've got a really unique need, then US Digital Service is there to try to help figure out, okay, how do we fill that with the minimum amount of work and money?
Speaker 1
32:38
Cool. Alright, next question. Spencer Clark asks, it would seem that the government is far behind private industries technology. To what extent is this true and what can be done about it?
Speaker 1
32:48
In addition to that, how should we gauge the progress of institutions like the USDS?"
Speaker 2
32:54
That is such a good question. So I sometimes joke, and this is not intended to be a knock against, again, the amazing people who are trying their very best to make things happen in government. But I sometimes joke that government technology is frozen in 1995.
Speaker 2
33:10
And the reason that I pick that date is because bug bounties, which are just an idea of like, if I find a security hole, I'm going to alert a company, and the company gives you money and says, thank you. Bug bounties were invented in 1995 by Netscape, which was a browser that came before Firefox, for those of you who weren't born then. Paul Matzkoff Yeah, exactly. And then the federal government had never done bug bounties before 2016.
Speaker 2
33:38
So the Defense Digital Service, which is an amazing group of individuals at the Pentagon, ran something called Hack the Pentagon, and later Hack the Army, Hack the Air Force, Hack the Marines, they've done a ton of bug bounties. And it increases the security of our country in all kinds of different ways. It's cheaper, faster, you find more security holes. Bug bounties are a fantastic, you look at your quiver of tools, it's a great tool.
Speaker 2
34:04
So bug bounties were not put into place until 2016. Now the government is sort of thinking more about vulnerability disclosure policies, bug bounties, that kind of stuff. Now we're kind of at a phase where I've seen, even just in the 3 years that I've been in government, a lot of folks like, okay, how do I move to the cloud? How do I make sure that it's secure?
Speaker 2
34:23
So if you think Amazon Web Services was introduced in 2006-ish, if you can, in three-ish years, go from 1995 to 2006, instead of going 1 year per year, you're doing like 3 years per year. And again, not to claim that that is all the work of the US Digital Service, because there's amazing groups. There's 18F, which is a group in the General Services Administration. There's a ton of super leaning forward chief information officers, CIOs.
Speaker 2
34:54
So a whole bunch of people all collectively pushing the government means that, you know, if we're moving through bug bounties, through on-premises email, on to people thinking about how do I move my stuff to the cloud? My gauge of progress is, hey, we're only 13 years behind instead of 23 years behind. So that's pretty good progress from our standpoint. Paul Atkinson That
Speaker 1
35:19
seems awesome. And in particular, your progress. How do you rank yourself there?
Speaker 2
35:25
Paul Shuffman Yeah, I think the fact that we are, the US Jail Service is still here, we're still working on projects that matter, we're hiring, and we're able to have an impact. For me, that's like, if we've got good work to do, that's the primary measure of success that I care about. Brian.
Speaker 2
35:42
Okay, cool.
Speaker 1
35:44
Steven Sturgis asks, with GANs, general adversarial networks, getting more and more powerful, is the USDS thinking about the future of data authenticity?
Speaker 2
35:53
That is such a good question. And it makes me put my web spam hat on. So you can use a GAN to make a fake person that doesn't actually exist.
Speaker 2
36:01
And so a picture of someone that looks completely real, but is just invented by a computer. Which is a huge problem for someone like Spam, because you can astroturf comments and be like, I am Bob Smith, and here's a picture that doesn't look like any other. You haven't just stolen someone else's picture. So it makes it harder to figure out, is this comment authentic?
Speaker 2
36:21
And is this data authentic? Luckily, the profit motive to spam government, there is some. But Primarily the sorts of spam that we've seen are things like fake comments on the FCC or various other places. The Wall Street Journal had a good article about that.
Speaker 2
36:40
So typically the US Digital Service is more like we're implementers. If there's a system or process that needs to be examined, we are happy to help. There's this amazing group called the Office of the Federal CIO. And they think more about policy.
Speaker 2
36:56
So what should the federal government data strategy look like? What should the federal cloud strategy look like? Those kinds of things. And so how much open data should people have?
Speaker 2
37:09
And so I think all of those are hugely important. Data authenticity, at least as far as with people spamming or creating fake data is a little bit outside the scope of the kinds of things that we typically see. We do see more movement toward data interoperability. So that might be a way where you could be like, okay, this seems like fake data because it's like 2 standard deviations out from what the typical stuff seems like.
