00:36:20 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:36:20] S1: Explain the demographics of who's working in the government right now, because this is a wild story. [00:36:24] S2: Yeah, so today, 7%, that's seven, of the federal workforce is 30, okay? So just so your listeners have a comparison, if you look at the total US workforce, 23% of the total US workforce is 30. Okay? So by a factor of three to one or more, the federal government is way under indexed on early career people. Okay? If you go to the other side, 44% of our population is 50. [00:36:49] S1: In the government?
00:36:50 · Scott Kupor
[00:36:50] S2: In the government, sorry. 44% in government is over the That age of compares with about 33% in the total US workforce. So we are three to one under indexed, and then we are 11 percentage points over indexed in the 50 category in federal government. You know, we talked about this, but look, I'm a small government guy. I I won't presuppose your your ideological views, but Son a Cuban immigrant. Okay. So you're you're more more small government than big government. Okay. So that explains a lot. Like, if we did nothing else, half of our workforce will retire over the next five or ten years, and we are stuck with nobody to actually do the work. Right? So, like, we need something more than zero people to actually work in the federal government. Thing number one that motivated me is, like, can we solve that problem? And I think you solve that problem in two ways. One is we actually have to go tell a story about why it's interesting to go to government. So we've been talking about this, but one of the things I'm doing after I go here is we're starting on a college tour, which we have never done at OPM. We've never gone out to colleges or where where the actual young people are and said, let's go find you. Let's tell you what's compelling. Let's actually create programs around this. And so we're we're gonna do that. And, you know, you know, you may not have seen this, but I do these stupid social media things on, you know, Instagram and WhatsApp and stuff like that, because, like, I've hired younger people who actually understand. How do we get a message to people who are fooling you this stuff?
00:38:07 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:38:07] S1: And your message is what? We need young Here's my message. Technically talented people to [00:38:12] S2: just Not just touch on health. [00:38:13] S1: A choose your stint. Exactly. Somebody was saying when you first came in, Oh, you're kind of screwing things up, because our pitch here is you have a job for life. And you're like, Yeah, but young people don't think that way.
00:38:24 · Scott Kupor
[00:38:24] S2: Yeah, so I had a manager who told me that. They're like, You guys suck because our whole pitch to people is, Come here and you have lifetime employment. I told her this, I'm like, Look, that is the worst pitch I've ever heard. There's not a single person under the age of 30 today who is thinking about lifetime employment, and if they are, by the way, I hate to say this, but that's not the kind of self motivated, driven person that we want in the government. So my pitch to people is, look, come here, do something, you know, not just as good for your country, that's fine, but like do something that's actually good for yourself, which is come spend two or three years to work on, like, some of the most complex, hardest problems there are out there. Right? If you're interested in space, like, go work at NASA. What, like, Jared Isaacman at NASA is doing is fucking awesome, and, like, you should be part of that. Or if you want energy stuff, go to the Department of Energy. There's all kinds of cool, like, supercomputer stuff and all kinds of things. Work on these hard problems, and then after that, quite frankly, if you want to go to private sector, that's amazing. Let's help you go to the private sector. So this Tech Force program I mentioned, in addition to these two year stints, we partnered with 40 private companies, right? So all the names you would know, right? You know, Alphabet and Meta and Databricks and all these guys, and what they're doing during the two years is they're gonna do training and career development for these folks in this program, and at the end of the two years, we're gonna do like a massive job fair, and if we've done our job right in the government, we have trained these folks so well that I want, you know, every private company to be fawning over these people. It's a little bit like, you know, you and I were mentioning, right, in Israel and the IDF, right, they have this cyber corps where it's the best and brightest kids coming out of high school and go to the cyber corps, and when come out, every venture capital firm is falling all over themselves to fund these guys. Every cyber company wants to hire them. That's the kind of thing we want for the federal government, and if people love being in government, great. God bless them.
00:40:03 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
They can stay in government, but we don't need to ask people to make thirty, forty year commitments. [00:40:07] S1: I think your appealing to interest is way smarter than saying, Hey, here's the government, you're a citizen, come try to do something good for the government. That will get some percentage of people, but you're gonna get a lot more if it's like, No, this is actually good for you and your country at the same time. [00:40:21] S2: That's Just [00:40:22] S1: align the intent is. Look what could happen. This is where your starting point is when you come in. This is what we can do. This is what you'll learn during this, and this is what happens after that. [00:40:29] S2: That's exactly right. Then while you're here, which comes to the second point, is, look, I have to create a high performance culture for people like that to succeed. If I can convince young, aggressive, like, career minded people to come to government, they can't come to the environment that I walked into, which is you have to sit in a job for a year before I consider you promotion, or I can't hire you at a GS 14 level because you have an experience. I'll tell you the story, which is somebody was reminding me of today. So if you follow the dough stuff, right, there's a guy named Big Balls. Have you ever heard of Big Balls? [00:40:59] S1: I have heard of Big I
00:41:01 · Scott Kupor
[00:41:01] S2: hate I don't know anything else but his name. It's it's very hard to say it on air. But, anyways, his... He... As I mentioned to somebody who talked this morning, he actually has a name. His name is Ed. So apologies to his mom that basically Big Balls has become his name. He joined the government. He joined DOGE. He joined Elon's team. I think he was 19 years old. He went to Northwestern. I think he dropped out as a sophomore. Okay? And he's one of, like, the most brilliant software developers around, basically. And he's like, look. I got motivated by Elon, and I wanna do this stuff. And he's still there, by the way. He works for Gebbia now as part of this national design studio, which is, like, redesigning all of the, like, web sites for the government. Anyway, when I saw this article come out a few months after he joined, this was in the height of the DOGE stuff when, of course, everyone was, you know, thinking the world had come to an end, and there was a quote from a government employee that said, We would never hire, he didn't say big balls, he said Ed. Said, He we would never hire Ed in government because he didn't have a college degree, and he didn't have five years of work experience. And when I saw that, like, literally, like, I wanted to pull my fucking hair out because I was like, this is exactly the problem. Right? This guy's awesome. We should hire him because he actually has the skills to help us. And literally, every job description in government, almost all of them have, like, a college degree requirement. Well, in my mind, like, that is a proxy for skill that may be indicative of something but may not. Right? Like, the fact that Ed didn't have a college degree had no bearing on his software engineering skill set, but it would have been used to basically kept him out of a job because he would not have qualified, or we would have hired him at like this low level where we would have paid him like $40,000 a year, which he never would do. Of course, he would go to Silicon Valley and get paid like 10 times that. Right? So part of this is like, if we're gonna get great people, we have to be able to actually have them walk into a culture that actually believes in performance, that believes in accountability, that allows them to progress the organization, that pays them at the level that's appropriate for them.