Prompt: Now, if you’re the last person and you’re not training anyone, all that knowledge goes away. A new person who comes in and starts working on a system that hasn’t been maintained for three or four months. People try to write everything down but you never say a lot of these things, even to a person sitting right there next to you.  If you want to see somebody actually working on the mainframe screens to get a sense of how complicated they are, moshix—that’s his username—on YouTube has about 160 video recordings up.

Response: Have you watched some of these? Quite a few, yes. Some of them I watch because I’ve never used the products he’s working on. Others remind me of systems I’ve worked on and I find it enjoyable to watch it over again. Get Your CICS You mentioned earlier that you were on the applications side at CMS before you were on the storage side. Can you tell us about when you started and what it was like? When they hired me, they were moving into a brand new office building. There were about 150 people there, and we had thirty or forty mainframe applications. We had CICS, IMS DB, just about everything. We were a service bureau.  Teams now tend to have product managers, designers, and programmers. What was the makeup of your team?  We had systems analysts and we had coders. I was in-between. In terms of designing the applications, you’d start with a screen layout and a database layout, and go from there. Usually, you’ve got a form that you need someone to fill out. You have to replicate the form fields on screen: first name, last name, middle name, social security number, address, and all that. That gives you all your records.


Prompt: The first IBM was this Hollerith card system they used for the 1890 census. You’d have a person’s name, their address, and all this other information punched on cards. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit, so you’d need a few cards for each person and you needed to know what information was on what card—card one had the name and address, card two had the spouse and job, card five had whatever. That’s your set of information for that person.  Now that you’ve got computer files on hard drives, it’s all in one record. All the transactions for that person—having a kid, changing their healthcare plan—those are different fields under that person.  It sounds like, when you were building out features, there was programming you did on the backend and then programming in CICS. Is that more like the frontend? CICS itself is a multitasking transaction manager, where it takes in a transaction name that the user enters. It uses that transaction name to start the COBOL programs associated with it. A transaction in this case is like a thread. Maybe CICS runs the programs, then returns the result and exits. Or maybe it shows you a result on the screen, asks for more inputs, then does more work, and then exits. So CICS itself would not change but you’d get releases every other year with updates through the operating system.  When you found a problem with your application program, you’d put the changes in at that point. Only a few people could update the authorized production application, because you just don’t want a bunch of people going in and messing up a production database, causing all kinds of problems. The real problems were bad enough.

Response: Did you all do any user testing where you’d have a caseworker or an HR worker go through that screen with you?  Yes, we’d call up our end users and they’d try out the changes to the system themselves. Everybody who did the testing had a coax switch to switch between test and production. Like a physical switch?  A physical switch on a coax line, yes.


Prompt: Software engineers now expect to be on call and sometimes get called in the middle of the night. Were you on call for these systems? Yes, I was. All thirty-some years.  We would have two or three people in a group, so we could rotate. But then we got people in that had grown up around PCs, and they just don’t appreciate that computers have to operate 24/7.  How did being on call for thirty years affect your life?  Since I did it my whole life, it’s hard to say.  I was limited in how far away I could go for a social event since I had to be able to get back to work if called. And limited on drinking since I had to be able to drive to work at any time.

Response: Most nights I didn’t get called, but then some nights would be bad and I’d get two to three calls in one night. Other times, I wouldn’t be called but once a month. When I got towards the very end of my career, it was less than once a month because we kept so on top of those storage groups, made sure we had enough space on them.


Prompt: When you were working on those applications and you were working with people who then were using your application, how did that feel? I felt a real pride and ownership in working on that screen. There were 300 to 400 people who used it to sign up 80,000 state employees for healthcare programs all across the state. It was important that it worked just right for them.  These people are all counting on me to do my thing right. I felt quite a bit of responsibility.  Make and model Backing up a bit in the story—how did you first get into computers?  I was in high school in 1979 and they got in two TRS-80 Model Is with a cassette tape drive and sixteen kilobytes of memory. We started doing little projects on that. They had one in the electronics lab and it was empty during my lunch hour, so I would go down there and use it then. That got me interested in computers.  You could sit there and see your results right in front of you. I had even used a teletype printer keyboard at this physics camp at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in June 1978. You type in a command and it’s printing as you go. Then, when you press enter, the command goes in and starts printing up the results.  I got my computer science degree at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. I used punch cards for my first two classes in the fall of 1981 and spring of 1982. We got IBM 3270 consoles at that time, and that was also when the IBM PC came out. I also had one class on an Apple II computer with a Zilog Z80 card in it, which was a follow-up to the Intel 8080.  Could you describe the teletype printer keyboard more? Was there a screen? We used it to play this Star Trek game. You didn’t have a screen; it was all printed text. You’d type your command at the printer because it was a teletype interface over an acoustic coupler modem that had cups to hold the phone headpiece with speaker and microphone. The teletype machine would output sounds that the cups would then receive and transmit through the modem. The telephone system didn’t have the RJ45 phone plugs to directly connect phones into the modem yet.

Response: When you were going to college at Illinois State, why did you choose computer science?  The IBM PC didn’t come out until November ’81 and they didn’t have one at the university until fall of ’82. At that time, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to work for a big business that could afford to buy one. Even the TRS-80 was a couple thousand bucks and I was earning three bucks an hour. I was not going to be able to get one. I knew a computer-oriented job would be with a big company that had an IBM mainframe or a minicomputer.


Prompt: In 1981, the IBM 360 had just been out fifteen years and they were still rolling out major changes to the operating system. It had thirty-two bit registers but only used twenty-four bits for the address so it could only address sixteen megabytes. Our mainframe computer at the university had eight megabytes and when they expanded it to twelve, it took a whole refrigerator-sized unit to add that amount of memory. Every four megabytes basically meant another refrigerator. And then the computer core itself was one or two refrigerators.  So where did you end up working after college? I applied to the Illinois State Police (ISP) because they had a job posting. I went and interviewed, and they initially said they were going to hire me, but then they called back and said I wasn’t going to get in because I had voted in the Democratic primary. They told me to contact my county Republican chairman and join their Young Republican’s group, which I did. After that, ISP offered me a job. I started on December 3,1984 and I worked on various applications there. One was crime statistics reports, and then I went to online applications for them. Never involved in cases; I was just making sure the computer systems were up and running to track traffic tickets and, later, investigatory files.

Response: What were your first impressions of that job?  The office building was sixty years old by the time I got there. You had a desk on one side and a computer table on the other. There was a 3178 display, which is basically a CRT unit and a keyboard with a little computer box on the side of the computer that communicated over coax cable to the box in the closet. There wasn’t a full PC there yet. It worked really well. In fact, I kind of missed it when we got our PCs. The PCs wanted everything in twenty-four lines instead of forty-three, so we had half the amount of screen we’d had before, but it seemed like even less. But other than that, you know, it’s all the same information.  Could you talk about the applications that you worked on while you worked there and who used them?  It was the dispatchers at the state police headquarters who talked to the troopers over the radio. Entering traffic tickets, entering a license plate to do a query on it. Find out who the owner was, if they had any warrants out on them.   That system had been around over a decade by the time I got there in ’84. It was about ’69 or ’70 when they got their first computer going to communicate with the FBI and offices in other states.


Prompt: It was a federal project? There was a state project called LEADS that communicated with the FBI’s computer and then each state had their own computer and applications, just like every state has their own state police.  These were applications written in COBOL, Assembler, and IDEAL. Then I did a reporting system on a CICS with Datacom. For a drug traffic stop system, I copied an application we had to a new application called Valkyrie. It was to track what they found during traffic stops: drugs, weapons, whatever was found. I think we were the first state to come up with an application to do something like that, and that was one of the last projects I got to do over at the state police about 1989. The headquarters for that was going to be in El Paso.  We work on technology to help clear people’s criminal records. So I’ve talked to a number of people at the FBI and Nlets about making sense of criminal record data across state lines.

Response: Yes, it’s complicated. The FBI has their own network for sending electronic law enforcement data nationally, but the states can’t use it. The states had to create their own organization called Nlets to communicate criminal justice information, like out-of-state arrests, across state lines. There are other barriers too. You know the 1-800 number you have to call to do the background check for a firearms purchase? By US law, all that information has to be stored on paper. So when you call that number, somebody takes the person’s information and goes and looks it up on paper and then calls you back with the information. You can’t just type it in and get the information back, or even just have a person in FBI headquarters type the name in and find out right there. The FBI person doing the lookup has to go physically search through paper for that person.  And Congress doesn’t want the information released. So they just put up all these obstacles in people’s ways.  Why did you leave ISP?  Well, that was the asbestos. We were up on the sixth floor and we had like skylights up there and the caulk would leak from time to time. Sometimes, we’d have a leak and you’d smell the mold. And then that started dropping on the asbestos and it all started falling off the pipes and onto people’s desks.


