Tracy Alloway (3:06)

I remember the ones that we did with Jennifer Palka, which were fantastic. And we got a good sense of some of the issues facing public technology, including, I think it was 7,000 requirements in a single RFP that was at the state level. But you hear stuff like that and it just kind of blows your mind how complex the whole process of developing new technology actually is in government.

Joe Weisenthal (3:34)

Right. So. Right. And we've also. Patrick McKenzie is the other one. We've talked about this with, like, these legacy systems. They have all of this cruft or whatever, and some of it's tech and some of it's related to hiring. Everyone, I feel like, comes in to the public sector. They're like, why can't this look more like the private sector, et cetera? But I have an observation that I thought about after the last time we talked to Jennifer, which, again, they're excellent conversations. Maybe we'll move the ball forward. So there are all kinds of obvious problems with the public sector, and we'll get into them. That being said, and I think you had the same experience, you hear these descriptions of, like, say, what's broken with the hiring process, and it's like, you know what, that sounds kind of familiar. I've experienced that in the private sector, too. Yeah. A lot of these pathologies seem to exist in large organizations.

Tracy Alloway (4:22)

I was going to say, I think it's. It's endemic to bureaucracy.

Scott Cooper (4:26)

Yeah, Right.

Tracy Alloway (4:26)

And I remember Jennifer specifically saying that, like, one of the main choke points is just the operational process of getting stuff approved or getting a new candidate through a hiring process that has been dictated by human resources. And you have to fit into certain slots or certain categories. So it's a big deal.

Joe Weisenthal (4:46)

But the whole dealing with HR thing and their role as gatekeepers of the hiring process and their role.

Tracy Alloway (4:54)

I love what you say, Jer.

Joe Weisenthal (4:55)

I love our HR people here at Bloomberg. I'm just saying some of it sounded a little bit familiar, so I'm going to leave it at that. Some of it sounded a little bit familiar.

Tracy Alloway (5:03)

Fair.

Joe Weisenthal (5:03)

So of course we know that the new administration. Of course, lots of people from the tech world have come to it. I think probably most famously Elon Musk and the whole Doge endeavor, which we'll get into, perhaps where we stand on the verdict for that, but widely viewed, is not particularly transformational. Nonetheless, a lot of buy in a lot of people from the Tech world, thinking about what aspects of our most dynamic industry in America can be brought into the public sector to perhaps make it a more dynamic place, maybe more efficient, maybe more effective, and maybe a more desirable place to work for talented people.

Tracy Alloway (5:41)

Right. And the government, the Office of Personnel Management is launching a new cross government program. Right. To recruit top technologists to modernize the federal government. And I would just add it kind of has some new urgency because the Trump administration has identified the AI race with China as like this existential threat to the U.S. so you, you can see stuff kind of coalescing totally.

Joe Weisenthal (6:09)

Well, we literally do have the perfect guest because we are going to be speaking with the director of the Office of Personnel Management in dc. We're going to be speaking with Scott Cooper. He's a former venture capitalist who's at Andreessen Horowitz. So he knows all about the public world, the private world, etc. Literally the perfect guest. Scott, thank you so much for coming on the Odd Lots podcast.

Scott Cooper (6:27)

Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (6:29)

Absolutely. What is, let's start from real basics. What is the job of the office? The director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Scott Cooper (6:38)

Yeah, it's a great question and I didn't know the answer to this one before I started talking to the administration about the job either. So I think the simple way to think about it is, look, we're the talent management organization for the federal government. So there's about 2.1 million federal employees roughly in the government today. And we are responsible for all policies related to people. So how do you hire, how do you fire? Performance management systems, so HR IT systems. And then we're also a cross functional organization that everything we do obviously touches all the different agencies. So we're trying to make sure that we've got consistency of policies across the government. And the simple goal in my mind is just how do we make sure we have the right people and the right jobs in the federal government? That's basically the forward articulation of what we do.

Tracy Alloway (7:16)

Why did you decide to go from Andreessen Horowitz to what seems like something of a challenging job and possibly lower paid? You don't have to tell us your.

Joe Weisenthal (7:26)

Salary, but it's probably public somewhere. But I assume it's definitely lower than a partner at Andreessen Horus.

Tracy Alloway (7:32)

Right, Right.

Scott Cooper (7:34)

My salary is public, actually. In fact, you know when you've hit a high point in your life when you're oldest daughter who is, I won't give her age, but she Is, let's say under 30 is making more money than I am at this stage.

Joe Weisenthal (7:46)

Congrats to her.

Scott Cooper (7:47)

Exactly. I'm very proud of her. Yeah, it's a great question. Look, the honest answer is it was a couple of things. One is just it was the right time. You know, I'd been in, as you know, from the founding for 16 years, super proud of what we did there. And Ben and Mark were incredibly gracious in giving me this opportunity. And I really felt like there is an opportunity in this administration to do something differently. So you mentioned a bunch of technology people coming to the administration. There's also just a bunch of business people more generally. And look, we're not going to make the mistake of applying every private sector method and model to the federal government. But I think what the President has asked us to do is to think differently about things and given us kind of the permission and the flexibility to do that. And so to me, look, I've been around the venture capital business. You know, ultimately companies succeed or fail. My lesson from the venture capital business is they succeed or fail almost entirely because of the people in the organization and the organizational structure and the culture and the incentives. It's pretty simple. And so my view is, look, why can't we learn some of those lessons and apply them as appropriate to the federal government and think about creating a culture where we've got great people who can do great stuff on behalf of the American people.

Joe Weisenthal (8:51)

So I want you to tell me about your new initiative to bring in tech talent. And also in the answer, maybe like situate it within, maybe what makes it different from other endeavors. There was the Code for America endeavor, which probably had some similar themes. Obviously there was the JOJ experience, which I want to get into further. But talk to us about this new project. What is it? And then why is it different from past efforts to infuse technology or infuse tech thinking into the government?

