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.
00:42:45 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never gonna, like, pay what Silicon Valley does, and that's fine, and that's okay. But we ought to at least level people appropriately so that, like, Ed should not come in at this GS five, which is, like, the most entry level for government. He should come in at a GS-fourteen or 15, which is the highest levels, because his merit shows that he's capable of performing at that level. But the system as it existed would not have allowed that to happen. So this is what we've doing from a policy perspective, to fix all that stuff and say like, Merit matters, take a test, take an assessment, and everything else, quite frankly, we shouldn't worry about. [00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was...
00:43:15 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:43:15] S1: So big balls kind of gives you the blueprint where he says, I'm super talented. Yes. Dropout, maybe never wouldn't qualify for the set of requirements in federal government, but I heard this person I admire tell a compelling story. Exactly. Right. You came in before, during, after DOGE? Like, what was... [00:43:33] S2: Yeah. So I came in with... Basically, I got interviewed, and I came in with the DOGE guys. So it was obviously Elon, but of course, there were guys like Steve Davis was kind of the day to day person running it. And, I had the opportunity to spend a bunch of time with them pre inauguration. So kind of, you know, end of... I got nominated, like, first week of December or something, and so kind of December and first part of January late to inauguration. Then what happens is they tell you, okay. Like, until you get through your nomination process, you basically have to be persona non grata and, like, stop communicating with folks because otherwise, it can, like, foul your nomination process. So we had developed a bunch of plans and ideas for what we would do once, the administration turned over, but I wasn't there day one to be able to actually execute those things. [00:44:13] S1: But you were observing a lot of what was going on. [00:44:15] S2: That's exactly right. And they were executing it literally out of my office, so it turns out my office was ground zero for