Prompt: One person had a four-inch-high conical pile of white powder on their desk every day for about two weeks. We thought the janitor was pulling a prank or something because they’d sweep it off in the morning and there’d be nothing there all day. Then we’d come in the next day and there would be another pile there.  When we found out it was asbestos, we were concerned. We reported it to building maintenance and they covered it with duct tape and started taking air samples. This air sample machine was sitting there every day making noise. We lived with it. They moved us to another floor while they fixed it up, and when they were done, we went back up there.  You went back?  Yup. But that was the last straw for me. Repairs were going so slow. They were there for another twenty-five years in that building. It was 2009 before they bought the Franklin Life buildings in town and got the people out of there. It was 2012 before they got the computers out. The rest of the building still has to be cleared out and they haven’t done that. It’s been sitting empty for close to a decade now.

Response: Union Dilution Were you covered by the union at that time? And was the union present in those conversations about the asbestos?  Most of my time at state police, I was in a merit comp, a nonunion position. The “programmer analysts” were in the union, but we were just “programmers” so we weren’t. Right before I left, around ’88, they brought us in.  Do you know why they did that? When the union wants to bring in a particular title, they send out letters to everybody in that position. When the union gets back so many letters, they can go to the National Labor Relations Board and call for an election where everyone votes on whether they want union representation. Enough of us voted to join.


Prompt: By the time you moved to CMS, were you always in the union going forward?  After that point, yes. I told ISP in spring of 1990 that I was going to go over to CMS. The US Supreme Court was sitting on a case called Rutan versus Republican Party of Illinois over the hiring practices by the state of Illinois. There was a transfer freeze and hiring freeze during that whole period, so I sat there for six months working on a project not knowing when my transfer would go through. Once that decision came down, all the transfers went through all at once.

Response: What union were you a part of? AFSCME. Different locals represent different agencies. There was one for the police officers in the state police department and then there was another for several agencies that have employees in Springfield, just the employees in Springfield. There was Local 2224 that covered CMS and five other agencies in Sangamon county. And then Council 31 has all the other state employees in different locals. So they were running the show whenever they were negotiating contracts. In about 1994 or so, I actually stood election for negotiator and won, so I was involved in those negotiations for about five months. We’d go in for a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday negotiation session. And then three weeks later we’d have the next one. Each local could send five delegates, so we had something like 250 people total for our side and then there’d be maybe a dozen agency heads for the management. We’d meet in convention centers.


Prompt: What else would the union work on? For example, my coworker was applying for other positions and she had the seniority and the skills to take these other positions. But she would never hear back about her applications. Most people, when they don’t hear anything, they just assume that they didn’t get it. But she would follow up, find out who got the position, and then compare their record to hers. If she had seniority on them, she’d file a grievance. She’d get the raise she should have gotten before, though it wasn’t backdated to make up for all the time she had been underpaid. She was stuck and trying to go someplace else for fifteen years. I know that happened to her at least three times. And it just seemed so cheap, you know. Her seniority should have applied—your seniority is supposed to give you priority within your bargaining unit, within that county—but the state wanted somebody else and it didn’t cost them much.

Response: The state basically just hires whoever they want. And if the person who they should have hired eventually found out, then and only then would the state have to give them a small raise to match what should have already been their pay. It’s a low-cost violation for them. When did you first experience contractors in your government work? When I was first hired on at the state police, they already had some contractors and we basically treated them the same. The main thing was, on the phone list, they all had an asterisk by their names. And if they did something wrong, then boom, they were gone and there was nothing they could do about it.  The big thing about being a state employee is you get a pension and health insurance. The state has to do that to keep people there, and if you as an employee want to keep those things, you have to stay with the state of Illinois. But if you were a contractor, you didn’t get anything else. They were paid twice what we were, but no pension or healthcare. If they found better wages or something more interesting somewhere else, they could be gone in two weeks. Lots of people stuck around, but they also might be gone in a year or two when their project wrapped up.


Prompt: What sorts of roles did contractors fill?  Application programming for the most part. The union had put into the contracts that agencies couldn’t do a personal services contract. So that meant that they could never interview an individual contractor. The contractor would have to incorporate into their own company or be hired through some other company. But they were basically just employees.  We got rid of those for the most part about 2005. The union got the state to recognize what state agencies were doing. Now, if you want an employee, you’ve got to hire an employee. You can’t just hire a contractor through a third party and say it’s not personal services. The state had a year to hire replacements for those people. That was quite a bit of turmoil: a lot of people to hire and a lot of expertise was lost. I mean, some of the contractors had been in there for decades.  Did it seem like that was one for one, like one employee was hired to replace every contractor, or were there some contractors who were never replaced?  There was considerable shrinkage. It’s worth noting that by this time, the state of Illinois had cut taxes, yet kept up their expenditures, so they were behind on paying bills and falling further behind every year. They were borrowing out of our pension funds just trying to catch up on bills. Today, Illinois has something like five billion in unpaid bills with about six months delay.  Back to your question about contractors specifically: the agencies tried hiring, but they didn’t get many replacements. Many contractors didn’t apply for their own jobs as employees because the pay was lower. I saw the job postings go up on the bulletin boards. Normally, there would be enough surface area on the board for each listing to have its own place. The listings were so thick you had to leaf through pages and pages. Even after a year, they had all these vacancies they were still trying to fill.  When did you first start learning to program?  I’ve been programming since I can remember. I grew up in Israel so I couldn’t actually speak or read English, but I could write elementary BASIC code.

Response: What was it like not knowing English when you were learning BASIC?  I memorized the commands in Hebrew, which were overlaid on top of the standard QWERTY English keyboard. So to draw a circle I spelled the word ’circle’ in the Hebrew letters. It’s not an actual word, obviously. I didn’t recognize or understand English letters.


Prompt: I’ve been reading fluently in English since I was eleven or twelve, and learning English definitely helped me learn to code because I could recognize the shape of the letters and something about their meaning earlier than the smarter kids did. Do you feel that the prevalence of English in coding languages is a barrier for non-native English speakers? I stopped using Hebrew when working on computers when I was fourteen or fifteen, as soon I had access to control my own computers. Growing up, I used the Hebrew version of Windows, which is built to support right-to-left languages and tries to translate. But, supporting both Hebrew and English languages is really hard and is never done well, and so I gave up on Hebrew as a working language at a very young age.

Response: So, the short answer is yes, absolutely it’s a barrier. And the solution is that most of us just give up. My phone and computers have been in English for about as long as I can remember, because the experience is horrible otherwise.  When you were young, what did you think that you wanted to do with your life?  I was very, very certain until my late teens that I was going to be a doctor, like a good Jewish son of a good Jewish mother. I have some medical challenges though, and when I joined the Israeli Army for my mandatory service I was assigned to be a truck driver, which was less cool.


Prompt: At that point, I had already developed some level of programming knowledge. I remember an interesting discussion with my HR non-commissioned officer, where I expressed discontent with being a truck driver. She tried to explain that it’s a fantastic gateway to a career in life, and I—maybe slightly rudely—expressed that as an eighteen-year-old, I had slightly higher aspirations than being a truck driver.

Response: And so I failed the truck driving class. I failed it horribly.  Was that intentional?  Yes, very much so. Somewhere in my files, I still have that rejection letter, which more or less says that I am too stupid to drive a truck. It’s one of the things that I’m most proud of. That got me out of that black hole and into the general assignment. Then I mentioned that I could code and they made me a small computer operator in the Salary Analysis unit of the HR division of the Israeli army, which is now called the Manpower Directorate.  This job started on an actual terminal, which is basically a keyboard attached to a printer. You typed blind, hit enter, and got a response, which is usually something like “error on line three.” Then you have to guess what line three is, because the end of line submits a query so everything you’re typing is on one single line. So, to debug, you just type it over and over again.  The language used on the terminals was a Hebrew query language called אמת3, or EMET 3. In Israel, speaking Hebrew has a nationalistic value. It’s a revived language that was part of the creation of the country as a country. So a lot of the motivation behind the creation of אמת3 was that it had to be in Hebrew.


