The key part IMO is buried in the article - there happened to be an existing, perfectly accurate database containing all the required info about each employee - the same info that previously had to be manually found for each retirement.
Without this, this effort would not have been possible.
> Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it.
> For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access.
> From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.
Yes! Whoever built the data warehouses and keeps the data pipelines running would seem to be the real heros of this story. I sure hope that group did not get gutted by DOGE.
If the people who set up the DW and set up the data to flow into it did not also build any applications to actually take advantage of the data, they didn’t complete their job properly. It’s been 18 years, that’s long enough to document the existence of it. Some might say 18 years is even enough time to build at least one useful application powered by it.
I’m sure in reality the people who built this system were smart, and wanted people to use it, but were just buried under layers of technology-unaware management and bureaucrats who felt threatened, afraid it would marginalize or eliminate their paper-pushing jobs. But this very likely reality is just more proof that the government needs significant restructuring. Most people in management at the government are there purely because of tenure, not because they’re great leaders, nor subject matter experts in how complex things are efficiently built and run outside the government world.
This is the same OPM whose previous efforts at digitization were famously compromised by state espionage, right [0]? To the tune of… losing, to the US’ largest adversary, every security investigation into every Federal employee holding a sensitive position?
Since that enormous breach of their core responsibility became public more than 10 years ago, I wonder if there are reasons, beyond managerial incompetence, that over the past 18 years the federal HR department hesitated to expose processes—specifically ones that depend on careers’ worth of highly personal data, and that don’t NEED to move fast—to the world through a publicly-routed hairball of JS SPA crud...
They “discovered” this treasure of a data store as if it were some natural resource that just needed “exploring for.” What I’m missing is the part where they figured out why it had been left alone, and why its guardians were so reluctant to let the cowboys at it. Giving serious Chesterton’s Fence.
I get how it’s nice to see instantly what amount will be on your pension check, but that’s not exactly the only factor weighing into your decision to retire. You can reckon a fairly good guess yourself and from talking to peers, and it’s not like seeing the exact number instantly would let you do much to change it. And not to normalize mediocrity, but… I feel like federal employees by that point in their career have acclimated to long bureaucratic waits.
And it’s a nit, I know—but I sure wish they’d cleaned their phone cameras before they made photos for bragging to the public. On those… phones… which surely belong inside the secure document processing facilities where they were mugging for casual selfies…
I buy that it only takes 2 to cowboy, but in my experience, after said cowboys ride off in a triumphant self-celebratory blog post, it can take an army to clean up the mess they don’t even know they created.
> If the people who set up the DW and set up the data to flow into it did not also build any applications […] they didn’t complete their job properly
1. That’s a whole extra level of responsibility / management / bureaucracy. At some point, somebody near the top needs to care or it doesn’t all get done. The existence of this DB says somebody cared, they just didn’t have enough power.
2. I’m curious how this compares to experiences at Big Old Corp, like IBM or GM, not just the SV darlings.
Thanks for pointing this out. I think it does a good job of also highlighting that most problems aren’t technical; they are either people or organizational.
Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it.
Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air, and often even work stolen from others.
It's sad, but I think our generation is partly to blame, since we demanded that from them.
It must suck to lose your whole life and personality just to appease the meritocratic golem.
> There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air
Isn’t it true for every so-called edge that CEOs pitch to shareholders?
You're literally being downvoted for stereotyping an entire generation. The word stereotype implies it, but it's not remotely close to true.
Like, the easiest, most obvious example in the world is trump: he hyperbolically brags constantly about things he didn't do or actively tried to stop and it would be real hard to argue that he's genZ.
When you single out a specific group for your observation, it has strong implications about the other groups you didn't mention.
Yeah and that would be a lot more relevant if we were talking about, dunno, programming circuits or constructing proofs.
Instead we're writing english language sentences to be read by humans. Where connotations and implications and other such "unspoken" things absolutely matter.
Are you trolling? The implication is clearly that GenZ is unusually hyperbolic. That their predilection for hyperbole is somehow unusual or notable, otherwise WHY MENTION IT.
Reply to edit: generations are sequential; if you've noticed something with one generation it means that you're not accusing the prior generations of the same thing, otherwise you would've used different wording.