Scott Cooper (9:24)

Yeah. So let me take you through the program. So the program is called US TechForce. So anybody who's interested can go to our X at US techforce and find more information about it. Basically, here's the program. The goal is to bring 1,000 engineers into the government. So software developers, AI experts, data scientists, product managers. So anybody who can help us basically with the job of modernizing government infrastructure. It's a two year program and we partnered with about 25 of the largest private technology companies, private sector technology companies, I should say. And we're really trying to accomplish a couple things here. Number one is the government has a dearth of what I would call modern software expertise and modern AI technology expertise. And that's not a knock at all on the organizations. But a lot of what these big CIO organizations the government have to do is they're maintaining these massive legacy infrastructures. And so the ability to do bespoke development is quite difficult in those organizations. So this will be a vehicle to help them accelerate bespoke development across the entire government. The second problem we're trying to solve is we have a massive early career pipeline problem in the federal government. So 7% of the federal workforce is early career. Let's call that less than five or seven years worth of work experience. And that compares to about 22, 23% in the non federal sector. So by a factor of three to one, the federal government is completely failing at getting early career people into government. And if you look at the other end of the spectrum, by the way, so we've got about 44% of our population that's over the age of 50 and that compares with about a third in the non federal workforce. So we've got this looming problem which is we're going to have a ton of people over the next five to 10 years who, rightly so, are at retirement age and want to go do other things. And we've done very, very little to actually replenish the pipeline. So this program is really intended to do that. And one of the ways we're doing that is by making it a two year program. So I don't think it's reasonable for us to go to a 22, 25, 27 year old person and say, decide today do you want to commit 40 years of your life to be a career public civil servant? What I'd rather do is expose them to the problems in government, let them actually have a great experience. And you know what, like we should convince them over time how great this is. But you know what, if at the end of the two year period they want to go back to the private sector, that's great. And that's why we've lined up all these private sector partners who are going to actually help run a job fair for us and make sure that we have kind of greater connectivity between the public and private sectors.

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Tracy Alloway (15:06)

Can you talk a little bit more about why historically government roles have not been that desirable for tech workers. What is, I assume you diagnosed the problem before you came up with a solution. But in your view, what is the main choke point or market failure that is leading to difficulty for the government to recruit the kind of people that it wants to.

Scott Cooper (15:29)

Yeah, so I think there's a couple of problems. So one is it's, I think the fundamental issue quite frankly in my mind is a messaging problem, which is, I'll give you an anecdote. Right. So when I first came into office, I've been in the office about six months now, I met with one of my managers in the organization who said, hey, you guys are ruining things. And I said, what do you mean? And by you guys she meant doge. And you know, I'm not part of Doge, but obviously, look, I come from, you know, I know lots of those people. And I said, well, how are we ruining things? She said, well our whole value prop to employees has been come to the federal government and have lifetime employment. And I said oh my gosh, you're not going to like my answer because number one, I'm going to tell you like that's a myth and a lie that people have been telling you there is no such thing as lifetime employment. And two, I said look, that's the most, that's the worst, least compelling kind of narrative that I've ever heard that I'm going to go tell some 25 year old like that's the value proposition coming to work for the government. So number one is like we have to change the narrative. The narrative in my mind is come work on the toughest, biggest, most complex problems, do some public service, but then give yourself career options. And you know what, if you want to go the private sector, God bless you, that's a perfect thing to do. So that's part of the problem. The other problem is the nature of what happens in government. And you know, Jen Palka, as you guys mentioned in your intro, who's like brilliant on this stuff, diagnosed it perfectly. Which is so much of what government does is it's a compliance based culture, right? It's not just literally, you know, that we follow laws, but if I do something wrong, you know, I'm worried about getting an inspector general report or I'm worried about a GAO report or worry about some congressperson hauling me in front of their committee to testify about stuff. And so the short answer as a result is like, we have a zero risk based culture inside of government. There's no concept of you guys mentioned. I came to the venture capital world. In that world, look, we take crazy risk because all we're doing is trying to maximize upside opportunity. Now, I'm not proposing we do that in government, and I've been using the term measured risk as a better way to try to describe it in government. But we have to change the culture and enable people to think about the upside opportunity that comes from taking modest amounts of risk. Unfortunately, particularly on the technology side of things, that has not been the case. Again, if you're a young early career person, I think you want to do cutting edge stuff, you want to learn things, you want to kind of go out a little bit on the risk curve. And right now, at least historically, government has not been an amenable place for that.

Joe Weisenthal (17:40)

So you mentioned that the pitch to work in the federal government should not be this is lifetime employment. That that is like, that's not healthy for a lot of reasons. And I think a lot of people can intuitively agree with it. On the other hand, you mentioned the sort of like in the VC world, you're always shooting for the right tail, but when you're talking about no layoffs or lifetime employment means like you're cutting off the left tail. Just from a money standpoint, the employee of the federal government never has the chance to experience a right tail outcome. The highest paid worker in the federal government, it's a very decent salary. But you know, and compared to very, even moderately successful people, you know, the most senior successful person in the federal government will make less very often than just sort of like someone who's hung around Google for a long time. So like, how much of the problem actually just comes down to that simple monetary fact?

Scott Cooper (18:37)

So look, there's no question that compensation is relevant, but I actually think we've been overstating the nature of that problem. So let me give you a couple thoughts on it. So first of all, part of the reason why we're focused on early career here is at least the pay gap between private and public is a little bit more manageable. And it just kind of asymptotes like massively as you go farther through your career. So yes, it's totally unrealistic. Unless you're rich and you just decide you want to do something different. It's Totally unrealistic for us to think we're going to compete against like a VP at Google for a, a senior level executive person in the government. So that's not even in my mind, like, that's not even worth worrying about basically because, like, the pay gap is just crazy and nobody's going to do that. But my experience at least, and you know, you guys have been around a lot of organizations is, look, there are some people who are purely kind of profit maximizing. And that's great. I have no normative objections to that, obviously, but my sense is that's actually a relatively small minority of the population of employees. I think most employees come to work every day because they're being challenged, they're learning, they have career development opportunities, they work for someone who cares about their career and they feel like they can be rewarded when they actually do good stuff. They feel like they're held accountable. That to me, is a culture that we can create inside of the federal government. And even if it means, yes, in a short period of time, you are going to have a remuneration challenge relative to the private sector. But this is also why, again, just to go back to it, this is why I think this whole narrative of come work for the federal government for 40 years to me is just crazy. We should have an open idea that you can go back and forth between the public and private sector. And you know what, if you have points in your life where you think profit maximization is the most important thing, then yes, you should go to the private sector because the government's never going to deal with that. But I think we just have to break this. To me, this dichotomy that there's one way to go or the other makes no sense. So look, in the perfect world, I'd wave a magic wand and say we pay everybody what they can get paid at Google. But that's not realistic. And quite frankly, as you know, there's zero support in Congress for that. The final thing we can do, though, just Joe, to give you one last perspective, is we can do things inside of OPM to mitigate some of the challenges on the compensation side of things. So let me give you a very specific example. So as you probably know, there's a GS schedule which is like Everybody gets paid GS1 through 15. These are different levels. Today all those GS schedules are driven off of tenure and they're driven off of degree requirements. So if I don't have a college degree and I haven't worked for 10 years, no matter how good I am I can't get to a GS15 level in government. In my mind, that's just silly, quite frankly. Right. That's the opposite of a merit based culture. You all will remember since we've talked Doge, right? You'll remember I won't mention his name, but you know, there's a Doge engineer with a very colorful name that I'm sure your listeners have heard of. You know, when all the kind of exciting Doge stuff was happening, there was a quote from an administration official who said, this guy's terrible. We never would have hired him because he didn't graduate from college and he didn't have whatever five years of work experience coming here. And in my mind like I literally wanted to pull my hair out when I heard that because I was like, that's the craziest thing in the world. Like if this guy is capable of performing at a GS15 level, why should we care about what his tenure is or whether he has a college degree? And so one of the things we're doing inside of OPM is we're going to eliminate all degree requirements and all tenure requirements in the pay schedule. And so as a result, if someone is doing awesome, like we can hire them at the appropriate level. So some of the pay gap problems is not just a numerical problem, it's a leveling problem. And I think we can solve that even in the absence of congressional legislation.