Prompt: The query language was written in Hebrew but compiled into English—because everything is compiled in English. Brackets had to be reversed because figuring out how to write brackets in reverse does not work in that compiler installed in pre-Unix VMS. They used the ASCII code that corresponded with the letter that was on the keyboard when you typed in Hebrew, and while compiling reversed the Hebrew letters into those ASCII codes. It was essentially gibberish English, basically what I did when I was learning BASIC. The language was written in 1973, and I started working on it in 1999.

Response: But, that was my life. You’d get a question like, "How many people served between 1998 and 2000 as nurses in this unit? And how much money did they get paid?" And then they would run an analysis to get a sense of what kind of modification to their salary they should have because they were practicing emergency medicine in a medical combat unit. My job was to run those reports for them, because translating from the logic of the query to that stupid language was hard.


Prompt: Like every other piece of legacy software, when you work with it long enough it shapes the organization around it. Workflows are created to handle the limitations and people like me start building bits and pieces on top of it to make it better so that the workflow can become better. And what you end up with is a whole bunch of legacy code held together with duct tape.

Response: How did you feel about your job at the time? Initially, I was very grateful because I wasn’t driving a truck. Being the clever guy who can do these reports when everybody else gets stuck was exciting for a while. But then I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. You just have to copy and paste, change the dates. It gets very boring.


Prompt: Outside of the desire to do interesting things, did you feel any responsibility to your job or a sense of civic duty? I’m curious what motivated you.  That’s a discussion that’s really interesting for my current job. But, for that job? You need to remember that I was eighteen and serving in the Israeli army is a complicated thing. Everybody has to do it. Caring about the people that I was affecting by supporting the system clearly isn’t something that eighteen-year-olds do. Or at least, I didn’t at that age. So, no. I was there because it was fun and interesting and it didn’t involve driving a truck.

Response: Now, it’s very different. My current work affects five million federal employees and two and a half million military units. What I’m doing directly improves their lives and improves the life of the people who serve them, and that is awesome. That’s why I’m doing my job now. I don’t think that any of those considerations existed back then.


Prompt: What made you leave that job? Where did you go next?  I moved from the Salary Analysis unit, to the HR division IT. At the end of my service, I was given the opportunity to work on a tool that was supposed to remove the need for anybody accessing or using אמת3 ever again. I was so full of resentment of that system that it sounded like an awesome idea.

Response: The first RFP for that project came out in 1981. I was born in 1981. In 2001, I was essentially the tech lead on it. The intention was to wrap this system in a modern—2001 modern—UI system where people could go into a graphical interface, type in the ID number of the soldier or the query, and get the results they needed to make their decisions. I decided to volunteer for an extra six months of army service to see this project through.


Prompt: The workflow that we're trying to solve is the following: we have something called lonely soldiers in the Israeli army. They are soldiers who usually are American volunteers. Their family does not live in Israel. They get housing, food, and extra money. For the record, when you join the Israeli army, as a soldier, you basically make twenty-four bucks a month. You don't get paid for your service for the first three years. But, lonely soldiers get a bunch of services and more money because they need to eat.

Response: So, let's pretend that a lonely soldier is in a combat unit on the border somewhere. When they submit their application for benefits, there’s a couple-months-long process of passing paper up the chain of command, at the end of which, someone runs a bunch of queries and updates the record in the mainframe system. Now, let's pretend that there’s a typo in the form being passed. That form would then travel back another two and a half months to get back to the soldier to be corrected.


Prompt: What we wanted to do was to shorten that process by offering a graphical interface accessible to the local HR officer so they could submit the applications form electronically and have it approved by the central command HR staff. That was our goal. Take a six month process, turn it into two weeks. To make that possible, we have to build that UI system, wrap it around the actual mainframe system, and make the connection.

Response: Now, that is a fairly common modernization approach to mainframes, but it’s really not modernization. Today, I am generally angry at this approach.  How come?  Because what I’m doing now is cleaning up after people who made that decision twenty years ago. I’m also twenty years older and I understand technical debt a lot better now. Wrapping a UI around a legacy system doesn’t pay the technical debt. It adds more technical debt. My job now is literally cleaning up after that situation.


Prompt: There’s a bunch of parts of the industry where people basically make their living out of building wrapper systems around mainframes, because it means that, despite whatever is currently running, you appear to have a shiny new modern system six months later. But you don’t, not really, because you can’t actually change the underlying workflow in any way—which works for a while, until you have to change something and you can’t.

Response: Making Moves Where did you go after the army?  I got to New York and as I was about to head out on a month-long cross-country roadtrip, a relative of an army buddy of mine said he needed a website to write quotes for his moving company. I said okay, I’ll work for a couple weeks and make a little bit of money and I can do a two month long trip... And that was nineteen years ago.


Prompt: Eventually, around 2010-ish, I got pulled into fintech by somebody that I was working with on the moving side, introducing me to the idea of taking programming algorithms, hosting them on a stable system, and running it. Essentially, the foreign exchange (forex) market is ginormous, and has many, many, many, many traders, with each of them trading tiny amounts with insane leverage. It’s a very, very bad industry, morally speaking. There’s a tool called MetaTrader, which was the primary go-to tool for retail trading in the forex industry—this is a Windows application running thirty-two-bit code in 2016. You wrote your algorithm and you ran it on this application on your desktop. If you had a power outage or one of your kids came over to play a game and closed your application, you would lose money as a result of it.

Response: Fairly early on, we came up with the concept of taking a machine and running it on a Linux server using Wine, to make things more stable. I ended up doing a lot of work with Wine to make it run this trading algorithm properly online. Today I would just do this with virtualization or containerization, but since we’re talking about the late 2000s, none of these were options. I spent the next four years getting that up and running, having up to 11-12,000 people using the system at some point, and then selling that. That was the first and only software that sold successfully. It was my primary success in fintech.


Prompt: Then, the company I worked for got bought by a Slovak conglomerate of foreign exchange brokerages. After buying our company, they just kept buying more and more brokerages. Each brokerage would hand us—hand me—their technology team and their technology stack. We would work to bring their team into our environment, taking their technology and combining everything to create a unified service. We became a technology service company.

Response: As we bought new companies, we became really good at wrapping around other people’s projects—regardless of which stack they were using—and getting them to talk to each other. We’d take complete projects, wrap them, and turn them into services supporting our unified frontend and unified APIs. Over time, we got into refactoring stuff and breaking them into different pieces and we eventually started building lean microservices, running on AWS, things like that.


Prompt: Now that I’m talking to you about this, it’s very, very sad. The story of my career is that I absorb other people’s legacy software and then kick it until it becomes useful again. Which is, to an extent, what I’m doing now for the federal government.  What was your experience transitioning to the public sector? Well, at first I went looking for jobs at nonprofits as opposed to government because government is—in my head, at least—morally ambiguous. But non-profits don’t like people who don’t have degrees. Government doesn’t like people who don’t have degrees. Anywhere else in tech, nobody cares about what certificates you have; people care about what you’ve done. You only need certificates or degrees if you haven’t done enough yet.

Response: I spent two and a half years trying to find a way to transition my career over to something meaningful. At the end of the day, the problem is that the not-for-profit jobs are few and far between. I applied for dozens of jobs. All of that failed miserably. My search for more morally fulfilling work ended up taking two years.


Prompt: Wow, two years is a long time.  Eventually I discovered the United States Digital Service (USDS) on Twitter. I applied to USDS and I went through their very tedious six-interview process. Apparently I passed that. But, because I’m a former officer in a foreign army and they do most of their work with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, they felt I would never pass their security checks and decided not to hire me.

Response: But there’s a circle of government technology organizations where they all know each other and work together—USDS, the General Services Administration (GSA), Technology Transformation Services (TTS) which includes 18F, etc. They forwarded my resumé to them. I interviewed for GSA and then waited three months to hear they wanted to hire me. And then, three months after that, they told me I’d need to start the background check process. It took something like eight months altogether from the time I interviewed for GSA to the time I started to work for them.


Prompt: I’m interested in how you feel about that government hiring process. My understanding is that one of the reasons why there’s an insistence on pedigrees or a specific number of years of experience is to try to level the playing field. For example, testing someone on specific topics in an interview can privilege certain backgrounds and it’s easier to let bias slip in. But, if you look just at years of experience, in theory that will make it a bit more equal. That doesn’t account for your experience with needing a specific academic pedigree, though.

Response: Yeah. I understand the need to try to remove bias from hiring. But access to higher education is a biased measurement. And in tech, it’s also kind of irrelevant to skill. One of the things that I have done many, many, many times is hire people who have just come out of their bachelors or masters programs and then spent six months paying them salaries while I’m undoing what academia did to them. People come out of academia with an interesting theoretical background. But honestly, let me ask you, have you ever done Big O analysis during your professional work as an engineer?  I’ve had to think about it, but not deeply or often.