> show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements which are mostly hot air and many times even work stolen from others.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the ball has been rolling for a while now. Gen Z might just be the crowd that recognizes how lucrative it is to scam people.
We must have different definitions of hot air, if yours includes a 4-trillion-dollar company.
Edit: you edited your comment so now my reply doesn't make sense. I would re-post your old comment but I didn't save it. I won't change mine because I'm not like that.
The creation in the article appears to be genuinely useful and impressive as well. It certainly benefitted a great deal from other people's work, but so did apple and linux and whatever else.
> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.
Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient.
(A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)
> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.
Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
> They had committed to building all of this [a previous modernization effort] on Microsoft PowerApps, a “no-code” tool meant for building simple web apps
> When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
It’s enterprise software so product managers don’t decide anything. They’re just an automaton charged with implementing whatever complied with the RFP terms that were written by the vendor to wire the procurement. It’s basically a problem with central planning, there’s no easy fix but giving people agency is a big part of it instead of ramming some enterprise crap that was designed to sell to “leaders” or committees down their throats.
Many small businesses (and small teams inside large orgs) do not have “servers” in the sense that an employee can push code to it. It’s just Windows Server and handles email, file share, ERP, etc. I think those in the tech industry may not appreciate the ease of having a platform you can “program” jobs in, and it’s included in M365, despite the very-large warts.
I specifically said "large, complex codebases", so I'm not sure how your comment is relevant.
If the project you're implementing is Big (which the federal employee retirement system qualifies for by any sane metric), then the infra you described is inappropriate. If the project isn't Big, then my comment wasn't addressing it.
> How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits.
An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
not scripting per se - yes that is part of it typically, with windows based ERPs, you get scripting for close to free if you can 'drop into' other stuff, like VB, or if your ERP leverages the COM interfaces, has an ODBC or even a straight SQL backend, yes there are many approaches. It's really - how does the scripting interact with the system
What i am talking about is more simple
1. user defined actions.
2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete)
2. user defined fields on core data tables
3. user defined tables
You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
I did a brief news search for something from a more neutral party and found this article:
Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms.
> Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.
> Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.
> “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.
> But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.
> “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
Power Apps is just absolutely terrible for forms. Which is sad, because the platform itself is decent and most governmental entities that I've worked with seem to have access to it. If the UI/UX was better and Forms weren't cursed then non-technical teams could maintain their own apps and workflows. Combo'ing it with Power Automate can get a lot of things done. But Power Apps Forms need a complete re-haul and without such a change it will absolutely be the right decision to create something outside of it.
I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
> Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
This is exactly how us taxes should work. The IRS already has all the information it needs - it should fill out the form, give you a chance to double check, and then you're done.
> Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said.
> Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand. Why did we gut 18F, which was doing incredible work and make a... a new version? Seems the opposite of reducing waste.
I did find that troubling too. I can see the logic of a short lived / well funded project using nextjs, but for something like this that's meant to be a simple form that needs to be reliable, easy to maintain, and long lived, my first thought would be to make a classic restful MPA. Introduction of a complex frontend framework like next seems like it would lead to more headaches than it's worth. Had similar thoughts about the Azur vendor lockin. I seriously doubt they had the traffic to justify needing something like Azur functions and batch processing. I'd love to hear some more justification for why they choose this stack, and if they considered any alternatives first.
If it was really down to two engineers, it's almost certainly what one or both of them were already comfortable or familiar with and no other reason. Six months is such a short time frame for long term projects like this that I imagine they could not spare much time for analysis of alternatives.
So what's going to happen in 3 years after these startup bros have left government, none of the frameworks they're using are supported any more, and nobody in the office that they parachuted into is trained to maintain whatever spaghetti they crapped out over three months of all-nighters? There's a reason that we don't build critical infrastructure by giving it to some guy whose entire accomplishments are "working at Airbnb for 10 years"
You cast too broad a brush! Having worked at Airbnb for 10 years would have been fine. The problem is DOGE was staffed by twenty year olds. How would that have worked? They started at AirBnB when they were 10?
Found the blog post troubling amateurish for something so important, then noticed the name Edward Coristine and zoomer twitter handles at the bottom and realized this is a bunch junior devs hacking together our country's infrastructure.
Well done! Government agencies tend to always seek more funding and never change or close down even when everyone universally agrees change is needed. Good to see change here.