Tracy Alloway (21:56)

Yeah, I remember Jennifer again said something very similar about like the best coder in America or a young guy who had won this huge coding competition and then couldn't get hired by the government because he didn't tick all of the official boxes.

Joe Weisenthal (22:11)

Kind of crazy for that specific role.

Tracy Alloway (22:13)

Yeah. Since you mentioned doing awesome, how do you actually go about evaluating the performance of a tech worker in government? And how do you figure out which people you actually want to hire in terms of talent?

Scott Cooper (22:29)

Yeah. So the short answer is we have to do it differently from how we do it today. But let me give you the very specifics. So on the front end, historically we have relied on self attestation of skills in order to hire people into the federal government. So I apply for a software engineering job and I get this application where I check boxes and I say, you know what, I'm an expert in Perl programmer, I'm an expert in AI technology and I literally check the boxes and that is the basis on which my application gets through or doesn't get through to the next round of screening.

Tracy Alloway (22:59)

I assume this is crazy at some point though, right? There's some sort of competency test.

Scott Cooper (23:06)

So in many roles there's not. And the reason is, let me give you a perspective. There's a historical reason for this. So way back when we used to have literally a civil service exam. It was called. PACE was the name. I forget what the acronym stands for, but it was Pace that existed until 1980. And there was a lawsuit at the very tail end of the Carter administration, very beginning of the Reagan administration. First Reagan administration where there was disparate. It was a disparate impact claim, basically. So the kind of test results on this exam were disproportionately negative for minority applicants versus majority applicants. And so in 1981, the government entered into a consent decree where basically they banned essentially the use of these examinations. And from 1981 until literally four months ago, we were living under that consent decree. Nobody ever revisited it. And as a result, every agency was terrified to use any kind of actual merit based assessment for hiring because they were afraid they would run afoul of this consent decree. Luckily for us, we revisited it along with the Department of Justice and we got out of the consent decree. We actually found the original plaintiff actually was still alive, Lovano was his name. And we actually finally said, okay, 43 years later, we think it's time to get rid of this consent decree. And they agreed to that. So for the first time ever, now we have kind of avoided. We've eliminated the risk that the agencies were worried about, which is if I use a technical assessment to judge somebody in their employment process, I might get sued, you know, under some type of disparate impact theory. So we are now doing that. So number one, to answer your. There's a long way to answer your question. But so like the way we're going to evaluate people is they actually have to demonstrate merit. So there's lots of private sector tests, as you probably know, codesignal, all these other things that every single private sector company uses where they're like, hey, basically let me give you a coding test if you're applying for a software development job. And then we can level you and figure out are you a GS5 or a GS15 based on that. And then we can do secondary stuff like obviously an in person interview or other things to make sure that you're actually a good fit for the organization. So that's kind of thing number one, we have to do on the front end. Does that make sense at least and kind of a little bit of perspective?

Tracy Alloway (25:05)

It totally does. It is kind of wild to think that last year or a few years ago or just four months ago, Joe and I could literally say that we're like coding Experts.

Joe Weisenthal (25:17)

I'm a 10x engineer.

Tracy Alloway (25:19)

Yeah, that's right. And apply.

Scott Cooper (25:20)

I know.

Tracy Alloway (25:21)

I'm a COBOL expert. Cobol. Cobol. I can never.

Scott Cooper (25:24)

COBOL expert would be very much in demand. Cobol. Cobol. No. Team. Cobalt.

Tracy Alloway (25:28)

Thank you.

Scott Cooper (25:28)

Cobalt is. Cobalt is the mineral. There's a cobalt mineral cobble.

Tracy Alloway (25:32)

Yeah, I never know if it's cobalt. I want to say cobble because it's like cobbled together across IT systems.

Scott Cooper (25:40)

That's actually really good. Okay, I didn't think about that. Okay.

Joe Weisenthal (25:43)

Actually, but on the second part of Tracy's question, okay, so once they're in. Once they're in the office, and again, because it's not a for profit entity, like, how do we current. How does the government currently go about evaluating how someone did this year? And what would be the optimal way for the government to evaluate how productive someone is in their state? And this is a problem in private sector too. I'm pretty sure that if you went into Facebook or Google, et cetera, they would also not have a clean answer of like, which software engineer is more productive or contributed more value than the other one.

Scott Cooper (26:15)

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Look, this is not a problem that's unique to the government. But what I think is unique to the government is historically, basically everybody gets an A in government. To give you a perspective, most agencies rank people one through five at the end of the year, their performances one being the worst and five being the best. And if you look historically, over long periods of time in government, about 80 plus percent of people get ranked a 4 or a 5. Okay, so meaning basically everybody is in kind of Lake Wobegon and well, well above average. And then about 0.2% of federal workers get ranked a one or a two, meaning that you're performing below expectations. So number one, like, we've had no system that actually recognizes outstanding performance and quite frankly, unfortunately, no system that actually holds accountability. On the other end of the spectrum, we're changing that. We've already put out regulations for the most senior executives, what are called the ses, which are the most senior executives. Where we effectively, for the ses, have put out a regulation that requires a forced distribution. So a cap of 30% of fours and five rankings, which we think is appropriate to actually distinguish people in terms of their performance. So number one is we got to reform the system, period. And we're working on that. And you'll see more regulation from us on that. Number two, you're actually right, which is look like sometimes the metrics are hard, right? So you don't really want to measure like lines of code that somebody produces because obviously all code is not created equal. But what I think does work in the private sector is, look, managers are responsible for their frontline workers. They meet with them one on one. They have weekly. They have a sense of what they're doing. They provide feedback along the way. I think the performance management ongoing process works better in the private sector. In the public sector, what I found is instead of managers, we use the term supervisor, which I think actually unfortunately does a disservice to what the job is. I don't think the job is necessarily supervision. The job is to manage. Meaning are they working on the right stuff? Are they doing the right things? Do they need training for this kind of stuff? And historically we haven't done a great job on that. So one of the things that we just did, for example, is we just rolled out a brand new training program that's mandatory for all supervisors specific to this issue on performance management. So to teach them, like, what does a one on one look like? You know, those of us who grew up in the technology industry, the first book that we were all assigned to read was Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive, which I still think is a fantastic book. I don't know if y' all have read it. It's actually a really awesome thing. I have read it.

