00:31:13 · Scott Kupor
[00:31:13] S2: Yeah, so here's the other side of this, right, which is then you have a performance management system that's also screwed up. So, I'll give you a story, I think you and I may have talked this a long time ago when we first met. Everybody gets ranked generally one through five at the end of the year in terms of their employee rating. Some organizations have a four point rating, but say one through five. One is the worst. Like, you definitely, like, should not be here. Five is, you're not gonna cover off the ball. And three means, hey. Like, you know what? Like, you're good. You're doing what we asked you to do. That's all fine. And and every organization, quite frankly, needs a lot of people like that. Historically, in government, 99.7% of people are a three or above, meaning literally 0.3% fall below expectations. Now, in a population of 2,000,000 people Is that even possible? Not even mathematically possible. It's not. So you have one problem, which is we don't do anything on low end accountability in the government. I'll tell you about how we're gonna change this in a minute. So that's a serious problem to your point, which is, look, how do I attract and retain great people when I'm sitting here, you know, busting my ass and you're, like, dialing in, and everyone knows you suck, but, like, nobody actually wants to do anything about it. Like, that's a terrible place for high performing people to be. They'll leave. Yes. Exactly. And then on the other end, so four and five, right, those are the top ratings mean not just you're doing your stuff, but, like, you're extraordinary or you're outstanding. You're doing great stuff. In the senior... Just give me example. In, like, the most senior side of government, which is, like, 7,000 people that are, like, senior executives, something like 90% of people get ranked a four or a five, meaning, like, literally everybody's awesome.
00:32:40 · David Senra
[00:32:40] S1: And, again, an organization of 7,000 people are Yeah.
00:32:42 · Scott Kupor
[00:32:42] S2: It's not... Again, it's not it's just not possible. Right? What it means is, like, we game the system. And as a result, again, if I'm a high performer, like, you know, I wanna be a high performer, and there ought to be smaller numbers of people who are high performers. And by the way, I ought to disproportionately get money for that. So when you have a system where 90% of the people get ranked at the top of the class, that means the bonuses make no sense, right? I give you a thousand bucks, and it has no incentive value, it has no retentive value. Instead, like, we should have a system where, which was what we're doing, is we've put a rule in place which is no more than 40% of the population can be at that top ranking, and 60 plus percent of the compensation pool needs to go to those 40% of the people. Now, personally, I'd like to do even more extreme than that, but, like, we've gotta crawl before we walk and run on this stuff. But, like, if you wanna attract great people, you have to hold people accountable on the bottom end, and you have to allow for differentiation. And then the third thing you have, by the way, just here, you got me on my soapbox, is almost every promotion opportunity in government is gated by tenure. So you have to be in the job for a certain period of time, typically at least a one year minimum, before I can even consider you for promotion. Now again, if I'm gonna hire some person who's awesome in software development, and they knock the cover off the ball, and within six months, they demonstrate that they're better than
00:33:53 · David Senra
[00:33:53] S1: I thought. Essentially stuck in purgatory for
00:33:56 · Scott Kupor
[00:33:56] S2: six months. Yeah. And then, by the way, if you promote them, they have to wait another twelve months. Right? So we're eliminate... We're gonna... We're eliminating stuff like that. So these are all policy changes we're making, which is we're gonna eliminate... It's called time integrate is the is the name for it. But, like, what we want is a merit based culture where you come in and we level you appropriately for what you can do. So one of the programs we have is called Tech Force, just so you're aware, which is basically we're trying to build this elite core, you and I talked about this. This is a elite core of like, we're trying to bring in a thousand software engineers, AI experts, data scientists, to serve two year terms of government. We're hiring them at what's called the GS-fourteen level, which is pretty high. That's like the second highest individual contributor level in government. And we're hiring that way because we are actually giving them assessments that technically analyze their skill set. So they come in and they have to do an actual test by a third party that is a code development test. Never before has the government done this. Right? Instead, I would give you a questionnaire, and you would self rate your skills. Right? You would say, I'm a really five? Tough Turns out I'm a five. You're a five. Right? You know this language. You know that language. And, again, like, it's it's just... It's crazy, and there's a whole historical reason for it, which is, like, there was this lawsuit about just for an impact on these exams. But but the point is, like, if we have a merit based culture, we will bring people in at the right level. We will promote them at the right pace, and then I believe they will want to stay because they will feel like they're actually able to do what they want to do. Right now, until the changes we've made, like historically we've had a system where it's very hard for you to break out of the pack, basically, and that's just not amenable to having a high performance culture. In
00:35:23 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:35:23] S1: the most simplest description that you can muster, explain why you felt it was... What is the main problem as you see it, that you felt the need to, again, change your entire life, move again across the country, and dedicate two, three, four years of your life to doing this? Is it the demographic problem? Is it we just don't... It's not a political thing, but if you care deeply about America, you want the most talented people in the government. [00:35:52] S2: Yeah, so three things that motivated me, which we're trying to do. One is, do we have the people in the right seats? This is where, again, again- [00:36:01] S1: The answer is clearly no. You can't say this, but- [00:36:04] S2: Yeah, look, let me say this, because I want to be fair. There's a lot of... There are a lot of very good people in the federal government. So, like, I I think, and I'm gonna come back to this, I think a lot of this is a systems incentive problem versus necessarily a talent problem. Now there is a talent problem, which which you and I talked about a little bit, which is we suck at getting early career people into government. [00:36:20] S1: Explain the demographics of who's working in the government right now, because this is a wild story.