The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood like bankruptcy does for private industry. We do need a smoother mechanism than just hacking whatever is not protected by insane public employee unions though.
> The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood
What do you mean?
The budget is voted on by Congress literally every single year. The mechanism absolutely exists. The political consensus to do so is harder to achieve, but that's only when people actually don't universally agree change is needed (or how specifically to change it).
The mechanism technically exists but we haven't had a budget vote in years. We get "continuing resolutions" and periodic government shutdown brinksmanship games.
“People” aren’t really involved. Thanks to the gerrymander (which has now been full-throatedly embraced by the party that used to rightly call it out), the people’s votes don’t really matter. The congresspeople’s votes theoretically do, but they’re mainly just bought by the lobbyists who fund their primary campaigns.
Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
It’s bad when the government does those things. That doesn’t change the fact that no such feedback mechanism exists for the government, which comprises almost 40% of GDP (in the U.S. including state and local).
The government should NEVER bail out a private business of any kind. There should also be no limited liability for companies... that would prevent issues where an owner abuses the environment then walks away with the fortune he made while the company goes bankrupt from lawsuits.
The key part IMO is buried in the article - there happened to be an existing, perfectly accurate database containing all the required info about each employee - the same info that previously had to be manually found for each retirement.
Without this, this effort would not have been possible.
> Fortunately, we stumbled on a critical clue. While poring over old documentation, we discovered that OPM actually had data warehouses that stored historic information about every federal employee. Apparently, these warehouses were created as part of a modernization effort in 2007, and HR and payroll offices all across government have supposedly been regularly reporting into it.
> For some reason however, this was not well known at OPM, and those that knew about it didn’t know what data it held, nor considered how it could be used to simplify retirement processing. Not many had seen the data, and administrators were initially resistant to sharing access.
> From a software perspective, this was the holy grail: a single source of truth that held all the information that the manual redundant steps were meant to review. Because the information was regularly reported by HR and payroll, by the time an employee retired, OPM should already have everything needed to process the retirement, without anyone re-entering or re-verifying information.
Yes! Whoever built the data warehouses and keeps the data pipelines running would seem to be the real heros of this story. I sure hope that group did not get gutted by DOGE.
If the people who set up the DW and set up the data to flow into it did not also build any applications to actually take advantage of the data, they didn’t complete their job properly. It’s been 18 years, that’s long enough to document the existence of it. Some might say 18 years is even enough time to build at least one useful application powered by it.
I’m sure in reality the people who built this system were smart, and wanted people to use it, but were just buried under layers of technology-unaware management and bureaucrats who felt threatened, afraid it would marginalize or eliminate their paper-pushing jobs. But this very likely reality is just more proof that the government needs significant restructuring. Most people in management at the government are there purely because of tenure, not because they’re great leaders, nor subject matter experts in how complex things are efficiently built and run outside the government world.
This is the same OPM whose previous efforts at digitization were famously compromised by state espionage, right [0]? To the tune of… losing, to the US’ largest adversary, every security investigation into every Federal employee holding a sensitive position?
Since that enormous breach of their core responsibility became public more than 10 years ago, I wonder if there are reasons, beyond managerial incompetence, that over the past 18 years the federal HR department hesitated to expose processes—specifically ones that depend on careers’ worth of highly personal data, and that don’t NEED to move fast—to the world through a publicly-routed hairball of JS SPA crud...
They “discovered” this treasure of a data store as if it were some natural resource that just needed “exploring for.” What I’m missing is the part where they figured out why it had been left alone, and why its guardians were so reluctant to let the cowboys at it. Giving serious Chesterton’s Fence.
I get how it’s nice to see instantly what amount will be on your pension check, but that’s not exactly the only factor weighing into your decision to retire. You can reckon a fairly good guess yourself and from talking to peers, and it’s not like seeing the exact number instantly would let you do much to change it. And not to normalize mediocrity, but… I feel like federal employees by that point in their career have acclimated to long bureaucratic waits.
And it’s a nit, I know—but I sure wish they’d cleaned their phone cameras before they made photos for bragging to the public. On those… phones… which surely belong inside the secure document processing facilities where they were mugging for casual selfies…
I buy that it only takes 2 to cowboy, but in my experience, after said cowboys ride off in a triumphant self-celebratory blog post, it can take an army to clean up the mess they don’t even know they created.