Speaker 2
37:36
So you could do those kinds of things. But we haven't, honestly, the kinds of problems we run into at the US Digital Service are more like, here's a paper process, can we make it electronic? Here's an electronic process, but it sucks. Can we make it like private industry would do where you can do it on your phone and it's no obvious glitches?
Speaker 2
37:55
And there's so much work to be done just on that sort of non-functional stuff.
Speaker 1
37:58
Paul Matzkoff Before you hit bleeding edge GAN stuff. Yeah, that makes so much sense. All right, we have another Google question.
Speaker 1
38:05
So John Doherty asks, how difficult was it to communicate Google's algorithm changes and evolving SEO best practices without leaking new spam tactics?
Speaker 2
38:14
Paul Shifrin Oh man, Good question from John. So it was interesting because I would go to search conferences and a lot of Googlers would go to search conferences and we would pick up, you know, what are people talking about as far as Black Hat tips and tricks or what are they talking about on search forums and stuff like that. So we got a lot out of that participation.
Speaker 2
38:34
We would learn and then we had to be careful about how we communicated. But at a very high level, my goal, and I think a lot of how Google communicated, the goal was to say, look, here's where the puck is, here's where the puck is going to be, move toward where the puck is going to be. Make a site that works on, like we were saying, you need to have a mobile site, way early before everybody realized mobile was going to be such a big thing. You need your site to be fast.
Speaker 2
39:02
You need to think about, are you practicing good design, those sorts of things. And so it usually wasn't that hard, because you're like, look, most sites, if you do a site audit, there's things where you could just say, move toward this mountaintop and you'll be good. There were definitely a couple of signals or dimensions that I had to be careful about. I talked to a partner at YC at demo day and they were sort of saying, I just have to be 100% honest because there's like 5,000 founders, I can't keep them all in mind.
Speaker 2
39:36
And so if you're honest, you don't keep track of what you're saying. So there might be times when I could, I did my best to always be honest, but I might, you know, frame things in a way that's like, here's the positive way to talk about it and leave out, you know, and you could probably make some money in the short term doing it this way.
Speaker 1
39:56
Right.
Speaker 2
39:56
But it historically wasn't too bad. It
Speaker 1
39:58
wasn't that big of a deal. Okay. Vanman0254
Speaker 2
40:05
totally a real person. Exactly.
Speaker 1
40:06
Totally legit. I completely trust this comment. How can smart tech folks better contribute to regulatory and policy discussions in government?
Speaker 2
40:15
It's a great question. I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening at the federal level, but there's also a lot of stuff happening at the state level and even down municipal city county sort of stuff. So what I would say is, you know, show up, show up to the city council meeting, show up to the state legislator, and say, I can help answer some policy questions.
Speaker 2
40:37
There's a guy who literally was buying DVDs of the Virginia state legislature and their transcripts and getting them turned into actual transcripts and then just making that available to more people. And so there's like all these grassroots ways to like encourage people to understand how government works. The other thing I would say is like, smart tech folks, you should run for office. We need people who, we don't have that many computer scientists who are elected officials, especially at the federal level.
Speaker 2
41:11
So it's hard, I'm sure, but it is a thing that is possible to do. And so, especially at the state level or at the federal level, you would be amazed how much of a difference it makes to just show up and be like, hey, I'm a resource. If you want to hear about X, Y, or Z, I'm kind of the world expert on this part. So if you have questions about whatever, happy to help.
Speaker 2
41:35
Paul Matzkoff
Speaker 1
41:36
Yeah, cool. I mean, also not for nothing, there are a bunch of government tech startups that have gone through YC, based in DC
Speaker 2
41:42
and other places.
Speaker 1
41:45
You can do this in a for-profit way. It affects
Speaker 2
41:47
the government. Paul Sherman And there's a whole new generation of contractors that are like, hey, we see a bunch of opportunities. So yes, you can go the non-profit route, you can go into government, you can offer your resources to free, you can be a consultant.