Prompt: Exactly. You think about complexity and you think about efficiency and you measure it, but Big O analysis as an interview tool is only useful to measure how much attention you paid in your second year of college. It’s one of my pet peeves. It’s a symptom of a disease. Nobody Puts COBOL in the Corner As I understand it, you’re not currently a permanent employee with the federal government. How would you describe your position? My position right now is a termed position. Technically, in eight months, I am supposed to go back to the private sector and move on with my life. I probably won’t because this is what I want to do with my life. So I am going to fight to find a way to stay beyond my term. For the government, every change requires years.

Response: As an example, take my current effort to replace a specific mainframe overseeing the benefits and livelihoods of two and a half million people. Getting away from that system will take more than five years, because of the amount of technical debt that has to be paid. We have led a successful acquisition of a mainframe that took three months and we’re very proud of that. Usually it takes more like seven months to finish an acquisition process in government. We bought a new mainframe, which is a horrible thing to say, but that was the right thing to do because the old system was really about six, seven years past the end of life, and we needed five years to pay the technical debt to fix the system. So, we had to buy a new one and we did it in three months.


Prompt: That’s what I think makes the GSA’s Centers of Excellence (CoE) so special; because the CoE is a part of the federal acquisition service, we can cut that time down to get a new system. But there is value in people like me, people who are angry at the way government works, sticking around for five years, for ten years to see these things through.

Response: Right now, government is shortcutting the hiring process with termed employees like me who have short two-year stints to try to make change. I don’t think that’s effective because you need someone to stay and see it through. Especially for an organization like the federal government where, every four years, regardless of what happens from the mission perspective, leadership goes away. Targets change. To create sustainable change, we need angry people in the same chair for more than two years.


Prompt: What is a termed position? And what are the other positions available in government, whether salary or contract? The federal government has four positions that I’m aware of. You have general service (GS) employees, who are salaried employees who work for the federal government. They’re somewhere between GS-1 and GS-15, which is a salary scale, and they are competitive service positions. Essentially, that means they have the ability to apply to any position within government, compete for it, and get it as a long-term position.

Response: Then there are people like me, termed service. To make my position valuable, they let me slide into GS-15 step 8, which is two steps below the maximum salary of GS-15 step 10. They try to match our salaries from the private sector. They couldn’t—they could only match two thirds of what you make in fintech in New York. But they tried, which I appreciate. I was completely aware that I was going to take a salary hit by switching.


Prompt: In my case, the termed position is two plus two, meaning I have a two-year term and would be up for renewal for another two years. They can fire me within the first three months and they can decide whether or not to renew my term at the end of the first two years. Terms can be anywhere from a year to eight years.

Response: Termed employees are essentially civilians—I can’t apply for other competitive positions outside of my current role. When I’m done with this role, I have to apply again to a GS position and all of my government experience doesn’t count. When you say it doesn’t count, do you mean toward the qualifications for other positions or for benefits?  All of the above. That experience essentially doesn’t exist. If I apply and get into a permanent position that is open to the public, which is some small percentage of the perm job positions, it could contribute to the pension calculation, if and when I retire. But that’s about it.


Prompt: It also doesn’t count for experience for other positions. My position right now is nonsupervisory. For accessing the third kind of position, you have to have a year of supervisory experience. I can manage as many people as I want right now, it doesn’t count. I have to start from scratch from that perspective.

Response: The third kind of position is Senior Executive Service, or SES. Most people with senior titles—CIO, CEO, directors—tend to be SES. There is a subset of management criteria that you have to reach to become SES, and you also have to have the supervisory experience as a competitive employee that I mentioned earlier.


Prompt: My goal in life now if I’m going to state government is to become SES. But I can’t even start working towards that until I am rehired. Practically speaking, from a career perspective I may as well be a civilian right now.  Why is your goal to be SES?  Because whichever system I’m in, I require myself to accomplish the highest level possible. Right? Also, because that’s where change is. I’m trying to effect change.

Response: The more you spend time in technology, the more you understand that technology is not the problem. I can build the shiniest system in the world, but it doesn’t mean that anyone will use it. Change is always about people, and people are controlled by management. For example, if I want to get an agency to start working in a different way, I have to be near enough to the top to be able to make decisions that affect how people function. Being at the top doesn’t make it easy, but it gives you the option of trying to accomplish it. This is kind of the sad thing about technology—the more you look into it, the more you understand how little the technology means.  We haven’t yet talked about contractors. From your perspective, what is the role of contractors within these teams and systems? And why does government often procure or contract technology versus building in-house?  That’s a really complicated question. I mentioned there are four classifications, right? Termed, GS, SES—and contractors are the fourth one.


Prompt: It takes me somewhere between two to three months to get a contractor in the door, whereas a new hire takes about eight months to a year. So as a product manager, if I’m trying to get something done in government, contractors are usually my go-to solution. The other piece here is that for political reasons or other reasons, hiring freezes are a thing in government. A bunch of agencies have had eight to ten years of hiring freezes and, as a result, have basically gotten to the point where only 20 percent of the workforce are federal employees. Because they can’t hire, they just buy more contracting because there’s no monitoring of that. That is actually fairly common.

Response: As an example of one of these freezes, say a lot of the mainframe support people across government started to work as federal employees, but then the federal government can’t hire any new ones. The federal government will go out and buy contractor support to help maintain this legacy system, and the contractor support will turn to the salaried employee and say, “we’ll pay you 150 percent of your salary and give you better benefits if you come work for us.” Federal employees in those positions get to essentially keep the same job, but have better quality of life as a contractor.


Prompt: The law says that federal contractors can’t manage contractors, so a federal employee has to be the contracting officer representative who manages that contract. So you have people whose job used to be technologist or system administrators, but now they are federal employees who are middle management and as a result all they do is manage those acquisition contracts. We’ve seen this pattern a lot.  How does that impact the maintainability of software?  Theoretically, it should improve it because every single person is replaceable. Practically, it presents interesting challenges.

Response: For example, VB6 was decommissioned in 2012, I think, but there are many VB6 systems across government because VB6 presents a fairly low barrier to entry for development. There’s a whole bunch of these lying around. Say I have a contract with the vendor and that contract says I need VB6 experts to manage these VB6 systems. Awesome. The contractor gets to move those experts around, and they’re supposed to be interchangeable. But what you learn from managing technology as opposed to doing technology is that knowledge management is really hard to do. Organizational knowledge dissipates even if we get a new VB6 expert, because that expert has never seen this system and the person who was an expert in this system gets moved to another project.


Prompt: Documentation is hard—and if it doesn’t exist, I end up paying the same contracting company over and over to learn the business logic and reasoning behind a specific system. That’s the flaw of this approach. To your point about people, COBOL and mainframe systems have been in the news lately as state unemployment applications struggle under the historic load of applicants from the pandemic. A lot of folks are demonizing the languages, but my opinion is that it’s not just about the language or the technical systems—there’s an important social component, too. What is your take on that? I actually got into a very angry discussion with a few of the protectors of COBOL. I described what happens to COBOL in its lifecycle. Every language has a lifecycle for large systems. COBOL has a very specific one.

Response: Mainframe systems have one primary benefit, which is a horrible trap: you can set the system up, leave it alone, and it will keep running, forever. What you get is forty-year-old codebases that keep doing their job and management doesn’t bother paying for it. Why would you? I can get away with paying less money and the system will keep producing, so I don’t need to bother maintaining it. But then you have code that was written forty years ago by people who have since retired.


Prompt: When the time comes to make a change, you see one of the following. I’m looking at a system that had 900,000 lines of code. It was obviously not man-made. Who made it? Multiple times in the past, IBM introduced new hardware. To make the migration to the new hardware easier, they built tools that would automatically rewrite code. So I have a piece of code that was a hundred thousand lines long to begin with that has now been rewritten and rewritten by other pieces of code. It works, but now there’s no documentation to speak of. There is no understanding of which piece of the code does what. And what I have is people—and they’re really good people—who’ve been maintaining it from the edges, writing around pieces of code that are too big to change like I did back in 2001. But the system is still there. And so you have massive systems that are completely monolithic. There is no understanding which piece of the code is what, or what I can do to kill it or make it better. I have no way to maintain it.