Joe Weisenthal (28:31)

I have read it. Yeah, keep going.

Scott Cooper (28:33)

Yeah. I mean, basically he literally talks about like, what is a one on one meeting with your, you know, team member? Like, what should it look like? And it's like, you know, it's very much like management 101 stuff. But I think the honest answer is like, most people don't get that training. And so as a result, we have had a performance management culture where we have inflated grades and we have basically once or maybe maximum twice a year, people actually get feedback. So it's totally unfair to the employee. And it's also just unfair to top performers who are not actually getting differentiated reviews and differentiated compensation.

Tracy Alloway (29:01)

I was just about to ask just to be 100% clear, compensation is going to be tied to performance.

Scott Cooper (29:07)

Correct?

Tracy Alloway (29:08)

Okay, all right.

Scott Cooper (29:09)

Yes. And again, it's not that it hasn't been before, but the problem is if everybody's a 4 and a 5 and you have a finite bonus pool, then you're peanut buttering out the bonuses, basically. So, like, yeah, just, you know, Tracy, just To give you a sense, like when we gave guidance on this SES, these very senior executives where we said there's a 30% cap, we also said we think 60% of the bonus based compensation should go to those that 30% of the individuals. And you know, that's a, you know, we can argue Whether it's 60% or 80%, but the point is like let's, let's actually really pay for performance and let's differentiate compensation as opposed to giving everybody a $300 or $500 bonus which in the scheme of things has little retentive or incentive value for employees.

Tracy Alloway (29:47)

So you mentioned project management just then and I was looking at some of the press releases and documentation that you put out as part of this program and there really is an emphasis on getting project managers. And I am very curious why that particular role seems to be in short supply because I know someone who moved from a completely different industry into project management for a graphic design company. They had never done it before and it didn't, it didn't seem that hard.

Scott Cooper (30:19)

Okay, so I'm going to distinguish between project management and product management, which is, I think we, I hope we wrote product management in the, in our stuff.

Tracy Alloway (30:27)

Oh, did I misread it? Oops.

Scott Cooper (30:29)

Well, I don't know that you did or not. We may have, we may have put it in there. But what we need is what I, what I would call a product manager job, which is, you know, a product manager in my mind is basically somebody who sometimes they come from an engineering background. They might actually have been developers themselves, but they're kind of people who sit between the engineering organization and the end user customer and they listen to the customer and say, great, okay, tell me your problems, what are you trying to solve? And their job is kind of to translate that into ultimately in tech speak, what we'd call a prd, a project requirements document for the engineers to develop against. So like that's the role we need. So in a well functioning engineering organization, you have developers, you have designers, and then you have product managers. And the product managers probably aren't putting their hands on the keyboard actually typing ones and zeros, but they are literally that go between the end user customer and then the requirements that ultimately drive the development process.

Joe Weisenthal (31:20)

It's interesting. I feel like that's something I've really come to appreciate in working for a large organization, how valuable translation skills are because you have this one part of the room that knows one very specific thing. And then there's these generalists on the other end that have some vague thing and that person who could sit in the middle and talk to both sides is clearly a very, is a valuable person. You know, so you mentioned like the one thing that comes up a lot in a common theme on our podcast is like the importance of this sort of like tacit organizational knowledge. Things that are like, cannot simply be written down. They do not exist necessarily in one person's head. They're just things that are sort of collectively known process knowledge and so forth. How do you think about that in light of the fact that these are two year rolls and you know, again, maybe in some cases someone will do two years, then continue their career in the federal government. But you know, especially given the pay gap that emerges specifically for technologists, like that's probably you're taking on the one area where the pay gap probably gets the widest over time. How do you think about fostering and maintaining that kind of knowledge, especially given what you laid out at the very beginning, which is this sort of. I don't know if crisis is the right word, but these looming retirements of all these people that do have years of accumulated knowledge about how things really work.

Scott Cooper (32:49)

Yeah. So you're absolutely right, which is, look, we have to balance kind of the two year time period against the need for actually the organization being able to maintain these systems once people leave. So let me just give, I'll give you a real world example, Joe, just so you have it, because it might be helpful. So in my organization opm, we own the retirement process and retirement for, you know, several million annuitants basically who have, you know, kind of completed their professional careers.

Joe Weisenthal (33:12)

Yeah.

Scott Cooper (33:12)

And we are complete. It's a very. I won't go into the details, I won't bore you, but there's literally, it's a, like a ridiculously manual paper based process where for years we have had people literally filling out paper applications as recently as beginning of this year and sending paper by postal mail and all kinds of stuff. And we literally have a mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania which is very fun if you ever want to come see it, where we have hundreds of millions of file cabinets of people's retirement records that we sold.

Joe Weisenthal (33:38)

We'd love to. I would love to. I've always wanted to go like those, those like huge, like under mountain, like big, like literally bury it is Iron Mountain.

Tracy Alloway (33:47)

I'd love to check out Indiana Jones Warehouse for Government.

Joe Weisenthal (33:51)

I've always wanted to check out one of these places. We'll arrange that after the episode.

Scott Cooper (33:55)

All right, we're going to work on that one together. Anyways, I bring that up to say, okay, so look, luckily we've had a small team of developers, Joe Jebia, who you guys may recognize the name, he's a co founder for Airbnb. He joined the administration even, actually before I got there. But he's been kind of housed in opm and he has a team of three developers and a design person. And they've been completely redesigning this retirement application. So we now have what we call ora, the online retirement application, where instead of paper, people actually can go in the year 2025 onto a computer and type in their information, upload their documents, it gets routed to the hr and it's vastly better than what we've had. So I bring this up to say, look, I think this is me as a good example, which is all those people are going to disappear at some point in time, and then the responsibility for that application is going to shift to the existing CIO organization within OPM to maintain it, to integrate it with other systems. And so a requirement of being able to do that development process for Joe and his team is, look, they have to do documentation, they have to do training of the team. Look, I think it's not an insurmountable problem. I just think it means as part of your process, you just have to anticipate that there is going to be a time where people are going to disappear. And quite frankly, it's a smart thing to do anyways, because we just know. And look, this happens in private companies all the time. Look, people's average tenure in private companies, I can tell you in Silicon Valley, it's way less than four years is what the average tenure of an engineer is. So these are not new things. They are new things to the government, which is this idea of kind of knowledge capture and knowledge management, you know, kind of in light of the fact that people might not be there for their entire career. But I think it just means, as we've designed this program, that we have to have the appropriate level of documentation, of integration of source code, notes, and all those things that are, you know, you would do in a normal circumstance to recognize that. Now, look, Joe, in the perfect world, I hope people love it and they're like, wow, this is, this is exactly where I want to spend the rest of my life. And that's awesome. If they want to do that, like, we want to keep them in government. But I think we also have to deal with the practical realities that the current generation of people are not thinking about three five, ten year employments. Basically, things are much more clear than that.

