> I, probably stupidly, was asked by a — not even a journalist but a writer who just has a blog about my business going open-source, and I spoke to him. He had a bunch of questions about me working for DOGE and I felt that Elon was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent. That's something he said a lot in private and publicly. And so I felt, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent and sort of "ask forgiveness not permission" sort of thing. I said mostly that the government was not as inefficient as I was expecting.
> And then, my access got revoked pretty shortly after. I didn't get notified. I was basically ghosted and I just got an email notification that my access was no longer valid.
> Unfortunately, they did not tell me directly that the reason I was let go was because of my transparency. I don't know if irony is the right word, but I do think that it's maybe, as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, and letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.
Despite having been fired by DOGE, he is performing a lot of verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word "hypocrisy."
9283409232 · 1d ago
Or the words "lies" or "liar." DOGE and Elon have been anything but transparent and go out of their way to be as opaque as possible.
desktopninja · 1d ago
"lies & deceit"
workworkwork71 · 20h ago
Of course there is waste in the federal gov but somehow I think Elon ripping food from starving children and torching the agencies that regulate his businesses isn't actually going to solve that problem.
People who proudly attached their names to doge will go down in the history books as the people responsible for hundreds of thousands (or millions, in time) of deaths and the outright larceny of structure & privacy from the American people.
Nothing could be more shameful.
legitster · 2d ago
> And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.
An insanely insightful statement.
naijaboiler · 1d ago
Duh. Anybody serious could have told him that.
FootballBat · 2d ago
FAANG is daycare for adults.
kridsdale3 · 2d ago
I thought it was pretty well understood that the purpose of these companies is to overhire overqualified people simply to keep them busy doing things that are just enjoyable enough, with great perks, that they won't consider leaving the megacorp and focusing their talents to create viable startups that are a genuine threat to the monopoly.
apothegm · 1d ago
It’s not to prevent them starting startups. It’s to prevent them being hired by other FAANGs.
robocat · 2d ago
Why does that myth persist?
The numbers don't make economic sense for a company.
And truly productive people are not the type to be motivated by dollars (to do boring makework).
9283409232 · 1d ago
It's not a myth. Executives just don't do as much as you think and the numbers don't need to make economic sense when you have a bottomless VC fund to pull from.
shaldengeki · 1d ago
This strikes me as disingenuous:
> I like when my software gets used by a lot of people and people send me nice emails. In this case, people weren't sending me the nicest emails, unfortunately. But they also didn't really know what I was doing. They saw DOGE, weren't a fan of certain things that they were associated with. But I think at the end of the day, like, the role of the U.S. Digital Service is to improve the UX (user experience) of being an American, which is pretty exciting. And anyone who lets me do that, I will try to work for, even if my friends and family aren't huge fans.
People weren't mad at him because he was trying to improve UX. They were mad at him because DOGE was doing a bunch of other stuff like "harassing government employees who talked about climate resilience", which he actively contributed to but conveniently omits from the interviews he's been giving recently:
> And then, my access got revoked pretty shortly after. I didn't get notified. I was basically ghosted and I just got an email notification that my access was no longer valid.
> Unfortunately, they did not tell me directly that the reason I was let go was because of my transparency. I don't know if irony is the right word, but I do think that it's maybe, as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, and letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.
Despite having been fired by DOGE, he is performing a lot of verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word "hypocrisy."
People who proudly attached their names to doge will go down in the history books as the people responsible for hundreds of thousands (or millions, in time) of deaths and the outright larceny of structure & privacy from the American people.
Nothing could be more shameful.
An insanely insightful statement.
The numbers don't make economic sense for a company.
And truly productive people are not the type to be motivated by dollars (to do boring makework).
> I like when my software gets used by a lot of people and people send me nice emails. In this case, people weren't sending me the nicest emails, unfortunately. But they also didn't really know what I was doing. They saw DOGE, weren't a fan of certain things that they were associated with. But I think at the end of the day, like, the role of the U.S. Digital Service is to improve the UX (user experience) of being an American, which is pretty exciting. And anyone who lets me do that, I will try to work for, even if my friends and family aren't huge fans.
People weren't mad at him because he was trying to improve UX. They were mad at him because DOGE was doing a bunch of other stuff like "harassing government employees who talked about climate resilience", which he actively contributed to but conveniently omits from the interviews he's been giving recently:
https://github.com/slavingia/va/blob/main/eos/analyze_eos.py...