How to Attract the Next Generation of Civic Technologists

There is a small but strong contingent of technical students at Stanford University who are interested in public service. We’re two of them! But when we developed and taught a course on civic technology and government modernization, we learned that almost none of our classmates planned to take their technical talents to government after graduating.

Closing the gap between technical students and public service will require governments at the local, state and federal levels to rethink their recruiting strategy. Based on our learnings from our class, Move Fast and Fix Things: Innovating for Effective Government, we recommend three concrete shifts that could change the calculus for the next generation of public service-curious technologists.

FRAME GOVERNMENT WORK AS SOLVING CONSEQUENTIAL SYSTEMS PROBLEMS

The most immediate barrier we saw is that students perceive government as ineffective and question whether their work would produce meaningful results. Recruiting strategies that lean on abstract appeals to civic duty fall flat unless government can demonstrate clearly what impactful work is actually possible there.

We counteracted this in our class with concrete implementation case studies. For instance, Ryan Panchadsaram, former U.S. deputy CTO, walked us through the rebuilding of healthcare.gov after its failed launch. Students were presented with a tangible example of how millions of people depend on government technology systems, how billions of dollars in benefits flow through them each year and what is at stake if they do not work.

In that context, government work emerged not just as a moral cause, but as a consequential socio-technical systems problem. The impact is indeed less immediate than “just” building an app and watching users respond because change moves through layers of institutional processes. But those processes point to why the work matters: Civic technologists shape systems that affect millions of constituents, and the bureaucracy reflects the stakes of getting it right.

BUILD EARLIER, BROADER PATHWAYS INTO CIVIC TECH

Government needs to engage students early in ways that fit how they learn and choose careers. This means showing up to computer science courses, where technical students already are. Practitioners can guest lecture, as leaders like Jennifer Pahlka, Mina Hsiang and Jimmy Chen did in our course. State and local government leaders can work with faculty to embed short case study modules into classes and partner with nearby universities on semester-long, project-based collaborations to pique student interest. In fact, Chris Kuang and Ariana Soto, co-founders of Coding It Forward, were inspired to build a government fellowship for early career technologists after taking a field course at Harvard where students conducted user research for government. These initiatives do not need to be time-intensive to be effective: We intentionally constructed our course to be low-commitment but high-substance so that busy students could dabble in civic tech alongside demanding course loads.

Reaching students earlier also means expanding beyond elite universities. Community colleges and state schools represent a vast talent pool that is often more closely connected to local communities. Academic centers like the City University of New York’s Public Interest Technology Program, which offers application-based classes that partner with local governments, model what this can look like. Coding It Forward received applications from all 50 states and almost 1,000 academic institutions this year. The interest is already widespread; the opportunity now is for governments to meet that demand.

Furthermore, government must broaden its definition of “technical talent” to include generalists, designers, product managers and policy specialists alongside engineers. Civic tech depends on people who can translate across domains and build bridges between policy, technology and operations. As Lindsay Young, former executive director of 18F said, many of her colleagues “aren’t engineers by training, but they’ve been solving technical problems for a decade.” Especially as technical proficiency becomes increasingly accessible through AI tools, government should recruit for systems-level understanding, which is harder to develop.

BE UPFRONT ABOUT THE TRADEOFFS — THEN MAKE THE CASE ANYWAY

If government wants to earn the trust of technical students, it needs to be honest about what it can and cannot offer. For aspiring 10x engineers, government cannot offer cutting-edge technical work or the structured engineering mentorship common at big tech companies. Most of the problems that most civic technologists will encounter are, from a technical standpoint, largely solved. Building a benefits portal or modernizing a case management system won’t push the frontiers of AI.

But government can offer something else: the opportunity to build toward an honorable mission at a massive scale.

During our internships at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, we saw far more room for ownership and entrepreneurship than the stereotypes suggest. And as we heard from Harrison MacRae, Pennsylvania’s director of emerging technologies, state and local agencies can offer less bureaucracy and even more direct responsibility for problems that affect people’s day-to-day lives.

Most importantly, government must emphasize that civic tech is not a one-way door. Programs like the US Digital Corps, TechCongress and the new Tech Force create structured tours of duty for early career technologists. If government can normalize rotations between the public and private sectors, it will attract talent without forcing students to choose between public service and their long-term professional trajectory.

Civic tech leaders joke that you have to be a certain kind of “crazy” to work in this field. But government should not depend on that type of exceptional idealism alone; it needs to make working in government a rational decision for students. For state and local leaders, who are just miles from the universities where this talent is being trained, the opportunity is immediately actionable: showing up to a class, partnering with a university and being candid with students about the work are small investments with an outsized return. If governments at every level can effectively reframe and retarget their recruiting strategies, they can cultivate the generation of technologists needed to reimagine and modernize public institutions for the 21st century.

Emily Tianshi is a master’s student in computer science at Stanford University. She first became interested in public interest technology while interning at the San Diego Mayor's Office and has since worked at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, NATO’s Cyber Defense Centre in Estonia, and the Stanford Cyber Policy Center on projects involving open-source software security, security by design and election integrity. At Stanford, she leads voter registration efforts to expand civic participation and develops ethics curricula for computer science courses.

Medhya Goel studies computer science and government at Stanford University. Her interest in public interest technology began while working at her local courthouse, and she has since helped revive Stanford’s Public Interest Technology Lab. Previously, Medhya has engineered systems serving millions of users at Meta and Stripe, worked on cyber policy at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, built disinformation-tracking tools at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, and automated criminal records expungement at Rasa Legal.