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Tracy Alloway (39:44)

You doing to streamline the operational side of the process? Because I imagine you you mentioned culture before. If the pitch is come work for government. It's important, but you're going to be lower paid and you're going to have to constantly deal with paperwork and put together, you know, RFPs that have 7,000 requirements and things like that. That's a tough sell to someone who's used to the whole move fast and break things culture.

Scott Cooper (40:12)

Yeah. So anyways, let me just be totally clear, which is we are not going to move fast and break things because we can't quite do that in government. We can move faster than we currently do and we can afford to take some risks, but we generally don't want to break things because people do need to get their Social Security checks and the IRS needs to actually make sure you get your tax refund. But it's a great question. So look, there's a couple things that we're doing both inside and outside this program. So outside the program more generally. One of the big things that OPM is driving along with omb, the Office of Management Budget, is we're working with all the agencies to basically what I would call do headcount planning and reshape the priorities for the organization. So there's a huge amount of government is very good about adding things to the plate and they're very Bad about actually ever taking anything off. So every time something new comes down from Congress, we add thousands of more people. We add stuff to the plate. And then we have this list now of 20 things, probably five of which we've been doing for 20 years. And quite frankly, nobody even remembers why we're doing them anymore. They've just now become embedded into our culture. So part of the exercise, in order to kind of make the throughput faster and to make sure that an engineer isn't like, sitting on their hands dealing with, you know, crazy bureaucracy, is we have to go back and look at prioritization and actually remove services that are no longer statutory and they're no longer valuable to the American people. So that's the exercise we've started. That's the exercise that we're kind of is ongoing right now. But the purpose of that will be not only to make sure that we're hopefully spending our money in the right places, but will also be to remove layers that ultimately slow down the actual work product of government. The second thing we can do is, as I mentioned, we're really trying to kind of change the performance management culture in government and eliminate barriers to people being able to move through the organization and change the idea that you can't take any risk. I mean, obviously that's a big cultural challenge that we have in government. So everything from down to like, what's your performance plan look like? Your performance plan should have efficiency. It should have some measured amount of risk taking in there. So things that again, will speed the pace of deployment and make sense. The third thing we're doing is, and this is, again, you guys asked me, how is this program different from other programs? As we hire these thousand engineers, ultimately they will live in various agencies, right? So Dr. Oz at CMS says it's like, look, I need 75 engineers to do kind of important projects there. Or obviously Department of War has lots of stuff. So they're going to live in those agencies. But what we're not going to do, which is historically where I think these programs have failed, is if you drop these teams just into the blob that is the federal government, they're going to have a terrible experience and they're going to get lost. And their two years will literally go by without them actually having accomplished anything. So our whole goal with this is keep these teams together. So what I'm hoping from Dr. Oz is there's going to be a team of 75 engineers who are going to be a team and they're going to work on the projects that he thinks are the most important projects. And of course, they have to integrate with the existing CIO organization because so much of what we do has integration backends and all that kind of stuff. But we got to make sure that that happens, because otherwise you hire a random intern and you plop them into an organization and they get swallowed by the beast, basically. It's understandable why that happens. So we've got to think about the organizational implications of bringing people in and make sure they're set up for success. And my expectations are, and certainly the conversations that I've had with all the agency heads are that they understand that, and they understand that for them to achieve what they want to do, they have to create the organizational structure that enables these guys to actually do what they're there for. Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (43:35)

I think this is another thing that we could probably say from firsthand experience is you come to a big organization, you've spent a long time, maybe the first year of just getting to know the lay of the land, who are the people that you should talk to, et cetera. It's a real challenge. It's a real challenge being effective of actually accomplishing anything. The amount of time. I mean, I've been to Bloomberg, and we're all experienced. Yeah, they're still. I've been here 10 years, and there is, like. Who do I call? It's just like, the nature of large organizations. I want to talk about, you know, people who you say, okay, like, you need. We need to do something about the fact that all these people are going to retire, and there is this pipeline, et cetera, setting aside optimal levels of how big the federal workforce should be, et cetera. One thing that I could see as a bit of a problem about maintaining a career is if federal workers do not feel that they are respected in their jobs. And there is rhetoric that is. That you hear. It's like federal governments, they. You know, again, some people are like, oh, they're leeches. They're part of the deep state. They're all woke. And they spend money on this, and that's waste. But even that spending looks like what I observe as spending in the private sector, et cetera. And then, you know, there's. At least from this administration, there's been these sort of seemingly from the outside and probably from the inside, capricious layoffs or arbitrary layoffs. And so if you respect this workforce, then how could you possibly have just, like, cut so arbitrarily? I mean, this is what it seems like when you think about building a talent pipeline. Do you think about this dimension and do you agree with the sort of premise of the question, that it's a challenge that no one is going to work at a place if their bosses to some extent sort of think they're, you know, do not respect them?

Scott Cooper (45:26)