Speaker 2
42:00
But you can also form a company. People have started to nah-rah-rah-rah-rah on healthcare and there's so much redundant waste in there that it's like a decade's worth or a generation's worth of stuff to be done there. There's a bunch of stuff to be done in government as well.
Speaker 1
42:17
Totally. Ronak Shah asks, well they say, hi Matt, nice
Speaker 2
42:22
to hear you on the podcast. Hey Ronak.
Speaker 1
42:25
What's your best pitch to high-performing startups in the Bay Area to adopt more of a human-centered design? It says something that the government has been moving towards surprisingly well, but that fast-moving startups have neglected. Yeah.
Speaker 2
42:38
You know, there's this myth that the lore about Steve Jobs was always like, well, if I ask people what they want, you know, they'll tell me they want faster horses instead of cars or something. And so yes, there is room for the occasional fifth standard deviation genius who's like, I know they think they want this, but they really need this,
Speaker 1
42:58
you know,
Speaker 2
42:59
an iPod or whatever. But most of us are not Steve Jobs. We're just not.
Speaker 2
43:06
And so if you talk to users, you can only get so far off base. It's amazing to me. I went to someplace recently and I was filling out the register on the iPad in the lobby kind of thing, and they asked for an email address, but they don't have the at sign. You've got to go hunt down and press shift, shift, shift to find the at sign.
Speaker 2
43:27
And it's just like watching a user doing the journey map, seeing what the pain points are. People underestimate how important it is to be beloved. Like just goodwill. Like 1 of the things that people love the most about Google was the logo.
Speaker 2
43:44
Right? And it's like, that's not hard to do, but it's like, it's worth putting a few people on coming up with cool, fun Pac-Man logos. You don't think it contributes to your bottom line, but it kind of does. Like whenever Zuckerberg got testified and grilled in front of Congress, the market cap went down by $129 billion in 1 day.
Speaker 2
44:04
And I always had a hard time at Google saying, okay, yes we should talk to webmasters and publishers and SEOs, search engine optimizers, but how do you know how many people should be allocated to that? It should be at least 1, right? The first 1 helps, but then you don't know how far you go until you get to diminishing returns. So we always had a hard time quantifying what is the value of goodwill.
Speaker 2
44:27
And I think losing $129 billion in market cap in 1 day is like 1 really good measure of goodwill about whether people like you or not. And so like don't wait until the congressional hearings roll around.
Speaker 1
44:41
But this is a dangerous conversation, right? Because I think a lot of tech companies are like, oh, okay, how do I get out there more without offending the other side? Right.
Speaker 1
44:49
So they're just like wading through very carefully. It's like, oh, if I make just to make it very simple. Yeah. Like if I make the right like me by allowing, you know, gun videos and whatever gun has, whatever The left will hate me.
Speaker 1
45:01
So how do you do that?
Speaker 2
45:03
So I would say yes, there's like 2% of issues that might be hyper-partisan and divide people and polarize people. But there's like 98% of issues that are like, I was literally trying to buy insurance the other day. I had 2 websites open.
Speaker 2
45:20
And the first website was like, okay, step 1, we're going to need you to make a login. It's going to be this password, 6 to 30 characters, da da da da da da. The second website was like, tell us your personal information. Tell us your credit card number.
Speaker 2
45:33
Which 1 do you think I gave my $400 worth of insurance money to? The second 1 that was super easy and no pain points. And you could literally see, 1 was like 1980s style static websites and the other 1 was like hero images and cool stuff. But design is not just what is pretty, of course it's not, it is thinking about the user and how to make sure that they have a good experience.
Speaker 2
45:57
And I honestly think that is like a secret competitive advantage. Whenever you talk to a random company and they think about, what is my net promoter score? And yes, net promoter scores have their own issues. But if you're not thinking about how much your customers like you, you probably have a competitor who is thinking about that.
Speaker 1
46:16
Paul Adamson Totally. I mean it's so much that it's a cliche at YC, but we basically shove people out the door to go talk to their users.
Speaker 2
46:22
Paul Shuffling Yeah. And we see that with search engine optimization as well. If you talk to 5 users and say, what would you type to find this page?
Speaker 2
46:32
Or, here's your problem, how would you type it? Like you will be radically surprised by the kind of words they use. You know, is it a USB drive, thumb drive, you know, USB disk, like this kind of stuff. So if you've got a friend who's afraid to insert, you know, a USB drive into their computer, you know, you got to think about why are they afraid?