Response: And then something happens like COVID-19. Suddenly my system that can handle x amount of calls per day needs to handle 400x, and I have no idea how to approach it because that is part of the underlying system itself. It’s not an edge problem. I’m not saying that COBOL is a bad language. I’m saying that it’s so good that it gets abandoned over and over again.


Prompt: May the Pipeline Be Unbroken One of the things we’ve struggled with in this series is finding a diverse set of people who have held technical roles with mainframe systems for a long time—and are willing to speak with us. So, given the breadth of your career and where you are now, I’m curious if that lack of diversity matches your experience or if it’s just a problem with our sourcing? I think it’s an instance of the fake “pipeline problem” for people who are not white men into technology roles. I call the pipeline problem “fake” because I don’t think that’s the actual problem. General technology in GSA has the largest number of queer people, the largest number of women I have ever worked with. For people who shoulder the joys of unpaid work as part of their lives, government does what is actually necessary to make it feasible for those people to stay at their jobs.

Response: For people still maintaining these systems, though, you’re looking at the pipeline from thirty to forty years ago. There are new people who are pouring into the larger pool of workers, but the mainframe teams haven’t changed. That’s the way it was forty years ago and that’s the way it is now, because these are the same people.


Prompt: What we’ve heard from people maintaining these systems on under-resourced teams is that they’ve been basically expected to be on call for their entire career. One of the things we’ve been trying to understand is: What impact does it have on their personal life? What you are describing gives some color to that, as well.  Ah, that question brings me back to the joys of working in fintech. Foreign exchange is open 24/7. The market opens Sunday at 4:00 p.m. and closes on Friday at 4:00 p.m. and is open 24/5 in the middle. This means that if you’re in charge of the system, you’re on call during the week because you have to be there if things break, and the weekend is when you do all your maintenance. So, you just work constantly.

Response: In terms of the impact on people's personal lives: you really shouldn’t talk to me, you should talk to my partner and ask him. The fact that I can’t make plans, the fact that I have to walk out of dinner with his parents and go deal with work calls, I’m sure that has an impact. And yeah, people working maintaining government systems have been doing that sort of on-call work forever. That is what they do.  By the way, these people that are on call all the time, the same people who weren’t willing to talk to you when you asked for an interview: part of the reason they refused is that they are still GS-12s and 13s. They’re low in the hierarchy, and yet so essential. Let’s say you publish something and it somehow comes out as negative about GSA. In my position, I would get a slap on the wrist. If they said anything that they shouldn’t say about their agency however, then they’re done. That is their career. So, I have a kind of privilege; I’m coming at this from a position where I can talk to you and I’m not risking that much. These people who’ve been here for forty years—and they’re completely essential—know for a fact that they’ll be railroaded if anything happens.


Prompt: I'm sorry, I'm not trying to guilt you. I'm trying to expose the dynamic. Tell us about your job. My official title is Computer Specialist. I’ve been the lead developer on a team of one for over thirty years. I created and maintain a computer system called VACOLS, the Veterans Appeals Control and Locator System, which manages the appeals process for the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Response: That’s an interesting title, “computer specialist.” Why is that your title as opposed to “software engineer”? When I first got started that was what we were: specialists. We did everything from hardware to running cables to configuring and maintaining switches and routers. We maintain our own Exchange servers, which are Microsoft systems used for email and calendaring. So when I started at the VA, I was involved with all of that. Then, in 1986 or 1987, I started developing VACOLS as a side project. Eventually, more and more people started using the application, and it became more and more my primary task.  I don’t know if the government has “software engineers,” I imagine they do. But “specialist” was my official title thirty years ago, and that’s what it still is today.  You started out as a contract worker at the VA. What was that like?  I was on a full-time contract at the time with the State Department’s diplomatic security unit, and they were ten blocks away from the VA. At lunchtime, I’d run over to the VA, do my VACOLS stuff, and then head back to my regular job after that.


Prompt: The VA had me working in the computer room, which was about sixty-two degrees. Remember, this was pre-PC so we had what were called dumb terminals: a keyboard and screen all attached directly to the server with a coax cable. No processor or anything. At the VA, the coax cable ran back to these Wang minicomputers. I was a team of one back then, too, so it was just me in there.

Response: There was a lot of learning to do. It’s fairly complicated, that whole appeals process. A lot of different legal regulations, things you have to follow. So it was a bit of a challenge in figuring out everything that goes on there.  Can you tell us what an appeal is and why someone might go through the appeal process?  The majority of appeals are for benefits. Let’s say there’s a vet who returns from service and he has a knee condition that’s rated as 30 percent disability. As time goes on, he might get worse, and he can appeal his original decision and say, hey this is a lot worse. I’d like to get 50 percent, or 100 percent, or whatever. So those are called increased rating appeals, which is probably 50 percent of what we do.  The other appeals are for service-connected compensation. Someone says, “I have PTSD resulting from my service.” He goes to his local office, puts in a PTSD claim, and it gets denied. He can say, “I want to appeal my original grading decision and appeal to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals.” At that point, he can have a hearing before a judge at the Board, and the Board will issue a second decision either affirming the original or overturning and granting his request for benefits or to increase his rating. Basically, it’s an appellate court.  I don’t think that I had fully understood that appeals in this context could be a case of a disability worsening over time.


Prompt: At any point he can appeal his initial rating up to 100 percent disability if that’s warranted. But the appeal also involves presenting new evidence, new exams and everything. A judge reviews all the new evidence and has a hearing face-to-face or via video with the appellate and then writes a decision.  So a veteran continues interacting with this system over the course of their life? Not every decision that the VA makes is appealed. Only about 10 percent of the original decisions made by the local offices get appealed to the Board. In 90 percent of the cases, the veteran is either satisfied with the decision or decides not to pursue the claim further.

Response: How many appeals does the current system process per year?  Last year, they decided about 90,000 legacy appeals. When the Board was 400 people, they’d do about 30,000 a year. Now that they’re 1,200 people, they can process about 90,000 a year.  What is the increase from?  More people, more judges, more attorneys. Over the last twenty years, the board has tripled in size. The more people they have drafting decisions, the more judges they have holding hearings, the more cases they can get out the door. Basically just increased manpower.


Prompt: And how does the system that you built fit into the appeals process?  It tracks all the elements of the appeal. If a veteran was in an accident, he could’ve injured his knee, his elbows, his head—so there could be different issues on appeal. He could be rated 30 percent for an elbow injury, 10 percent for a knee injury, 30 percent for the head injury. Typically, each appeal has an average of three issues. VACOLS keeps track of all the issues he’s appealing, keeps track of all the forms he has to submit during the process.  Like for the first step, he’s going to file a notice of disagreement to indicate that he disagreed with the VA’s original decision. And then there’s four or five other forms to fill out during the process, depending on how far it progresses. And all those forms are kept in the database.  Then, if he requests a hearing, it keeps track of that request and the dates, as well as any mail or evidence we get in correspondence that they sent to the VA. That gets loaded into VACOLS and tracked.  The appeal will start out at the regional office (RO) and it’ll go to the decision review officer, then it might go to the appellant’s rep at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, whoever his rep is. The same information will go to an attorney and a judge, so there might be ten or fifteen people touching the appeal at any given point. VACOLS keeps track.  What was the process before they decided to build a technology system to handle it?  Paper. Up until about five years ago, all the claims files with all their service records and military records and everything were in these big twenty-four-inch-thick folders.  For the first twenty-five years of VACOLS, one of the main things it tracked was exactly where these big claims folders were—who physically had them in their possession. Was it with a judge, was it with an attorney, was it out in the regional office, was it with a veteran service organization? We used barcode technology to track all the claims folders. We had thousands of these moving through the building.

Response: So that was the main purpose of VACOLS to begin with: let’s track where these folders are and who has them and the outcome of the appeal. Since then, we’ve added on module after module to schedule hearings, hold virtual hearings, and do all sorts of other things that are part of the appeals process.  Originally, the system kept track of a physical folder. Now, it’s keeping track of virtually who has the claim and what the status is and what part of the process it’s in.


Prompt: That sounds complicated.  Yeah, and I’ve only touched on a few of the areas. There’s a lot of information it keeps track of. Punch Out What originally led you to computers?  I graduated from Penn State back in the ’70s. I got a business degree coming out of school. I didn’t really take any IT classes. There wasn’t really any offered back in the ’70s. I got my first job with a contractor here in the DC area and the guy that hired me worked for a small business and he was looking for programmers, but he really wanted non-technical people. He hired about a dozen people, with different backgrounds, and then he taught us how to program. My first programming job was working on COBOL applications for large naval contracts.