Yeah. So the short answer is yes, like, absolutely. This is a critical part of making sure that the federal government is an attractive place for the people who are there and also the people who, you know, we're trying to recruit in. So I got a million thoughts. Let me try to see if I can keep them in the time we have remaining. So I'll give tell you one thing, so just to back up, as you know, I worked at Andreessen Horowitz, and Ben Horowitz, in my mind is one of the best CEOs, best managers that I've ever learned from. And I, I had worked for him for literally 10 years prior. So for 26 years of my life, I've had the benefit of learning from Ben. The most important thing I learned from him is exactly what you described, which is when you have restructurings in companies, basically you have broken trust with your employees. Okay? So particularly in the startup context, right? Like when we were in startups, we personally recruited every single person into that company and we told them how we were going to conquer the world and how awesome we were going to be. And we believed it. We weren't like lying to them. But it turns out we were wrong. Like, the market changed, we didn't have enough money, and we had to live through this in our loud cloud opsware days, we had to lay a bunch of people off. And so you've immediately broken trust with those employees. So you are, from that day forward, basically in a situation where you have to rebuild that trust. So you have to demonstrate to them that it wasn't capricious and arbitrary and that you're not lying to them and a jerk, but that you actually do care about them. And it turns out through no fault of their own, their next door neighbor who sat in the cube next to them, unfortunately lost their job because we couldn't afford to pay them anymore. So I say that only to say, look, I recognize that very clearly, I understand that. And if you literally go back to like the testimony I gave when I went through my hearing, I said that very explicit. I think that's important. All that being said, I think, look, the way to think about. Let me just give you the context of the headcount reductions that happen in the government because I think there is in my mind at least some misinformation out there that I think is worth talking about. So it'll give you some numbers. You know, you've got a very sophisticated audience. As of the end of this year, roughly about 317,000 people will have exited the federal government. Okay, we started the year at about 2.4 million ish, roughly in terms of civilian. These are civilian employees, by the way. So forget about the armed services, because my organization doesn't touch that. About 2.4 million civilian employees will be roughly 2.1 million civilian employees as of December 31st of this year. At the same time, we hired about 66,000 employees. So on a net basis, call it 270, you know, 260, 270,000, roughly kind of net departures from the government. If you go Back to that 317,000 number, 92.5% of those people took some form of voluntary retirement. So we had this thing called DRP, Deferred Resignation Program. That was literally half of it. 154,000 people took that, which was an eight month severance that we gave to people to voluntarily leave government. And then the rest of it was. There are some other programs, the acronyms aren't relevant for your listeners. They're called VERA and VSIP if people want to look them up. But those are other voluntary kind of retirement programs. And then only 7.5% of people were removed through either RIFs or what we call probationary employees, which is in the government. If you've been, if you've been there for one or two years, depending upon the job, you're kind of the closest thing to an at will employee that we have in the federal government. And so there were about 7,000 of those probationary employers who were removed and about 17,000 people who were ultimately riffed, you know, reductions enforced as a result of restructurings. So I say that, number one, not to. I want to be totally clear with your listeners not to make light of any of this. Obviously those are real people with real jobs and real families and stuff. But the numbers, again, kind of, I think, bear out what we tried to do in the government, which is tell people that things were changing. Tell people that we do have a different view as to what we think the federal government should be doing and give people an opportunity to voluntarily say, okay, this is not what I signed up for, which is a very noble thing to do, and say it's time for me to go do something different. So 92.5% of the people who left the government did so because they decided this wasn't an environment they wanted to be in. So that being said, now look, I totally agree with you, which is we have to demonstrate to the people that are there and to the people who are coming in that we obviously care about them and that we think they do valuable work. And I think that's the case for the vast, vast majority of people there do great work. Like any organization, yes, there are some people who are not doing great work, and we have a system that makes it very hard to hold them accountable. We're going to try to fix that. But look, that's true of any organization. So I don't think we're not. It doesn't make sense to kind of demean the broad federal government based upon the work of a few. But we have to do that. And we also have to be honest and transparent with our people, which I believe very strongly and is. Look, we can't be all things to all people. Like we're running $2 trillion deficits. That's not sustainable. And so, look, we got to be smarter. We have to use technology to find ways to improve efficiency. We have to think about if we're doing 20 things, are all 20 of them still required? Do they still add value? Because ultimately we're stewards of the taxpayer dollars. This is not our money we're spending. And so I think it's incumbent upon everybody, and this is the message that I'm trying to get across to my team and to the rest of the government is efficiency doesn't mean just cutting costs. Efficiency means, are you thinking about delivering a better service, but doing so at or below, like what you do today, because you're thinking about organizational changes, you're thinking about technology. To me, that is just, quite frankly, required of anybody in any organization to do. And so that, to me is what I'm trying to convey to people. And yes, that means that there may be some jobs that are impacted because of technology, but those things are going to happen whether we want them to happen or not. The question is, do we actually set up the workforce and do training and do all the kinds of things we need to do to make sure that people have opportunities in light of what is a very, very rapidly changing technological market.

Tracy Alloway (50:45)

So I get that part of the problem that you're trying to solve is an operational one. This idea of a COBOL programmer who's been there for decades and he retires and walks out the door and no one knows how to do what he was doing. Or no one understands the system that he's basically had control over for ages. But at the same time, you know, we're talking about a decent amount of turnover, a lot of new employees. If this goes the right way, how are you, I, I guess guiding for safety? Are there any sort of like institutional guard rails that you're putting in so that the government doesn't actually end up breaking things?

Scott Cooper (51:28)

Yeah, I mean, look, there are, you will hopefully appreciate this, but look, there are a ton of institutional guardrails in my mind. The problem is we have too many institutional guardrails. And again, rational people may disagree with me, but I can just tell you the entire culture of everything we do. Everybody I've talked to in government and luckily we've had lots of impact on making change early on, everybody is like, we can't do that because of X. And the answer is either because it's statutory and the honest answer is when you dig and dig and dig, the reality is it's not statutory. We built up this urban myth over time that something is statutory, or as I mentioned, because I'm terrified that I'm going to get a GAO report, an inspector general report or a congressional inquiry, and we have built such a compliance culture that we are just literally unable to do anything. That actually is kind of modern and forward thinking in terms of government. And so this is what I'm trying to do. And as I told you guys from the beginning, yes, this is not the private sector. We're not going to take crazy risks. We're not going to go put everything on black in the casino. But we can have a rational conversation which is, okay, what are the risks we're taking and what's the upside? So if you'll give me a minute, let me give you a very, very tangible example for your listeners. So I mentioned to you that we handle retirement services and it's a very manual process. And so like, it takes us a really long time to get people formally retired. So you quit from, you know, you retire from the government on September 30. In the current process, you know, it takes 60, 90, 120 days sometimes for you to actually get a check because we have this ridiculous manually paper process that takes forever to, for us to calculate what are you actually entitled to and to make sure you're getting the right money and all that stuff. So that's a huge burden on retirees. Right. You've been getting a paycheck every two weeks for the last 40 years. And now I'm going to tell you like, sorry, like, go manage your cash flow some other way while I'm doing this. Like, that's terrible in my mind. And it's a complete disservice and completely disrespectful to people who are retiring the government. So we have a process in the retirement services thing called interim pay, right? Which is, as the name sounds, right? The idea is, okay, can we get you some money on an interim basis that may not be 100% accurate, but at least helps bridge this gap between when you retire and when you get your actual annuity check? Okay, so going into. And then couple this with. We've got this massive. You know, we've had a lot of exits in government. So the 317,000 I mentioned, not all of those are retirees, but, like, on average people, we have about 100 to 150,000 exits a year. So we're, you know, more than double the number. So. And as a result, there's more than double the number of retirees that are happening. So you've got this terrible papal process, like, massive volumes, and we're just going to make life miserable for all these people who can't get money. So I asked the team, I said, okay, how many people go through interim pay today? This is kind of pre our change, and it's about like, 30% of people. And I was like, well, what's the problem? They're like, well, that's how we've always done it. Again, part of the answer was statutory, which it's not statutory. And they're like, well, there's huge risk to the system because if we pay somebody more and then they die between the time we paid them their interim payment and we get their actual annuity, there may not be any assets left into the estate. And so we might compromise the fidelity of the trust fund. Okay, now, keep in mind, this is a $1.2 trillion trust fund that is actually cash flow positive. So among trust funds for retirement, it's actually very rare, but we earn 2.5% on government treasuries a year, which is horrendously bad because we're only allowed to invest in government treasuries. But notwithstanding that, it's actually still cash flow positive and fully funded, like almost any circumstance. So we finally went through the math and I said, let's go through the math and let's assume, you know, we get it wrong X amount of time and all this other stuff. And we did a bunch of math and I said, look, if we're wrong 100% of the time, it could cost us a couple million dollars of overpayments out of a $1.2 trillion trust fund. But we can shrink from 90 to 120 days the time somebody gets a payment to either 0 to 7 days if we put more people through this interim pay process. So in my mind, like, this is just the most obvious thing to do, and we are doing it, by the way we decided to do it. But, like, it's a great example, at least in my mind, of where we have so ingrained in the culture that risk, any kind of risk, is bad without actually people being willing to have the conversation to say, okay, like, what is the cost of that risk relative to the upside opportunity that that taking that risk entails? And I'm perfectly happy. You know, I told them, I said, look, you don't need to protect me if it turns out some congressperson wants to yell at me because, like, I took a modicum of risk in order to make hundreds of thousands of retirees lives better and not have to take loans out after they've given their career service to the federal government. I'm totally fine defending that. I think that's a perfectly rational answer. So that, to me, is the issue.

