I'm an engineer at heart, which means my eyes are rarely pointed up towards the clouds. I'm usually looking down at the pothole in front of me.
But in my biggest, broadest vision, 5-10 years from now, building tech for the State of California would carry the prestige of Google.
But in my biggest, broadest vision, 5-10 years from now, building tech for the State of California would carry the prestige of Google.
"I work on Google Maps. I'm on the computer vision side, parsing street view for structured information like restaurant signs, density, yada yada. You?"
"I'm in eng at the Child Welfare Digital Service, right now focused on an onboarding overhaul for foster parents"
"Holy crap"
"I'm in eng at the Child Welfare Digital Service, right now focused on an onboarding overhaul for foster parents"
"Holy crap"
"Wait were you on *THE* California HHS Digital Service that hit made Medi-Cal renewal automatic for 95% of beneficiaries?"
"Yep! That was us. We've actually open sourced the data matching and administrative review interface, so Washington and Oregon are using it now."
"Yep! That was us. We've actually open sourced the data matching and administrative review interface, so Washington and Oregon are using it now."
“Were you on the team with Jeff Dean?”
“Only for 3 months or so. But their OCR pipeline for documents basically made it so workers didn’t need to process *any* income verification: 99% automatic. The workers now help folks with other services.”
“Only for 3 months or so. But their OCR pipeline for documents basically made it so workers didn’t need to process *any* income verification: 99% automatic. The workers now help folks with other services.”
And I don’t intend to be shallow with a measure like prestige: but the wins to be realized serving 40 million users with an explicit mandate to improve their lives would almost certainly blow ad improvements out of the water.
What if California farmworkers could report water, shade, and break time violations so easily and accurately—and enfrocement actions so effective—that compliance was 99.9%?
What would it feel like to leave your vim terminal for the night knowing that someone in Salinas was going home not dehydrated for the first time in a while because of code you shipped? This is the actual, tangible impact of public sector technology.
I don’t actually think we’re that far from this as a reality. I think 5-10 years from now we could be there for a number of very deeply impactful public services.
