Sahil Lavingia — an engineer, tech startup founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce platform for content creators
Thanks for the article, now I know what kind of person leads Gumroad: A DOGE lackey.
Edit:
Lavingia wrote that he wanted to work at DOGE to make an impact, noting that he previously canvassed for Bernie Sanders’ presidential run in 2016.
And he has no political backbone.
WIRED previously reported on the alarm bells Lavingia and his work set off for VA employees worried about DOGE’s lack of understanding of the agency and disregard for normal procedures.
“In meetings with the Office of the CTO, I discovered ambitious ongoing software projects like reducing veterans’ benefits claims processing from 133 days to under a week,” wrote Lavingia. “I also learned that several of VA’s code repos were already open-source, and the world’s first electronic health record system, VistA, was built by VA employees over 40 years ago.”
And he is an idiot to boot, with no prior knowledge of the agency he tried to trim down.
That last part: Yep, x100.
A whole lot of these newer techbro types are pretty much just script kiddies: They know one, maybe two languages and have their favorite libraries, and thats it.
They don’t bother to investigate why anything exists the way it does before they start ‘disrupting’ it… which very often results in just a bunch of actual service disruptions, which they then patch up with their new favorite language/library, making more confusing, poorly or undocumented spaghetti.
These idiots very likely couldn’t even pass a job interview to be hired as an actual employee for the actual org they are taking a hatchet to as essentially outside contractors…
But, American tech culture is such that management generally never listens to in house coders that actually know the systems, they prefer to hire outside contractors who have a marketing department and charismatic (read: wildly unrealistic) VP of Sales, not realizing they are getting themselves trapped into a much more expensive cycle of dependancy irt constantly needing contractors.
Now with DOGE, they’re basically a hostile force of ‘contractors’ that more resemble a cyberpunk style hostile takeover… but this culture of worshipping massively overhyped contractors / serial start up types, with more money and confidence than sense… thats a big part of how we got to this point.
They don’t bother to investigate why anything exists the way it does before they start ‘disrupting’ it…
Chesterton’s Fence
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Don’t change something until you understand why it is there in the first place.
Perhaps ironically, I first learned of GK Chesterton via the inclusion of some snippets of The Man Who Was Thursday… in Deus Ex.
Hey game devs, want some tips for immersion? Just generally good singleplayer game design?
Notice some of the little things, or fundamental design concepts that DX does, even back 20 years ago:
Idle animation loops of just basic breathing. Adds immersion, but doesn’t feel as… formulaic, predictable, pre-scripted, as an NPC cycling through the same set of idle animations, or just… not having any.
Location based damage and healing.
Meaningfully different difficulty modes that result in the player changing their gameplay style, not just making there be 10x as many enemies with 10x as much health.
You can have a regenerating health/shield… but it only works situationally, and is actually costly in terms of requiring actual resource management and thus forethought.
Levels/Missions/Quests that can be approached and completed via a variety of gameplay styles that mesh fairly well with your player’s customizable, modular build.
Skill system and inventory system that actually rewards and encourages off the beaten path exploration… but can accomplish this without a minimap or some kind of giant glowing waypoint on your hud… but also, does not strictly require the completion of a multitude of very low effort, formulaic, boring ‘sub quests’.
Dialogue choice/tree system not based on a speech or charisma skill… but instead based on what the player actually does or does not know due to prior gameplay… and dialogue choices/paths that actually result in different outcomes, not just 3 ways of saying yes, one way of saying no, and all 4 of those tend to result in the same actual outcome.
Note how you can capture the feeling of an immerisve and expansive fictional world… without actually having to fully model a huge empty world that will end up being largely empty and boring, unless you are also very good at procedurally generating a whole lot of your game.
… I could go on.
No, DX isn’t literally perfect in everyway, but good lord, if you want to make an FPS or even TPS game that is single player and maybe has a multiplayer component… probably worth doing your own case study of DX.
WTF is Gumroad? A me-too rehash of a million other shitty e-commerce sites?
Yo, picture this: Gumroad is like the Gumtree for Silkroad
Having worked with lots of government departments (in Canada, but the principle is the same), basically all government “inefficiency” is caused by high accountability to the public. Governments have more guardrails on their activity than privately-controlled organizations, much more transparency, and much less discretion to jettison their obligations. Otherwise, government is just as efficient, or inefficient, as any other large institution. There’s no magic energy field that makes government somehow worse at everything just because it’s the government.
It’s also very funny to hear startup people talk about inefficiency as if startups don’t have a literal 98% failure rate. We would crucify our governments if they took risks like that, even though that’s apparently how you create value.
Regardless, it’s always been clear that these people are either too ignorant to understand, or too dishonest to admit, that their definition of inefficiency is just “things I don’t like.” It would be like if I pointed at the Pentagon budget and said that it represents $800B in government inefficiency. I do believe that money could be spent better elsewhere, but I’m not a child so I understand that it’s being spent more or less exactly how the decisionmakers want it spent.
Coupled with the fact that for decades the American federal workforce has been lambasted as lazy, inefficient, and a downright drain on society by the right-wing media, is it any wonder that the christofacists that are currently in charge have an overwhelming disdain for federal employees?
Even most of the general population at least partially feels this way, “Good enough for government work” is a common phrase I hear. Like every large corporation, you are going to have those that are lazy, incompetent, or negligent, that’s inescapable. But by and large the government is filled with people who have dedicated their lives in the civilian service of the American people, usually accepting less pay as opposed to their private counterparts.
Cutting fraud, waste, and abuse is a good thing in theory, but the government already has means and methods for this, not the least of which is their own employees, who know that we are using public money, collected from our fellow citizens(and ourselves!), and entrusted to us to make the best use. It is genuinely frustrating and disheartening to see the people we work for day in and day out assume the worst about us, and then vote for the corrupt morons that are now running the government. They complain about fraud, waste, and abuse, AND LOOK AT WHO YOU JUST VOTED INTO OFFICE!!
Sorry, it’s just so frustrating to be treated this way, to be looked at as part of the problem, when I go to work, to do stuff to help my neighbors and family so they can have a functioning government.
Hello, fellow government employee. You are seen and you are loved. 🤗
Indeed, inefficiency means everything has checks and balances, which counters corruption.
The most efficient form of government is a dictatorship.
How much does everyone else have to suffer while these children rediscover government?
Rabid libertarian encounters the benefits of basic governmental functions
MAGA meets reality
I’ve seen and heard similar news items popping up recently.
If only DOGE would have simply proceeded by cutting all of its own staff and funding.
These people are so disrespectful to everyone already working in government. People who already wanted government to be efficient and have been working for years to make it happen.
It’s almost as if people don’t just wake up in the morning and go “Hehe hehe now I get to turn on the Do Evil Inefficiency Dial at work!” or something.
*worked
It’s like “spaghetti code.” A 50/50 whether the rewrite will actually improve performance
Of course there is spaghetti code. It represents the mass of exceptions on exceptions lobbied for over the years by rich folks and businesses. Tax everyone the same at a simple rate and most of this goes away.