Joe Weisenthal (56:05)

I have one last question, and maybe I'll sort of ask you a little bit to put your VC hat on, because maybe you will go back to VC when this rolls over, but who knows? Someone who knows a lot, a lot about technology. So we had an episode recently with Tyler Cowen where we talk about one the.

Tracy Alloway (56:20)

Of.

Joe Weisenthal (56:20)

One of the weird things. Yeah. Is that we haven't even really talked about AI. So there's my AI question. AI, the tech makes your jaws drop when you see it. On the other hand, the impact so far on the economy or the real world is sort of muted. It maybe is like you might have given the capabilities, you might have expected more revolutionary change. And his thesis that he put forth was like, we're really not going to see that sort of meaningful, impactful diffusion of the tech until we have organizations that to some extent are built ground up from AI that, you know, yes, you can maybe get some productivity gains here and there by putting AI into some existing workflow, but that the real breakthroughs will come from whether it's companies or so forth that are truly AI native from day one. I'm curious, you know, when you think about, you know, again, going back to the VC world, a. Does this feel intuitive to you that the real deployers will be AI native? And then does that have Any implications for, like, we're not going to have a revolution, I guess, hopefully at the federal level, not going to have a complete destruction and starting over. Does that have any implications then for thinking about how AI will be diffused within federal processes?

Scott Cooper (57:33)

Yeah. So obviously Tyler is a brilliant guy so far for me to disagree with him, but let me give you just a couple thoughts on what he said. So look, I guess I generally agree with most of what he says, which is, and this is true, by the way, I think of adoption of most new technologies, which is we go to the common use cases and we think about incrementality as the first thing to do it. So if you go way back when Marc Andreessen told me this, so if it's, if it's made up, I'll blame him. You know, when, when we, when we first, when we first had movies, you know, actual like, you know, moving pictures, they were just plays basically that people filmed, right? So like they weren't like producing them. They wasn't new content. It was literally just, we said, wow, we have this cool, cool thing called a camera. Let's film a play and then go show it in a thing. Now it's obviously that's not that relevant to this conversation. But my point is just like we tend to go to these very common incremental use cases for things. And so look, I believe that if you look at any major Fortune 500 company, I guarantee you that every single board conversation is, what the heck are you doing about AI? And how do I get 3 to 5 to 7% greater EPS growth relative to last year because you can fix my customer support problem or stuff like that. So I think that's what's happening right now. I do agree that, yes, what often happens is then there will be a new generation of companies. And we see this in the venture capital world too already. Which is the most obvious use cases that people did is there's a ton of companies who have customer support applications for AI and there's a ton of companies who have, you know, how do we help lawyers read documents better using AI? And that's great and those companies are fantastic. But the real breakthrough is going to be, yes, like when someone says, okay, we're not just going to make Salesforce.com more efficient, but like, we're just going to rethink customer relationship management with an AI first mentality. And like the AI should know who my customers are. It should anticipate what I want to do and it should send me emails and texts and say, like, you haven't talked to this person in five weeks. And I just saw that they spoke at this conference and they talked about this and you know, you're not following up on it. So that's where we will get. And I have no doubt we will get there, quite frankly. And look, I'm an optimist by nature. You have to be to be on the venture capital capital business. But yes, I would agree with him generally. I think that's right. What does it mean for the federal government? Very simple. Which is if the private sector is incremental, the federal government's going to be like, you know, 100x incremental relative to 100x less incremental, I guess is the right way to describe it. But that's in my mind, that's okay. Like, so again, I've told everybody in my team, I'm not asking you, I don't want you to go build like the 2040 AI plan because we have no idea what the heck that's going to look like. That's a total waste of our time. What I want you to do is look at a process you do today and figure out can you use an AI tool to help you get 3, 5, 10% greater performance out of your organization? Right. So we do a ton of, I'll give a very simple example. We do a ton of regulation writing, obviously, because, you know, that's what we're ultimately in the business of government is producing regulations. And we're about to put out a regulation. We got 40,000 public comments on this regulation. We literally assigned each one of those 40,000 comments to a person to read and to draft a response to. Now, to me, that's just insane, right? And I'm not saying that like the AI, we should just like the AI should do it, but like, clearly AI is very good at summarization, at helping people think about stuff like, that's all. If we did that, like, we would unleash so much creativity and opportunity in government if we just said take the very basic stuff we're doing today and use your companion ChatGPT or Xai, whatever your favorite tool is, and just, you know, eke out a little bit of productivity. So anyways, that's how I think about it. So yes, look, government is not going to, we're not going to transform government overnight. But what we're trying to do and what the US Tech force is trying to do is can we get the right people in here who understand those things so that we start to drive ourselves forward so we don't wake up five years from now and find that we're the last dinosaur, basically. And, you know, the world has passed us by.

Tracy Alloway (61:11)

So you sort of mentioned it just then. But can you talk at all about what kind of platforms you're using currently or what kind of models? Because, you know, I'm sure some people would find it very ironic if the federal government was using Deep SEQ or something like that. And I'm curious whether you lean towards like an open source thing or a closed source thing because of privacy concerns right now.

