Technologist is not a job

I've had a lot of conversations with people directly in or formerly part of the civic tech community and I've been sharing something that's become apparent to me in the 14 months since 18F was shut down. Technologist isn't a job.

The catch-all term for people working in civic tech, it's really meant to encapsulate all of the non-technical people who built a mission and vocation into an industry of its own. That's a misnomer though, because realistically, the only thing civic tech has proven is that you're not a vendor, based in a major city or forward-thinking state, you're basically going to a temporarily employed, forward-deployed practitioner doing harder work than your peers at tech companies for less pay. Your reward? The opportunity to be buried inside of orgs watching stuff be done half as well as it could be, slower than it should be and no real ability to raise your voice to stop it.

Am I selling you yet?

I've been writing a lot about what the successor of the space might be, and even taught a college class trying to contend with the *latency between policy as it's written and how it's rendered on the ground.

There's the other side, where you take a public service that operates so bad you can build a private sector solution around it, sell the data and call it a business. Civic tech as composed is crazy making business, because we just accept that government should deploy slowly, that problems we could solve in days or weeks — even as pilots — should take years because "the rules" say so. But the rules are only rules when certain people decide they are. The same institutions that insist delivery work must move slowly can marshal resources fast and route around statute when a stadium needs renovating or an industry wants its public handout on the promise of future jobs.

Technologists can be designers, developers, and product management types. But they're also deep subject matter experts across government sectors who don't know much about technology natively. They're the users of tools, platforms, systems and services. Their workarounds and deftness at using them during busy moments is where their expertise is especially valued. We thought for a long time that you could improve government by sending a team of people who've shipped software into places who don't know what an Agile ceremony is, but it turns out you need more than that. You need senior people inside the institution with the authority to fund it, protect it, and take the hit when it fails.

People swear that we can make government work better, but the sort of effort that it requires to do this means you need hundreds of little experiments deployed everywhere, sharing what they're learning and accepting some of the work will fail. It also means building teams that can pass down knowledge, and more importantly, deciding there are some problems that we shouldn't wait to solve when we have the tech, tools, know-how and time to tackle them now.

Which brings it back to standing. The work is real, and the job title decides everything around it — who gets hired, at what level, with how much authority. "Technologist" describes none of that. The piece of it people skip is the senior cover: people inside the institution with the authority to fund the work, protect it, and take the hit when it fails.