[0] https://oversight.house.gov/report/opm-data-breach-governmen...
> If the people who set up the DW and set up the data to flow into it did not also build any applications […] they didn’t complete their job properly
1. That’s a whole extra level of responsibility / management / bureaucracy. At some point, somebody near the top needs to care or it doesn’t all get done. The existence of this DB says somebody cared, they just didn’t have enough power.
2. I’m curious how this compares to experiences at Big Old Corp, like IBM or GM, not just the SV darlings.
Thanks for pointing this out. I think it does a good job of also highlighting that most problems aren’t technical; they are either people or organizational.
Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it.
Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
How do you know what the people involved did? Let’s not pretend speculation is fact.
They seemed to have replaced Mega Bloks with Legos, not skyscraper building materials.
Thanks for highlighting this.
There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air, and often even work stolen from others.
It's sad, but I think our generation is partly to blame, since we demanded that from them.
It must suck to lose your whole life and personality just to appease the meritocratic golem.
> There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ, they're quick (sometimes to the point of seeming rushed) to show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements that are mostly hot air
Isn’t it true for every so-called edge that CEOs pitch to shareholders?
This is not new to Gen z.
Didn't say it was.
Edit:
>I've noticed a lot of crime in [city].
>Crime is not new to [city].
>Didn't say it was.
Come on, the quality of this discourse is abhorrent.
You're literally being downvoted for stereotyping an entire generation. The word stereotype implies it, but it's not remotely close to true.
Like, the easiest, most obvious example in the world is trump: he hyperbolically brags constantly about things he didn't do or actively tried to stop and it would be real hard to argue that he's genZ.
When you single out a specific group for your observation, it has strong implications about the other groups you didn't mention.
As in this case: why did you only mention genZ?
>[A]s are [B]s
>But that doesn't imply all [B]s are [A]s
Come on, dude. This gets covered in the first 10 minutes of any entry-level course to logic ...
Yeah and that would be a lot more relevant if we were talking about, dunno, programming circuits or constructing proofs.
Instead we're writing english language sentences to be read by humans. Where connotations and implications and other such "unspoken" things absolutely matter.
>[GenZ]s are [Hyperbolic]s
>But that doesn't imply all [Hyperbolic]s are [GenZ]s
Seems clear to me.
Are you trolling? The implication is clearly that GenZ is unusually hyperbolic. That their predilection for hyperbole is somehow unusual or notable, otherwise WHY MENTION IT.
That's what saying "noticed with Gen Z" means.
Reply to edit: generations are sequential; if you've noticed something with one generation it means that you're not accusing the prior generations of the same thing, otherwise you would've used different wording.
> There's a dangerous trend I've noticed with GenZ
Those are some mighty fine hares you're splitting.
> show off hyperbolic-sounding achievements which are mostly hot air and many times even work stolen from others.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955, the ball has been rolling for a while now. Gen Z might just be the crowd that recognizes how lucrative it is to scam people.
We must have different definitions of hot air, if yours includes a 4-trillion-dollar company.
Edit: you edited your comment so now my reply doesn't make sense. I would re-post your old comment but I didn't save it. I won't change mine because I'm not like that.
The creation in the article appears to be genuinely useful and impressive as well. It certainly benefitted a great deal from other people's work, but so did apple and linux and whatever else.
It was 10x smaller when Jobs retired in 2011, not that it really matters for this analysis.
Musk was born in 1971, for example.
> Two engineers walked into the government six months ago to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov and are poised to turn six-month waits into near-instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.
Written by said engineers about themselves. It's hard to read this as little more than a long-winded self-congratulatory Twitter post before the results are actually visible. It's no wonder their social handles sit at the bottom of the page to funnel followers to their page.
It must be part of a larger marketing push; their boss(?) appeared on the Odd Lots podcast a couple days ago to talk about this work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scott-kupors-new-plan-... He spent a lot of time promoting this new National Design Studio's attempt to attract tech works for 2-year commitments to drop into existing orgs, which is basically how the 18F PIF program worked before it was dissolved earlier this year. Perhaps abruptly terminating a program to reinvent it from scratch six months later is very efficient.