Response: Did you have any experience with computers before you landed that job?  Not really. I took one computer course in college and we had to write our programs on punch cards, go to the computer lab at night, and wait in line for two hours to submit the big deck of punch cards. Then it would compile that as your program, and you’d find out that you missed a comma, so you’d have to go correct that and stand in line again for two hours. That was my initial exposure to programming: writing COBOL programs on punch cards.  Do you remember how you felt about it at the time? I felt like it was not a field I wanted to get into.  So what led you to take that first job?  School loans, rent, all the usual things. I’d had a lot of blue-collar jobs, worked in factories, and I knew I didn’t wanna go back to small-town Pennsylvania working the factories again. So it wasn’t as much a matter of falling in love with programming; it was a matter of avoiding the alternatives. The job market was tight back in the early 80s, so if you got an offer coming out of school, you jumped on it.  At that time, did you imagine that you would do different things with your career afterwards?  Yeah, but I showed an aptitude. I was pretty good at programming, and after a few years I realized it was a growing market, so it looked like a good field to get into.  There still weren’t PCs and all that at that point, but if you had strong COBOL skills back in the 70s, early 80s, there were a lot of job opportunities. So I bounced around on a number of different contracts. One of them happened to be with the VA.


Prompt: How did that first contract at the VA end up turning into your career? After I developed VACOLS, I maintained it part-time for about five years. Then, in the early 90s, they wanted to migrate the system off their old Wang computers and onto PCs and a relational database. That’s when they asked me if I wanted to come on board and take on the project. I did that migration, and then we started developing with a rapid application development tool called PowerBuilder, which was big back in the early 90s. And that’s been the formula for the last twenty-five years. We’ve used Oracle as a database and PowerBuilder as the window into that database, to create a client-server solution.  Have you ever thought about leaving for another job or another opportunity?  Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But I feel a responsibility. I’ve always been loyal. I’ve always believed strongly in the VA’s mission. My dad was a veteran. I have uncles that are veterans. And my dad, he’s in his eighties, and still goes to the VA every month. He loves the VA. You only hear the bad stories, but there are lots of people out there like my dad. They love the care and the attention. He goes there and they give him stuff he never even asks for. He raves about the care he gets at the VA. I’ve always felt a loyalty and a strong commitment to the mission of the VA. So, yeah, I’ve thought about other jobs, but the VA treats you well.

Response: Go It Alone When you were first starting to build out the system, were there other good technical models you looked to, or were you just creating this thing from scratch?  No, I was winging it. I picked up PowerBuilder off the shelf and learned it on my own. It was a great tool back in the 90s, although it’s since lost market share. Sybase eventually purchased it, and I think SAP owns it now. There’s a few people still using it. At the time, it was really easy to pick up and learn.  I was working directly with the end-user base to get all the user requirements and everything—the attorneys and the judges and the admin people that held hearings and docketed the appeals cases.


Prompt: We did an Agile-type development back then before Agile was the big thing. We would just go in and get the requirements and knock them out. We’d try to put something in production in a couple weeks like they do today, move on, and then add onto it a couple of weeks later. It was a good place to work in that regard because you’re working without any constraints. Being a development team of one and working directly with the end users and being there in the same office—you could really get a lot done fast.  That’s interesting to hear, because we’ve talked with a lot of government folks who are trying to move away from Waterfall towards Agile.

Response: Yeah, we were ahead of our time, but it worked out. Were you still working on things other than VACOLS? I not only did the programming, but we did all the Windows upgrades, as well as the wiring and cabling. I’d do programming on a Friday, the come in Saturday and run cables through the ceiling. You had to do everything back then.  Every shop—the Veterans Benefits Association, Veterans Health Administration, the Board of Veterans’ Affairs—all had their own IT guys, and as an IT guy you did pretty much what you wanted in terms of technology. Like, the Board was running Windows NT, while all the other organizations within the VA chose to go Windows 95, Windows 98. So even the version of Windows used within the VA was not standardized at the time. We had a lot of freedom as far as what type of servers we wanted to use.  Today, everything’s more consolidated and organized and everybody’s on the same platforms. But back then, it was the Wild West. You did what you wanted, and as long as it worked, nobody complained.  What were your responsibilities to that system? If it were to go down, were you on call?  Yeah, I’ve always been the primary point of contact if we ever have server issues or database issues.  Has that been difficult at all?  Not as long as you keep your cell phone on-hand. I always take short break vacations—don’t want to be away too long.  What about before you had a cell phone?  They had my home number back then. There is always a way to find me if they need me. We had pagers back in the 80s. I think I still have one in a drawer here somewhere.  Was it daunting to be working on that system alone for decades? It sounds like a lot to handle.  Yeah. It started out being a system just for the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, which was 400 people at the time, and now it’s grown to over 17,000 users as we pushed it out—VBA, VHA, and all these other organizations. As we developed more applications and interfaces for more kinds of users, it became more and more my baby. It became a full-time job—I painted myself into a corner.


Prompt: Who are those users? Who do they work for? You said a couple of government agencies, but I’m curious what all those acronyms mean.  All the appeals start at the VBA, Veterans Benefits Administration, and then they may move to the Board, but not necessarily. About 14,000 of VACOLS users work for VBA. The appellant could decide to withdraw before the board sees it or the VBA can decide, hey, we made a mistake when we originally denied this, and they can grant benefits before it gets to the board. So a lot of things go on before an appeal ever gets to the Board. The majority of VA people using VACOLS are VBA.  Then we have the Board, which is about 1,200 people now. It’s more or less tripled in size. I also got about a thousand veterans service reps—American Legion, VFW, Disabled American Vets, Paralyzed Veterans of America—about thirty, forty different organizations that we call service organizations that have access to VACOLS. And then VHA is the fourth group. We don’t get a lot of medical appeals; there’s probably 500 or so VHA users. If you combine the VBA, BVA, VHA, and the veterans service orgs then you come up with roughly 17,000 users.

Response: When you were working on VACOLS, was there ever a point when you said, “I actually need more people on this”? Not really. It was client-server, so deployment was easy. It’s not like a lot of web applications today where you need a lot of people to maintain them. If it worked, it worked; you threw it out on the server and everybody accessed it from the same point. And, knock on wood, we haven’t had much downtime. We’ve been using Oracle databases for thirty years and they never go down. The hardest thing was that, a couple years ago, they decided that all VA applications had to have two-factor authentication. We learned that 17,000 users hadn’t been logging in correctly and wouldn’t be able to get into their own accounts, so I had to quickly create a new authentication database for those 17,000 users. Other than that, things went pretty smoothly the last few years.  Do you think of yourself as a craftsperson? Yeah, I guess. It’s nice to sit back and look at what you’ve created. Right now, VACOLS is a suite of twenty different applications. There’s one for scheduling hearings, HR has their own application, quality review has an application, the intake team has their own application. The dispatch team has an application. They’re separate versions, VACOLS for the VSOs [Veterans Service Organizations], those service reps, and for the regional offices. So it’s a lot like the VA’s Caseflow software, how they’re developing different modules, sort of copying what we did. Just like there’s a VACOLS dispatch program, there’s a Caseflow dispatch program. Once they get all their apps finished, I’m looking at retirement here soon.


Prompt: The Last Appeals We recently went through a project where we were doing research on how people get Supplemental Security Income and disability insurance. Getting evidence for a claim in those cases is often an insurmountable obstacle for people. The appeals process that VACOLS handles seems even more complicated than those.

Response: That’s why they came up with this new Appeals Modernization Act, where they’re revamping the whole appeal process to make it a lot simpler and faster. The problem with the old appeals system was that it was an open-ended process. At any point in the process, the guy could submit new evidence, new exams, so things were constantly changing. If he filed a claim two years ago, the records could be stale by the time it reached the judge. He might have to go out and get new exams. The new process is a lot tighter. You submit all the evidence up front and then you’re locked in. They try to review in a more timely manner, within six months or so, so you don’t have all these issues with stale records. They’ve streamlined it.


Prompt: Has that changed over time? Now that you’re working with the United States Digital Service, I’m curious how that has changed your development process.  No, it’s still basically the same thing. There are less requirements now that VACOLS is getting ready to be sunset, but there are some new things they’re doing. Within the last couple of months, they’ve introduced virtual hearings where the veteran can have a hearing with a judge from his home, just like we’re doing here with a Skype or a Zoom meeting. We have to start tracking those for the legacy appeals. I’ll have to make some modifications just to indicate that these are virtual hearings, as opposed to face-to-face or video hearings held in the office. So there’s still a few new requirements that I have to put into VACOLS. Most of the new development is in the Caseflow system. I used to work closely with those guys, showing them all the requirements and what VACOLS did, and what they’d have to account for.