Speaker 2
46:51
What makes them afraid? What kind of words are they using? All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1
46:54
Do you have an opinion on the size of your data set? This is like a constant debate among some folks.
Speaker 2
47:01
I mean, I feel like the first 9 or 10 people you talk to get you the biggest amount of value. The team that we have at Veterans Affairs has literally talked to 5,000 veterans. Now that's over a course of like 4 years, right?
Speaker 2
47:16
But I mean, we built 1 feature and it was, so if you've been discharged for like other than honorable reasons, so traumatic brain injury, PTSD, don't ask, don't tell, whatever, it's really hard to get your paper upgraded. Because you have to, it depends on the service, you might have to fill out a form, you might have to send it to VA or DOD, Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense. Paul Anderson What
Speaker 1
47:39
does paper upgraded mean?
Speaker 2
47:40
Chris Sennett So that you can get an honorable discharge. So that you're eligible for health benefits and all sorts of other stuff. And it was crazy because we launched it, people love it, and somebody was like, well who told you to build this?
Speaker 2
47:57
Where does this fit into the software development life cycle, and the enterprise planning, whatever? And the answer was, the veterans told us to build this. And so it took 1 person, her name was Natalie by the way, taking the ball and pushing really hard, and she got this amazing group of folks who helped her. And now that community of veterans has like a tool that they really want.
Speaker 2
48:19
And it is it is amazing. Like, yep, the first 10 veterans you talk to are the most helpful, but the 5000 will still help you make your product better.
Speaker 1
48:30
Yeah, I remember 1 time I was at a post office in Japan and they had a bunch of different grade glasses tied to the stand where you filled it out. And it's like, this is so perfect. Wow.
Speaker 1
48:40
It's like you would never think about it until you see the 400th person like leave their glasses there. Yes.
Speaker 2
48:45
And you're
Speaker 1
48:45
like, oh, this is what they want right here.
Speaker 2
48:46
Paul Matzko, Ph.D. Yes, and it's crazy to me that there are some companies that people love. You know, Vanguard or TiVo or pick your favorite, right?
Speaker 2
48:57
And typically they love them because they delighted them in some way, or it can just be a lot of people like Google because it's just like I show up, it's always up, I get the answers I need, it's fast, it is as relevant as I think humans can reasonably achieve or whatever and then I leave. And just the sheer like being able to deliver over 2 decades now a product that just works and then gets out of your way and doesn't annoy you, doesn't show pop-up ads or whatever, that is a way to engender a lot of goodwill with people.
Speaker 1
49:27
Yeah, I mean just thoughtful. It doesn't have to be cute for it to be thoughtful.
Speaker 2
49:32
Right, whimsy is maybe good, but delight or just Caring for the user is huge. Yeah
Speaker 1
49:40
All right, Adam Hoffman asks What are legislators the government and the general populace populace most getting wrong and how they conceptualize the Internet's?
Speaker 2
49:49
Oh, man that is such a good question. I'm not sure I have a great answer. I mean, most people are not at the level of like Ted Stevens was where he was like, the Internet is just a series of tubes, you know, like People have a more sophisticated conceptualization now.
Speaker 2
50:05
I think, you know, the internet is a huge big place and you've got everything from great actors to bad actors. A lot of the times, the kinds of times when people like wanna pass a law or something to forbid something on the internet, you can just say, like, well what if somebody were doing it offline? How would you treat it? And a lot of the same metaphors apply.
Speaker 2
50:25
The other thing is, you don't need to specify the specific mechanism. You don't need to say you can fax something. Because if you bake into code or into law that this has to be faxed, that's going to affect things for the next 30 years until there's a new law that supersedes it. And so like baking in the idea of what you want, but not hard coding the specific technologies that are used, are a little more likely to make something evergreen.
Speaker 2
50:53
So that it's just like the data can be electronically transmitted. And then you don't care if it's via fax or chat or whatever. Or protocol buffers or JSON. You're not hard coding something to a specific technology.
Speaker 2
51:08
I think that's probably the best I can offer on that 1.
Speaker 1
51:12
Craig.