18F: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F Overview of the related programs: https://willslack.com/pif-18f-usds/
(A warning about Odd Lots: the hosts never question or push back on people talking their book. This especially bad with politicians and political appointees, who are often very creative during their interviews.)
I took the words at their face value and genuinely thought 2 engineers got this done. In reality there's an OPM engineering team in Georgia.
I mean, the article has paragraphs like:
> With the system online, there were still many improvements to be made. Like taxes, applying for retirement was still an incredibly confusing process. Working closely with talented designers and the Retirement Services team at OPM, we set out to reinvent the user experience from end-to-end.
Complaining that the writer took all the credit seems a bit petty.
> They had committed to building all of this [a previous modernization effort] on Microsoft PowerApps, a “no-code” tool meant for building simple web apps
> When we met with the developers in Macon, Georgia, OPM's engineering hub, they told us the PowerApps experience was so unfriendly that even they were afraid to make changes. Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
It’s enterprise software so product managers don’t decide anything. They’re just an automaton charged with implementing whatever complied with the RFP terms that were written by the vendor to wire the procurement. It’s basically a problem with central planning, there’s no easy fix but giving people agency is a big part of it instead of ramming some enterprise crap that was designed to sell to “leaders” or committees down their throats.
Many small businesses (and small teams inside large orgs) do not have “servers” in the sense that an employee can push code to it. It’s just Windows Server and handles email, file share, ERP, etc. I think those in the tech industry may not appreciate the ease of having a platform you can “program” jobs in, and it’s included in M365, despite the very-large warts.
I specifically said "large, complex codebases", so I'm not sure how your comment is relevant.
If the project you're implementing is Big (which the federal employee retirement system qualifies for by any sane metric), then the infra you described is inappropriate. If the project isn't Big, then my comment wasn't addressing it.
> How much longer is it going to take project managers to realize that no-code tools are inappropriate for large, complex codebases?
Really depends. It can work great, I see some really good No/Low code tools in ERP systems. Things like alerts, workflows, custom fields, actions, etc are... you would be surprised the ingenuity of people, but also - yes there are limits.
An ERP is practically an opinionated entire operating system with its own data, conventions, rules, ACLs, etc...
Ingenuity is the word. Some of the things I’ve seen “nontechnical” people do in Excel are boggling.
But I wouldn’t build the foundation of an ERP system on stuff like that. I think you’re describing a scripting interface, rather than the core?
not scripting per se - yes that is part of it typically, with windows based ERPs, you get scripting for close to free if you can 'drop into' other stuff, like VB, or if your ERP leverages the COM interfaces, has an ODBC or even a straight SQL backend, yes there are many approaches. It's really - how does the scripting interact with the system
What i am talking about is more simple
1. user defined actions. 2. common triggers (object X Save, object Y delete) 2. user defined fields on core data tables 3. user defined tables
You can go very far with that, and a drop into a VB script, or run a prebuilt action (IE some verb on the object, like "print this document" on Save)
I did a brief news search for something from a more neutral party and found this article:
Federal retirement processing has slowed substantially this year due to DRP. As OPM continues modernizing retirement systems, another application surge looms.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/retirement/2025/12/in-the-dar...
They seem to think the new systems helped:
> Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.
> Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.
> “OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.
> But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.
> “A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”
Power Apps is just absolutely terrible for forms. Which is sad, because the platform itself is decent and most governmental entities that I've worked with seem to have access to it. If the UI/UX was better and Forms weren't cursed then non-technical teams could maintain their own apps and workflows. Combo'ing it with Power Automate can get a lot of things done. But Power Apps Forms need a complete re-haul and without such a change it will absolutely be the right decision to create something outside of it.
I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
This "national design studio" seems strikingly similar to 18F, which was cut by DOGE earlier this year. Was not aware of it until now. Apparently it was established in August by EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/impr...
Does anyone have a scoop on NDS? Is it composed of 18F staffers?
> Unless they’ve been specifically trained with PowerApps, most software developers would find it extremely unintuitive to build with, making it hard to apply classic coding skills or iterate quickly.
Sounds just like Sharepoint.
I love both that this happened and that you did the work to bring attention to it. Heck yeah
Gee I hope they don't break an arm jerking themselves off. Good lord.
