I have been waiting for words to come, but I don’t think I’ll find a way to really tell everything that’s happening in my head and heart. After weeks of confusion and demoralizing actions, the agency where I used to work, 18F, was killed by the administration last Saturday. Laying off the 80-or-so folks who hadn’t been laid off before.
A door closing, a window opening
In 2018, I was feeling really restless at work. Yes, there was a leadership change at work, my specific team dynamics were changing in ways that made me feel more distant. But I was also moved by the momentum of the country, people hearing the news and wanting to get involved in politics. What could I do with the skills I had? I believe that design is in service to some bigger goal, not an end in itself. So what and who was I serving?
Civic tech was on my mind. Some years previously, a colleague I admired had left to do a 6 months tour at the US Digital Service when it was first stood up and decide not to come back. A classmate from grad school was currently working there. I talked to them both, but and they both recommended it and had wonderful things to say about working in government and the impact of the projects they were working on. Because actually navigating government is jobs are hard (the listing are inscrutable) and I didn’t want to move to DC, she also recommended some different consultancies and 18F, a consultancy within the federal government.
Absolutely not know what I was getting into, I applied and was made an offer at 18F.
— —
Working in 18F was like waking up in a weird dream. There were the things that were familiar about work, but I also felt like I realized I was breathing a different air. I won’t say that it was perfect, but I grew so much from working there. It helped me be a better professional and person. And I don’t think that’s something everyone can say about their work. Psychologists have found that you become more and more like the people you surround yourself with. And I was surrounded by talent, passionate, authentic, and kind people dedicated to a mission of serving the public through our government partners.
We often and explicitly stated to put our government partners at the center of the story when we talked about our work. Something I learned when starting government was that it isn’t a lack of care or talent in government that makes services “fail,” it’s often a lack of capacity, empowerment, and constraints imposed upon them. Things like:
- Congress including long, technical, and confusing language that has be used exactly on a form into the the law.
- Being a policy person needing to learn how to manage a complex IT project as a new part of your job when you were already understaffed.
- A culture where it’s hard to try something new because of decades of something taking a risk getting severely and publicly punished if it’s not a resounding success. And a lot of projects publicly failing because they weren’t able to pilot work in smaller, iterative ways.
Basically: it was complicated. I liked the complexity. I liked learning more about government, laws, policy, and meeting the interesting people who had find their home in public service. And it was fun doing it at 18F. I could say a million things about working there that would triple this post. But one example that I comes to mind is how much they supported me. I had always previously gotten the feedback to speak up more and to practice public speaking because I would sound audibly nervous. At Google, you really had to be fast and edge your way in a meeting—which you were supposed to do to sound smart (and by smart I mean, being the first person to ask “have you thought about how this will scale?”). In meetings at 18F, my co-workers took time to make sure folks were heard. If I didn’t say anything, they would call on me to give me time in the meeting. I got the feedback more like “we’d love to hear more of your thoughts because whenever you have, they’ve been really helpful or insightful.” I was given opportunities to present and actually practice getting better at facilitating, too. Our main stakeholder at the DOJ asked to co-teach a class with me at Georgetown University and has convinced to to present at two conferences with him. Another stakeholder complimented me for being a good listener. Do you see what I mean about it being like work, but also like some alternate reality of work?
I know it’s not goodbye forever, but I am heartbroken for my wonderful colleagues, friends, and the people who I never even worked with but know were just doing their best with what they had. We have a group chat of alumni and current employees and to repeat something that has been said so often lately: they didn’t deserve this.
Here’s a picture of my first day of work in front of the GSA building in San Francisco.
The work
I’ll leave you with the work itself. Just to give you a sense of the work we did, here are some of the projects I personally worked on during the 3 years I was at 18F (in roughly chronological order):
- 2 discovery projects to help our government partners see if 1) IT consolidation made sense and 2) if so, how. One was for multiple departments within the DOJ and one was for OPRE. It didn’t always make sense! And sometimes it did and was very possible! We also spent time teaching our government partners how we evaluated IT and how they could too. These consolidation projects were my first and last projects respectively.
- We helped the Civil Right Division of the DOJ’s build a way for it’s previously siloed legal teams to receive and manage reports of discrimination through a new public website and internal case management system. This created new ways for the division to collaborate and we trained-by-doing internal staff to manage the IT project and themselves. This was the longest project I worked on at 18F.
- We helped the Civil Rights Division reduce it’s onboarding time, audit and develop a content strategy around it’s knowledge management practices, including collecting feedback and leading writing for the web classes for other departments, during our project that ostensibly was to update their Sharepoint intranet website.
- Our agency values professional development and distributing leadership opportunities. I was a co-lead of the Accessibility Guild, creating a space for the internal team to learn and share knowledge about creating accessible products for people with a variety of disabilities. Including inviting the team to into usability sessions with a blind user, a first for some!
— —
I have almost NO photos from work because I took everyone on my work phone and never thought everyone would lose access to the folder where they lived. So sorry it’s just two photos of me.