Scott Cooper (61:33)

The honest answer is we're at the very, very early stages, which is most of what people are doing, literally. This may make your head spin because it made mine. Until about a month ago, we did not even have ChatGPT GPT on our government desktops. So like, you know, I literally would sit there on my phone and ask ChatGPT questions. My purse, my personal phone, just to be totally clear on my personal phone. And. And then I would go back to my work laptop and do stuff. So as of about a month or two ago, we actually have ChatGPT, we have XAI now we might even have. We might even have a third one. I don't even know. Oh, and of course we're, we're. The government's a big Microsoft client, so we have Microsoft Copilot for an individual user in government. That's basically the state that is like the state of, you know, kind of advanced automation basically as we literally have it on our laptops now for the development work that's happening. You're absolutely right, which is, look, there are major security issues that we all have to think about. Look, I'm a big believer, as you can imagine, in open source and certainly our firm, Andreessen Horowitz, you've seen Mark make lots of public comments about this. So I think the government will use open source and can appropriately do so. Clearly we're not going to use like the Deep Seat commercial version. But so much of that stuff is open source. And if you bring it in to your environment and you make sure, sure that you got the right security standards, there's tremendous value to develop an open source. But just to give you a sense of where we are, I would say we're very, very early in that journey in government.

Tracy Alloway (62:50)

I have one last very quick question, which is how much of a constraint is drug testing on new hires nowadays?

Scott Cooper (62:58)

I wish I had a really smart answer to your question. I don't know the answer to that. I have not seen hasn't shown up as some like, big red flag where we're losing people in the recruiting pipeline because of that. But the very honest answer is I don't know, but I will find out.

Joe Weisenthal (63:16)

I think that's a good question. I'm actually very curious about drugs in the workforce in general. We should do more on that. Scott Kubrick.

Tracy Alloway (63:22)

Thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (63:22)

No, for real, for real. You hear about it. My brother was talking about how hard it was to hire because he's like, everyone is sort of.

Scott Cooper (63:29)

If somebody, I would just say Joe. If somebody, if somebody clips that and puts it on, it's going to be. Joe is very. I'm very, I'm very curious about drugs in the workforce. That's going to be a great clip.

Joe Weisenthal (63:37)

Yeah, we'll get our producer. We'll clip it.

Tracy Alloway (63:39)

We'll.

Joe Weisenthal (63:40)

We'll get ahead. We'll get ahead of that one. Scott Cooper, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lodge. That was really, really appreciate your. Take your time. Very helpful. And we'd love to stay in touch and hear more about how these projects evolve during your tenure.

Scott Cooper (63:53)

Thank you both for your time. I appreciate it.

Joe Weisenthal (64:11)

I thought that was great. I love, I love these conversations. I mean, because I think they're just, I guess the sociology of them.

Scott Cooper (64:17)

Right.

Joe Weisenthal (64:18)

Like that's what these conversations are really about. And especially, you know, we talk about some of these pathologies that replicate from the public to private sector, et cetera, that are both like, they're really interesting sociological questions.

Tracy Alloway (64:30)

The Department of War needs to get a bunch of ping pong tables and free snacks to recruit the most cutting edge tech workers. Right.

Joe Weisenthal (64:37)

With a matcha bar.

Tracy Alloway (64:38)

That's right.

Joe Weisenthal (64:39)

I wonder if they're experiment. We should have asked that whether they have a matcha on tap at the office and whether that can move the dial.

Tracy Alloway (64:45)

But it's also interesting, again, there's that cultural, sociological aspect, but it does apply to large bureaucracies and private organizations. And I think everyone at some point in their lives will experience this type of unnecessary paperwork, whether it's in their jobs or when they're applying for a driver's license or whatever.

Joe Weisenthal (65:06)

Yeah, you know what, like, this is like where I have like the sympathy for like sort of like modern life, large complicated things. How can the individual, with our. I mean, how could we do. How could you navigate insurance? How can you navigate all this stuff, like drives you crazy at any scale? I do think, and this came up also in our conversations with Jennifer and I believe it, that there is more to a career than pay.

IBM Advertiser (65:34)

Right.

Joe Weisenthal (65:35)

But I also think that's like a very real issue, especially when you're talking about the tech workforce specifically where we know that you could just make an absolute fortune. And in many cases you can make a fortune as a very young person. You'll be in the right company at the right time and you many overnight multimillionaires in Silicon Valley. So it's not just the late stage, although that's where it becomes the most obvious. I really. The pay is a very tricky situation.

Tracy Alloway (65:58)

Well, I do think the emphasis on time constraints for the tech force. Yeah, that's really interesting. And that's kind of a shift, again, a cultural shift from the way people have perceived government jobs for a long time. And I can imagine, you know, like if you're a young tech worker, maybe you're having trouble getting into the private sector. You know, just last year, no, two years ago, remember there was the wave of like layoffs.

Joe Weisenthal (66:25)

Yeah, absolutely.

Tracy Alloway (66:26)

And now everyone is recruiting because of AI. But.

Joe Weisenthal (66:29)

Well, I mean, no, I mean you're to your point, like there are even like there are many talented tech people if they're not right there in the sweet spot. We even know that's not what it used to be.

Tracy Alloway (66:37)

So I can imagine like you go to the government for two years and it's, it's an educational process.

Joe Weisenthal (66:43)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (66:43)

And you can take some of that knowledge away from you when you then go into the private sector. Although that also opens up the question of rotating doors between the government and private companies. But maybe that's a topic for a different day.

Joe Weisenthal (66:56)

I just, and I do think there is, and it's not just this administration, but I think it's been very notable, at least with some parts of the administration or some parts of the rhetoric. There's this sort of like vilification of bureaucrats which is again sort of a long time thing. Like bureaucrats has sort of been a kind of a pejorative. I mean a bureaucrat is a real.

Tracy Alloway (67:14)

Problem.

Joe Weisenthal (67:17)

Anyway, I do think that's an issue. And I also think, you know, like, maybe we should just bring back civil service exams everywhere. And if you could. No, seriously. And if you could pass this test, you can get a job. Like it's lindy. You know, it's like famously, you know, go back thousands of years in China. It's like the big.

Tracy Alloway (67:33)

I was about to say, do you know about the Chinese civil service exams? Those are so interesting and crazy. Shall we leave it there?

Joe Weisenthal (67:40)

Let's leave it there.

Tracy Alloway (67:41)

All right. This has been another episode of the odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracee Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (67:47)

And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Scott Cooper, he's at Scooper. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at carmenarmon-obenit-bot@kalebrooksailbrooks. For more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots for the daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 24. 7 in our Discord, Discord, GG Oddlauts.

Tracy Alloway (68:09)

And if you enjoy Odd Lots if you want to see to go to Pennsylvania to look at a bunch of file cabinets then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple podcast and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

CVS Advertiser (69:01)

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