This is exactly how us taxes should work. The IRS already has all the information it needs - it should fill out the form, give you a chance to double check, and then you're done.
Sigh...
They often don't have all the information.
National Design Studios seems to have been created in August:
https://archive.is/Gv9nC
> Aug 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said.
> Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio - a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The work described in this blog post seems to have been done under its predecessor, DOGE, given that the launch date was June 2. But apparently these engineers moved to the new organization, so that’s why the blog post is there.
So, 18F.
Yeah, this is what I don't understand. Why did we gut 18F, which was doing incredible work and make a... a new version? Seems the opposite of reducing waste.
Because 18F was from the Obama administration
Ah yes, the Nextjs app with access to personally identifiable information for every federal employee.
Huh, hacker news keeps telling me we should run the government like a business though?
It's definitely a step up from PowerApps though.
I did find that troubling too. I can see the logic of a short lived / well funded project using nextjs, but for something like this that's meant to be a simple form that needs to be reliable, easy to maintain, and long lived, my first thought would be to make a classic restful MPA. Introduction of a complex frontend framework like next seems like it would lead to more headaches than it's worth. Had similar thoughts about the Azur vendor lockin. I seriously doubt they had the traffic to justify needing something like Azur functions and batch processing. I'd love to hear some more justification for why they choose this stack, and if they considered any alternatives first.
If it was really down to two engineers, it's almost certainly what one or both of them were already comfortable or familiar with and no other reason. Six months is such a short time frame for long term projects like this that I imagine they could not spare much time for analysis of alternatives.
I had assumed that these people were not junior devs left unsupervised to handle important government work.
So what's going to happen in 3 years after these startup bros have left government, none of the frameworks they're using are supported any more, and nobody in the office that they parachuted into is trained to maintain whatever spaghetti they crapped out over three months of all-nighters? There's a reason that we don't build critical infrastructure by giving it to some guy whose entire accomplishments are "working at Airbnb for 10 years"
You cast too broad a brush! Having worked at Airbnb for 10 years would have been fine. The problem is DOGE was staffed by twenty year olds. How would that have worked? They started at AirBnB when they were 10?
What's the relationship to doge?
Found the blog post troubling amateurish for something so important, then noticed the name Edward Coristine and zoomer twitter handles at the bottom and realized this is a bunch junior devs hacking together our country's infrastructure.
Well done! Government agencies tend to always seek more funding and never change or close down even when everyone universally agrees change is needed. Good to see change here.
The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood like bankruptcy does for private industry. We do need a smoother mechanism than just hacking whatever is not protected by insane public employee unions though.
> The shrinking of the federal government is much needed as there is no mechanism to remove dead wood
What do you mean?
The budget is voted on by Congress literally every single year. The mechanism absolutely exists. The political consensus to do so is harder to achieve, but that's only when people actually don't universally agree change is needed (or how specifically to change it).
The mechanism technically exists but we haven't had a budget vote in years. We get "continuing resolutions" and periodic government shutdown brinksmanship games.
“People” aren’t really involved. Thanks to the gerrymander (which has now been full-throatedly embraced by the party that used to rightly call it out), the people’s votes don’t really matter. The congresspeople’s votes theoretically do, but they’re mainly just bought by the lobbyists who fund their primary campaigns.
What’s missing is the incentive. The budget and deficit increase regardless of who is in office because all the incentives are for it to increase.
> deadwood like bankruptcy for private industry
Unless a given industry is too big too fail, or requires millions to billions in corporate welfare, or where bankruptcy voids responsibility of ecological disasters and socializes the damage. Since those things have obviously never happened.
It’s bad when the government does those things. That doesn’t change the fact that no such feedback mechanism exists for the government, which comprises almost 40% of GDP (in the U.S. including state and local).
The government should NEVER bail out a private business of any kind. There should also be no limited liability for companies... that would prevent issues where an owner abuses the environment then walks away with the fortune he made while the company goes bankrupt from lawsuits.
This admin has fired 270,000 people and yet federal spending has substantially increased. What would you say the goal is?
Could it be ... gut the federal government like it was a leveraged buyout and then steal everyone's money?
Certainly seems to be.
That's it. That is the goal. You found it.
Hear me out: there is no goal. Half your income is spent on supporting an elaborate jobs program of self-licking ice cream cones.