Response: What was the most surprising thing about working on that project with them?  How young they all were. They were all younger than my kids, so that took some getting used to it. But they were all great to work with, really sharp. They came in and got things done quickly. I mean, that whole digital service thing was thrown together by Obama in his last year. The VA was one of the first organizational digital services and so far it’s worked out pretty good.  When the discussion started on your end to start replacing that system, did you indicate you wanted to retire and they were like, wait, we’ve got to replace this thing—or how did that conversation come about?  It wasn’t so much replacing VACOLS as replacing the appeals process with the Appeals Modernization Act to make it faster and simpler. They were gonna have to develop a new system for that anyway, so it just made sense. VACOLS had run its course. There’s going to be legacy appeals for another couple of years, but VACOLS can be sunset after that.  How does that feel for you?  Sounds good to me! Sounds good to my wife. She’s got a lot of places she wants to go. Get to do a little traveling, do things that you put off all these years. So long as none of the kids move back home, we’ll be fine.  That’s exciting! What is the timeline for that? Maybe two years. The legacy appeals, there’s probably 200,000 left. And they do about 100,000 a year. They could get through most of them in the next couple of years.  One of the reasons that we’re doing this series now is because COBOL has been in the news lately with New Jersey making a call for COBOL programmers to help with their unemployment systems struggling under the load of applicants impacted by COVID-19. I think a lot of folks are realizing for the first time that COBOL systems are still a part of government technology. I was curious if you’ve heard of this happening, and what your thoughts are about that and the criticisms of these legacy mainframe systems?  I’m surprised they’re still out there. I haven’t been following the news that closely, but I wasn’t aware that New Jersey was having an issue with them. I mean, there are tons of legacy systems within VA. They have their own programming system, VistA, and they have something like 180 different VistA applications that are used in the VA hospitals and medical centers. So the Board is just a minute little part of the VA. There are a lot of legacy programmers at the VA that work on these VistA systems that have been there longer than I have, and they’ve got the same situation where they’ve now painted themselves into a corner. They’re the expert on the system and probably the only person who knows how to maintain them. Nobody’s coming into the job market these days saying, “I want to be a VistA programmer or a COBOL programmer or a PowerBuilder programmer.” But somebody has to do it.


Prompt: I know the VA still has what they call stovepipe systems, which are basically standalone systems that don’t interface with anything else. That was VACOLS for a while, although now we’ve integrated with Caseflow and other systems. But I’m sure there’s still a lot of these old stovepipe systems out there. They’re probably running in some background that nobody’s even aware of.

Response: 1/ The internet began with the dream of a common language. The vision was a network of networks, bound together by a protocol that let a global community of computers speak to one another—an Esperanto, but for machines.  This dream expressed distinct and sometimes directly competing desires. It was built on wartime sciences of command and control, yet it also contained a communalizing impulse. On the early internet, everything was open source. Open standards prevailed over proprietary ones. Then, after the end of the Cold War, the US government gave the internet to the private sector. The paradox followed that as the internet became truly commonplace, widely popularized, it gradually lost its openness: it became a set of walled gardens, dominated by the so-called platforms. The mediation of billions of lives through infrastructures owned by a handful of companies has not made us more free, even when their services are.


Prompt: Neither has it made us more alike. As the internet has become more massified, it has created more differentiation: producing filter bubbles, epistemic crises, and ever finer demographic segmentation—not to mention amplifying inequalities between those who own a piece of the platforms and those who scramble to put together a living on them; those they give the God’s-eye view, and those they’re used to oversee. Despite the expectations of early US cyberutopians—or, you might say, imperialists—the global spread of the internet has not brought American values everywhere. On the contrary, there are strong tendencies toward fragmentation, from the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union and calls for data sovereignty in South Asia and Latin America, to the billion users behind the Great Firewall of China. Even as networked technologies have become increasingly universal, it is debatable whether they are “common,” in the deep sense of that word.  2/ Commons is an unusual kind of noun. Singular plural. The article it takes is: The. Historically, “the commons” has referred to the various kinds of resources that members of a community might share. Within village settings, for example, the commons consisted of a central green area where villagers grazed livestock, or a forest where a kind nobleman let them hunt, fish, and gather berries.

Response: Elinor Ostrom, the economist who won the Nobel Prize for refuting the popular thesis of a “tragedy of the commons”—that is, the idea that any freely shared resource would inevitably be abused and deteriorate—said that a commons consists, at a minimum, of:  Common goods — Those fruits of nature and society that everyone needs to survive and thrive, including our atmosphere, oceans and forests, biodiversity, all species of life, natural systems, and minerals; our food, water, energy, and art; culture, technology, healthcare, and spiritual resources; and, also, news media, and the trade and finance systems we use.Commoners — Groups of people who share these resources. Commoning — Inclusive, participatory, and transparent forms of decision-making and rules governing access to, and benefit from, these common resources.  Ostrom also specified that commons came with boundaries. A commoning process, to include some, had to exclude others. What is needed, who needs it, and how to claim it are hotly contested political questions in our moment—particularly in the midst of a global pandemic. Who will ensure that the answers to these questions are found fairly? 3/ This issue examines the theme of “commons” from all three of Ostrom’s angles and more. Our authors investigate how large quantities of data have been collected and connected—not only by nation states, as the privacy advocates of the early internet feared, but by corporations, some of which sell their services back to the very government entities from which they were supposed to shield us. The fact that advertising, or attention capture, became the default business model of the internet is one reason for the situation in which we find ourselves. But, as this issue demonstrates, there are others. In the 2010s, advances in machine learning created powerful, and lucrative, incentives for companies to begin gathering as much data as they possibly could.


Prompt: Alongside the companies that gather data, there are newly powerful companies that build the tools for organizing, processing, accessing, and visualizing it—companies that don’t take in the traces of our common life but set the terms on which it is sorted and seen. The scraping of publicly available photos, for instance, and their subsequent labeling by low-paid human workers, served to train computer vision algorithms that Palantir can now use to help police departments cast a digital dragnet across entire populations.  What might have once looked like a transgression of the public-private boundary starts to look more like its transformation. But data can also be put to different purposes. Across the country, anti-eviction activists are using digital tools to extract information once held exclusively by corporate landlords and police departments, and put it into the hands of the tenant organizers who need it.  4/ Our authors and interviewees also investigate who is setting the terms of our world-system: the lingua franca that our machines use to speak to one another, and we use to speak through them; the standards that govern infrastructures on which more and more of us depend. The past is a source of lessons, alternative visions, and practices that might help us thread the gap from present conditions to a livable future. “Freedom quilting” was a form of computation that was also a form of care work, and not only that.  Pieces in this issue ask how to organize a fairer system of algorithmic distribution, and what a more public, less commodified internet might look like. They explore why diversity initiatives have failed, and might have been designed to—and why opposing racism might require a radical transformation of the business model, not just new inputs to it.  We are writing from strange times. The luckiest among us have spent months in digitally mediated isolation. For others, the closing year has been a time of hunger, illness, and intensifying hopelessness. All of our lives are increasingly managed by algorithms that target and personalize. Then again, we have all been compelled to think with new keenness about our points of proximity. How intimate, to worry about breathing in air that a stranger in the supermarket has breathed.

Response: In Latin, the phrase locus communis literally means “common place.” Figuratively, it means a familiar topic of conversation. The “commonplace,” in this sense, is not pejorative, like a cliché. It is a set of shared assumptions, a ground on which a diverse set of actors can meet. We hope this issue contributes to the making of that ground, to the construction of a space for us to think together about how, in whatever comes next, connected machines might help us create new collectivities and possibilities.


Prompt: Back in 1993, you published a book called The Panoptic Sort. In it, you described how the computerized collection and processing of personal information was creating an all-encompassing surveillance regime that, by sorting people into categories and classes, shaped their lives by controlling their access to goods and services.

Response: When I read it last year, I found it incredibly prescient. In the early 1990s, the internet hadn’t yet gone mainstream, and digitization wasn’t nearly as sophisticated or comprehensive a process as it is today. Yet you identified an emerging phenomenon that, almost thirty years later, has become the central organizing principle of our digital lives. How did you see the contours of this trend so early? How do you see it now? At the time, the book was supposed to be a challenge to the way that most policy scholars were thinking about privacy. For them, government was the major focus of concern—they were worried about governmental invasions of privacy. I wanted to shift the focus to corporate surveillance: the gathering of information by businesses in order to produce market segments and targets. In retrospect, that turned out to be an appropriate focus.


