The former Google engineer heads the U.S. Digital Service, a federal agency that grew out of the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov website and is now charged with developing technology to improve federal government services and operations.
Cutts came to the Bay Area recently, seeking to entice product managers, engineers, designers and other tech experts at companies including Google and Apple to join him in the federal digital service. Sure, new recruits have to forsake the company cafeterias common at major tech firms, but there are other rewards, Cutts said.
“There’s no free lunch in government, but there are other perks,” Cutts said. “There’s a bowling alley in the White House.”
Beyond possible bowling opportunities, digital service jobs can pay up to $163,000 a year, he said. Median compensation for a software engineer in San Jose is $107,000, and $113,000 for a product manager, according to PayScale.
What Cutts is hoping will really attract at least some high-performing tech workers is the sense of “mission” digital service positions confer, whether the job is streamlining the bureaucracies of Medicare and Medicaid, improving record-sharing between the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs, or designing ways to assess the impact of post-disaster Federal Emergency Management Agency loans.
“You can make a living while you’re doing good,” Cutts said.
In attempting to recruit tech workers from the Bay Area, Cutts should lean heavily on that sense-of-mission pitch, said Terri Griffith, a Santa Clara University business professor who studies the intersection of worker skills and company practices.
“Any decision to move into a new role is always a bunch of balances,” Griffith said. “They have to sell the service piece of this.”
But the Bay Area recruiting drive — during which Cutts delivered a keynote speech at Code for America Summit in Oakland — comes at a time of long-simmering distrust between the traditionally left-leaning Bay Area, the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress. Far-right supporters of the president often complain that tech companies like Google, for example, censor conservative views, while Trump’s policies and actions have alienated many in the Bay Area, and prompted Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to withdraw from the president’s advisory councils.
In the digital service, about half of the current 180 employees are women, Cutts said. He wants to hire 50 more people, with workers to be embedded in other federal agencies — potentially including the Treasury Department.
“We’ve literally flown people into Fort Knox to revive computer programs,” Cutts said.
Potential hires must be able to start within six months and commit to at least six months with the digital service, which works out of a townhouse “a stone’s throw” from the White House, Cutts said.
The White House, and its most prominent resident, could make Cutts’ recruiting work a challenge, said Stanford University business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.
“Government jobs are being demonized by many political figures… with people in all sorts of agencies regularly seen as part of the ‘deep state’ or something,” Pfeffer said. “The president and cabinet secretaries show, in general, little respect for or appreciation of the people working hard for their government. Who wants to work for a place that, in many ways, signals it does not value them or appreciate their service?”
The digital service, Cutts said, hires only 4 percent of applicants for jobs that require skills beyond technological expertise.
“We want people to be able to do the work, but also sit down and brief a cabinet secretary,” Cutts said.
A number of companies he’s aiming to poach employees from have policies allowing workers to take leaves, and he suggested that they could give the digital service a six-month test run, then either continue in government or return to their jobs.
The ability for tech experts to try out the digital service is a good selling point for Cutts, along with the opportunity for professional development, Griffith said.
“You could also sell in terms of … learning to work with very complex clients, learning to work with different kinds of time scales,” Griffith said. “If the U.S.D.S. can sort of paint a picture about how this is a great move to help you build a broad and unique foundation, then I think they’ll be more successful.”
Everyone in America should wish the digital service good luck in its recruiting, she added.
“All of us are touched by the work that the U.S. government does,” Griffith said. “I certainly like my government to work better and more efficiently. The inefficiencies cost us all a lot.”
©2018 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