Speaker 2
51:12
Okay, all right,
Speaker 1
51:13
it makes sense. Next question, Rafael Ferreira asks, is it possible to live without Google? I think there are some interesting questions like beneath this though.
Speaker 1
51:24
So he says, how do you think Google affected people in searching for answers and content now that everything is just in 1 click?
Speaker 2
51:31
That's such a good question because yeah, people lived without Google at least up until 1998, right? Then tens of thousands of years. But now I've been to a restaurant up in Toronto where they literally have a little indentation where you both put your phone in and then you put the wooden thing on the...
Speaker 2
51:50
It's like
Speaker 1
51:50
a Faraday cage kind
Speaker 2
51:51
of thing? Yeah. Whoa.
Speaker 2
51:52
And it's like, it tucks your phone away where you have to be present with the person. And it was hilarious because I went to a dinner that was at that restaurant and like 3 or 4 times during dinner, I was like, oh well I can just look up when the Eiffel Tower was invented or whatever. But the food plate is sitting on the little phone holder and so you're not able to get to your phone. But at the same time, I do think that we're a little more, I feel like my attention span has gone down.
Speaker 2
52:21
You don't have time for boredom anymore. Instead you just hop on Twitter. When you have 5 minutes to waste, Twitter is a great way to waste 35 minutes.
Speaker 1
52:30
I see it oftentimes with friends. I did it myself too. Like online dating as an example.
Speaker 1
52:35
You get in this like eternal optimization problem. Oftentimes you don't think like, oh I have to do a full load out if I'm gonna load something else in here. But you see people just like, oh, I can get someone who's like 10% more funny or more attractive or something. Same with restaurants, right?
Speaker 2
52:52
You're at
Speaker 1
52:52
this place like, ah, it could be better.
Speaker 2
52:53
It could
Speaker 1
52:54
be a cooler phone holding thing.
Speaker 2
52:57
Well, and it's strange to me that, You know, there's somebody who just wrote a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone in 30 Days. So you start by- Brian D. Rubinstein Oh, okay.
Speaker 1
53:05
Are you still doing that,
Speaker 2
53:05
by the way? Paul A. Rubinstein It failed horribly.
Speaker 2
53:07
I tried that as a 30 day challenge. I still have my phone, so I clearly didn't break up that much. But just like, I have been trying to spend a little more time being active on weekends instead of being on my computer all the time. I've actually lost like 5 pounds doing that.
Speaker 2
53:22
So I'm like, yeah, we could all step away and do a little forest bathing or that kind of thing as opposed to just like you spend 3 hours on the computer and then you're like, what did I actually accomplish?
Speaker 1
53:33
Yep.
Speaker 2
53:34
So, so I think this is kind of putting their finger right on the pulse, which is like, maybe the pendulum will swing the other way. Maybe we'll be a little bit more mindful and like, okay, I will do this thing with the computer and then I'll put the computer away and talk to a friend or visit with somebody.
Speaker 1
53:51
Hopefully.
Speaker 2
53:52
We'll see. We'll see. Meanwhile, all the dark patterns in the world and all the infinite scrolls indicate no way.
Speaker 2
54:02
I did use PyHole to block most of my time-wasting sites. So like I have to like...
Speaker 1
54:08
Have you stuck to it? Do you open the browser on your phone and then
Speaker 2
54:12
cheat? I do. So I like have to turn off Wi-Fi to like be able to access Twitter now. But it helps, because then you're like, you think at least for a second before you get back on there.
Speaker 1
54:23
I like Grayscale. Grayscale makes your phone terrible. It's so boring.
Speaker 2
54:27
You take a picture and you're like, I don't know if it's a good picture or not. Yeah.
Speaker 1
54:31
And also just taking time off you like, you know, I've gone away for like a week been off offline And it's shocking how quickly you can like batch process at all When but then when you think about it's like wait, I probably spent like 10 hours a week in email But then I just did a whole week of email in 1 hour. Yeah, like why am I refreshing this constant?
Speaker 2
54:47
Yeah, totally it feels like You know with the latest version of the iPhone, and with the latest version of Android, the pendulum's starting to swing the other way. Like, digital well-being, those sort of features, I think that's super cool. Matt O'Leary
Speaker 1
55:01
Yeah, it's exciting. Okay, so Tim Woods asks, which job was more fun and why?
