00:38:39 · Scott Kupor
[00:38:39] S1: a wild step. 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. And the work... Government In government. Sorry. So 44% in government 50. That 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. So, you know, we talked about this, but look, I'm a small government guy. I won't presuppose your your ideological views, but Son a Cuban immigrant. Okay. So you're you're more more small government than the 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. So 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 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 gonna do that. And, 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 act... Who are looking at this stuff?
00:40:24 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:40:24] S0: And your message is what? We need young Here's my message. Technically talented people to [00:40:28] S1: just Not just technically talented. [00:40:29] S0: Do a two year stint. Yeah, exactly. Because I think somebody was saying like when you first came in, oh, you're like, you're kind of screwing things up because our pitch here is like, you have a job for life. Yeah. And you're like, yeah, but young people don't think that way. Yeah.
00:40:40 · Scott Kupor
[00:40:40] S1: So I had a manager who like 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. Like 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, you know, I hate to say this, but like that's not the kind of person we want because that's not the kind of like 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 Department of Energy, there's all kinds of cool like super computer stuff and all kinds of things, work on these hard problems. And then after that, quite frankly, if you wanna go to private sector, that's amazing. Like let's help you go to the private sector. So this tech force program I mentioned, in addition to these two year stints, we've partners 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 core where it's the best, the brightest kids coming out of high school and go to the cyber core. And when they come out, every like venture capital firm is falling all over themselves to fund these guys. Every like cyber company wants to hire them. Like that's the kind of thing like we want for the federal government.
00:42:16 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
And if people love being government, great, God bless them, they can stay in government. But like we don't need to ask people to make like thirty, forty year commitments. [00:42:23] S0: I think you're 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. Will get some percentage of people, but it's like, 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. That's with incentives. And look what could happen. Like, 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. [00:42:45] S1: That's exactly right. And 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. Right? So 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 Doge stuff, right? There's a guy named Big Balls. Have you ever heard of Big Balls? [00:43:16] S0: I've heard of
00:43:17 · Scott Kupor
[00:43:17] S1: Big I hate peanut butter. I don't know anything else, but his name. It's very hard to say it on air, but anyways, his... He had... As I mentioned to somebody I 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 want to 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 dough 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. He said, 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, 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 skillset, 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 going to 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.
00:45:01 · Scott Kupor, David Senra
Look, we're never going to 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 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 14 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 been doing from a policy perspective is to fix all that stuff and say like merit matters, take a test, take an assessment and everything else quite frankly, you know, like we shouldn't worry about. [00:45:31] S0: 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. [00:45:45] S1: Exactly. Right. [00:45:46] S0: You came in before, during, after Doge, like what was?