There’s nothing sacred about the relationship between employers and employees. If you think something is horribly wrong it’s your prerogative if you want to protest. You’ll probably have to eat the consequences though.
Lemme tell you about a client who confronted his therapist in 2019 about how using non-clinical political personalities as reference points was eroding the feeling of trust - and also that pathologizing public entities without clinical access projects weak professional ethics.
And six years later the same client said “I don’t care anymore, say whatever you like, and I will explain how you may be projecting your personal fears on me.”
The fact that Recall data and screenshots are only protected at the file system level reinforces the reality that Windows lacks user-centered privacy and security. Microsoft is content to rest their laurels instead on system level control.
It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.
That's the last thing I'd want my government spending time and money on. Govs can't even build apartment buildings without being half a decade late and 2x over budget, let alone extremely complex software.
If you start to look at the purpose of government as being to distribute tax dollars to themselves / campaign contributors / friends, rather than to serving the common good and the will of the people, things start to make a lot more sense. I think government can be to solution to a lot of problems IFF that government is actually responsive to voters. Here in the U.S. our political parties and politicians work quite hard to ensure this is not the case.
Hell no, tech is a really hard job, and the legacy in-house software I've seen the french public companies use were definitely a machine to convert heaps of tax money into mediocre software that became obsolete a few years later. A tax-to-tech-debt pipeline.
The tech market makes progress through booms and busts, hype cycles, and bankruptcies. The government can't afford that, and it should not.
The taxpayers deserve the most efficient use of their tax dollars, and that's not through in-house tech.
The best you can probably get is public support for open source companies and open source products.
Estonia does, because well... policy wise the US is not functioning very well.
(Well various German goverments have their own inhouse tech, but kind of get the critic of German goverment lack of digitalisation)
1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses.
2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.
How many developers/PMs/etc. are working on Office software at Microsoft? With 20 you might be several orders of magnitude off. Why would a government project be leaner?
What is more, at least where I live there is not even a salary structure allowing to pay developers those figures, while managers several levels above them would earn less. Hierarchy is everything in government organizations.
I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical.
But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.
Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.
I've explored these emotions and behaviors with several therapists over the years and have developed a working theory.
The type of anxiety you mention stems from accumulated unprocessed negative emotions or traumas. These intense feelings — such as shame, guilt, dread, remorse, rage, helplessness, neediness, and hopelessness — often paralyze or disorient procrastinators, particularly when they are compelled to confront the present moment. These emotions typically reflect deep-seated issues with self-esteem and self-confidence, and an inability to face negative feelings squarely.
In my view, procrastination is essentially a high time-preference tradeoff, where escapism is favored over confronting immediate challenges and responsibilities. Common forms of escapism include excessive consumption of media, overworking, video gaming, substance abuse, emotional eating, casual sexual encounters, and excessive socializing. These activities provide temporary relief from stress but ultimately lose their effectiveness, causing the anxiety to resurface more intensely when the procrastinator becomes increasingly aware of their predicament.
This recurring cycle of avoidance and stress often leads procrastinators to act out—either by seeking constant validation through drama, shifting contexts frequently to keep their minds engaged with novelty, or by focusing on others instead of introspecting.
Despite knowing various organizational techniques and tools, lifelong procrastinators often struggle internally with facing reality, continuously deferring it to some future date. They appear constantly busy yet achieve little, mainly because they aim to divert attention from the mounting issues that they have sidelined
To start, a good talk therapist who can help the client learn to face those negative emotions, and to come up with a plan on reducing the escapism (which itself functions like an addiction to diversions). Dopamine is the reward hormone, so excessively escaping into novelty or thrill-seeking or other self-satisfying stimuli functions like an addiction even without consuming substances. A good experienced therapist should be able to work with the client on mindfulness techniques and somatic awareness of emotions to help the client navigate. In extreme cases, where the client is unable to focus and control their urge to escape or obsess, the therapist might refer the client to a psychiatrist who might prescribe bupropion (Wellbutrin) or some similar dopamine regulation drug to bootstrap the therapeutic process.
And here’s a good video by Andrew Huberman on dopamine regulation and optimization - he’s big on lifestyle changes before medicating (as am I). But it’s really hard unless you’re committed to doing the work on yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-TW2Chpz4k
Even if all US billionaires’ wealth is confiscated today it will not even pay for 6 months of the 2024 US federal budget. So no, the problem isn’t high individual wealth.
The problem is a pervasive culture of ignorance, idealism, inflation, and exploitation.
I have known temporary staff attorneys at large prestigious firms who were paid by the hour to read documents and summarize them for the case team. It’s not a junior associate’s income or career, but it’s a good living for even the most semi-committed and minimally experienced lawyers.
Also, it’s not difficult to imagine that many decent firms have been advising their clients on the legal risks and alignment benefits of DEI and ESG compliance. Will they not heed their own advice?
> I have known temporary staff attorneys at large prestigious firms who were paid by the hour to read documents and summarize them for the case team. It’s not a junior associate’s income or career, but it’s a good living for even the most semi-committed and minimally experienced lawyers.
It might be a good living if you didn't have to take out $300,000 in loans. But if you were planning for a life in biglaw, which would enable you to pay off your loans in 3-4 years, a seemingly-good salary of $120k could double your payback period. Throw in a little unemployment (the market isn't so good for staff attorneys) and things look even worse.
You have not earned the right to direct the attention of others.
You have violated the sacred trust placed in you by your employer by exploiting your access to a public-facing employer event.
If you cannot control your thymotic impulses where you earn your food and shelter, then you cannot be trusted again.
You must accept the consequences of your moral convictions.
This is dharmic justice.