Speaker 2
55:07
Brian Kardell Oh, that is not fair. I love all my jobs. Okay, so at Google, you could get a haircut and oil change and do your laundry on site and see Colin Powell.
Speaker 2
55:25
It was a great place. It was a ton of fun. The people were phenomenally talented. So on a sheer superficial fun level, Google's pretty fun.
Speaker 2
55:37
But I gotta say, working at the US Digital Service, often hard, often difficult, often frustrating, off the charts meaningful. There's a lot of people who say happiness is not this hedonism kind of did you enjoy your day, and how much candy did you eat? It's like, did you work on something that you're going to feel good about on your deathbed kind of stuff? So they're radically different, and I would not have been able to do the job at the US Digital Service without my time at Google and I'm incredibly grateful for it.
Speaker 2
56:09
And a ton of people work hard to make Google a fun place and a great place to work. But man, the people at the U S diddle service are folks who are just, incredibly noble and will sacrifice and will wake up every day and try to sometimes push a rock up a hill, and a lot of days the rock just comes back down 90% of the way. So that kind of perseverance and seeing people willing to do that in order to try to make services work better for the American public, it is super inspiring. Fundamentally, they're just different, though.
Speaker 2
56:46
Paul Willsher-Yee
Speaker 1
56:47
I Say all else equal in some crazy alternate reality where Google salary and USGS salary equalizes. Do you think there would be a swing? Because I mean purpose is super important, right?
Speaker 1
56:58
You see even these people who go for early retirement, they need to do something. You have to do something with your time. Do you think it's really a salary difference that draws people there?
Speaker 2
57:08
Yeah, salary is part of it. I've heard people say, why on earth do you have to take a drug test, which you do if you wanna join the US Jail Service, Or why do I have to move to DC? The summers there are hot and humid and they suck.
Speaker 2
57:18
All good feedback. I'm like, if we can solve some of those problems, we would solve those. I hear from a lot, a lot of people who are looking for more mission and purpose right now. Like if you think about the Me Too movement, some of the stuff affecting the tech industry, people don't always feel good to admit which company they're working for now.
Speaker 2
57:39
Or they don't feel good to say, yeah, I'm just making a little bit more money for this particular billionaire. Or I'm adding infinite scrolling so that people spend more time in my game or my app or something like that. And so it is super interesting to me. If I go to a random conference like XOXO, which is a neat design conference, and I'm like, have you considered government service?
Speaker 2
58:03
The hit rate is incredibly high. It might not be the right time for that person. They might want to work at a different level of government, or they might have certain political proclivities. But a large fraction of people are like, no that's on my list at some point.
Speaker 2
58:19
Maybe I was talking to somebody earlier today who was like, for right now I need to earn a little more salary, but in 2 years or in 4 years I would love to do this. To the point where they were like, let me come shadow you for a little while. And yeah, so it's really inspiring to see that, that a lot of folks are like, and if you think about it, there's folks who have student loans, who are a veteran, or their mom or dad is a veteran, almost everybody interacts with the government. And almost everybody sees ways that those interactions could be better.
Speaker 1
58:54
Peter. Well, as I told you before we started recording, I just interacted with the USCIS.
Speaker 2
58:58
I
Speaker 1
58:59
have some opinions about the product. Paul. Right.
Speaker 2
59:02
Okay, so a lot of folks are like, I am not the world's 10x best engineer, can I still contribute something to government? And as we were saying before you started recording, a lot of the stuff that we do at the US Digital Service is not rocket science. It's like, hey, show me the status of my claim online.
Speaker 2
59:19
So I know, do I need to wait 2 years for my disability claim, or am I gonna get helped in 2 months? And like, you know, adding a progress bar to see where you are in the process, or making a form work on a phone. A lot of people have those skills. So if you're listening right now, you can do a 6 month tour.
Speaker 2
59:40
You can get a leave if you're at a big company for 6 months and not have to give up all your stock options or stuff like that. That's what I did. I signed up for a 6 month tour and that was 3 years ago. And so we do practice commitment escalation full disclosure.
Speaker 2
59:55
But it is also 100 percent the case that there is good and there is bad.
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