Prompt: The mid-1990s was also the era when techno-libertarianism—as developed by Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow, Wired, and others—was gaining influence. The state was seen as the principal enemy. And in fairness, they had a point—the Communications Decency Act of 1996 did represent an attempt by the government to censor the internet. But the techno-libertarian approach could also downplay or even completely ignore the threat posed by corporate power.

Response: Right. But of course, a lot has also changed since then. I was writing about the kind of data gathering and analysis being done by researchers at firms, or researchers working as consultants to firms. There has been a really substantial shift in the nature of that work, because it’s now being done by algorithms. Algorithms are now taking on, or being assigned, greater responsibility for the kinds of questions that are being asked and the kinds of relationships that are being explored. That’s a major shift, and one that I’ve certainly been paying attention to. And I’m hoping that the rest of the world is paying attention as well, because there are going to be new consequences with a new actor.  I used to struggle with some of my graduate students in talking about algorithmic systems as “actors” in this regard. But we’ve got to understand them as actors in order to be able to assign responsibility—whether it’s through legal means or some other kind of tool. These systems are doing assessments, making classifications, generating predictions, and designing interactions in order to influence our behavior.  How do you hold an algorithmic actor responsible for its actions? First we have to understand how the law is limited by its historic focus on the individual. It is structured around the idea that privacy invasions are attacks on individual liberty. But algorithmic processing is about groups.  There are certain groups that federal law has designated “protected classes.” For instance, employers cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability. But we’re really behind the eight ball in terms of algorithmically-defined groups. These groups have limited political capability, because their members don’t understand the nature or even the identity of the groups to which they are being assigned—even though their membership in these groups serves as the basis on which they are discriminated against by commercial and state actors that have an interest in manipulating them.


Prompt: In other words, we all have identities that we’re not aware of—identities that a computer has constructed in order to make it easier for a company to sell us things, or for the state to lock us up. But because we don’t have access to what these identities are, or knowledge of how they’re made, it’s hard for us to organize around them politically. This is in contrast to the identities that make up federally protected classes, which reflect the achievements of struggles by members of those groups who composed themselves into a political bloc.  There is a whole host of technologies that have to do with identifying individuals as members of groups in order to make predictions, in order to estimate things like value or risk. For instance, a firm might calculate insurance rates based on where you live, or on the characteristics of the people within your neighborhood, and the estimation of risk associated with those factors. They are legally prohibited from using race to calculate those rates, but they can still use proxies for race, intentionally or not.  If a bank says it won’t lend to someone because they’re Black, it’s illegal. But if a bank uses an algorithmic system that ingests a bunch of data and performs an analysis that in effect infers that the prospective borrower is Black—say, they live in a majority-Black zipcode—and then denies them on that basis, they can get away with it.  Correct. Discrimination is continuing on the basis of race, gender, and other categories. This kind of discrimination—against groups whose members self-identify and therefore relate to each other and mobilize politically on the basis of that shared identity—is very important. But what I’m trying to get us to pay attention to is the other groups that we have been assigned membership, and through which we experience discrimination, but which we know nothing about.  This relates to a distinction you draw in your work between “identity” and “identification.” Identity, you write, “is primarily the result of personal reflection and assessment, something closely associated with individual autonomy.” Identification, on the other hand, is “almost entirely the product of the influence and determination of others.” Identification is a social process, in other words, mediated by various digital technologies. And once an individual is identified, they can be classified into a group, and subjected to statistical analysis.

Response: And discriminated against, and manipulated with nudges in order to shape their behavior.  Individuals are placed within these new categories, these new identities, because these identities matter to the actors who are relying upon algorithmic systems in order to influence the behavior that matters to them. That matters to them as capitalists, perhaps, or that matters to them as governors and mayors and others in the political realm. The actors are different, and they have related but different motivational factors. But they are all making decisions with the aid of algorithmic systems that identify people, and then direct manipulative communications towards them in order to influence their behavior. And, to push it one step further: to influence who you are, who you want to be, how you think you ought to change in order to become the kind of person you are being led to believe you should be.  How do these processes of identity and identification interact? On the one hand, there’s clearly a tension between an identity that I’m conscious of and which is important to me, and an identity that I’m not aware of and is important primarily to the state or corporate actors who want to influence my behavior.  Yet as more of our lives is mediated by digital technology, these technologies also become the medium through which many of us come to know ourselves—where our identity actually undergoes formation. Social media comes to mind. Of course, social media platforms are major sites of what you call identification: software is observing our activity on these platforms in order to sort us into groups we know nothing about so that our attention can be better sold to advertisers. But people are also constructing their identities quite consciously through their interactions on these platforms, and those identities can in turn produce real political effects by triggering new waves of social mobilization.  Part of what we are seeing with social media is further diversification within all categories of identity. There are new kinds of identities that we may not even be able to articulate yet, but which are being reflected in new kinds of social movements, such as the movement in the months following the death of George Floyd. All of these white folks are out there engaging in active demonstration against anti-Black abuses by police. Something has clearly happened, in part through social media, which has led to new forms of identity emerging among white people.


Prompt: So yes, we need to address the variety of identities that people are aware of, including the many new ones being created. But we also need to address those that we don’t have names for yet, the ones that are being generated by algorithmic manipulation. The bottom line is that we are in the midst of a historical moment in which both identity and identification are undergoing dramatic change.

Response: Risk Factors We’ve been talking about algorithmic logic. But the focus of your most recent book, Coming to Terms With Chance, is on actuarial logic—specifically, “the actuarial logic that shapes the distribution of life chances in society.” You tell a story about how society became obsessed with assessing and managing risk, and the role that probability and statistics have played in this shift. What does it mean to live in such a society, and how did we get there? Let’s start with the term “life chances.” What are the chances for good things to happen to us? What are the chances for bad things to happen to us? And what shapes those life chances?  Increasingly, the decisions that influence our life chances are made on the basis of statistics. The probability that we’re going to have a good future versus the probability that we’re going to have a bad future is itself determined through practices of probabilistic analysis. And this has enabled the emergence of something I call “rational discrimination.” Rational discrimination is when discrimination becomes justified in terms of an assessment of risk that can be said to be rational. It is both a methodology and a way to make discrimination acceptable in the eyes of the law. It is rooted in the argument that it is justifiable to discriminate against people—including people who can be identified by race, gender, and a host of other attributes—where there is statistical evidence of risk.  This gets back to our conversation about using proxies for race to perpetuate racial discrimination without formally discriminating by race. In this case, the bank is not saying it won’t give someone a loan because they’re Black. It’s saying that an algorithm told them that the individual has too high a risk of default, so they can’t get a loan.


Prompt: But then why are members of certain groups considered riskier than others? This is where we need to talk about “cumulative disadvantage.” For example, some of these models make predictions on the basis of an individual’s level of education. Well, we know the education system is highly unequal. Therefore, there is cumulative disadvantage as a result of the kinds of differences in education that people have, because those differences are then used to discriminate against them.  And it’s not just education, of course. There are all sorts of factors that are subject to cumulative disadvantage. And these will continue to perpetuate discrimination unless there is a powerful actor that steps in and limits the use of certain factors in making predictions. Otherwise, the harms that are associated with cumulative disadvantage will just pile up.  How new is the practice of rational discrimination? I’m reminded of the redlining maps that government officials and banks developed in the 1930s to deny certain neighborhoods access to federally backed mortgages. These neighborhoods were predominantly Black and Latino, but the formal basis for excluding them was that they had a higher risk of default.

Response: True enough. Look, I’m an old guy. I did statistics by hand. Statistics has been around for ages. The estimation of risk has been around for ages. And while discrimination on the basis of race may not have been based upon statistics at first, it soon was. But the nature of statistics has changed, and the nature of the technologies that use statistics have changed, in part through rapid developments in computation. That’s what we’ve got to pay attention to, especially if we want to gain control over these systems.


Prompt: These statistical systems infer the future from the past. But is this a reliable mechanism in our historical moment? As we’re speaking, there are red skies over San Francisco. Extreme weather events are only going to increase as climate change gets worse. We’re also clearly entering a new era of intensified social and political conflict. It seems likely that the next few decades will be full of events that may be hard to predict by looking at the past. Does this create a vulnerability for these systems? It’s true that for these systems, knowledge of the future is based on knowledge of the past. But the past is getting to be very short. If you think about big data, if you think about the systems being used by Google and Facebook, decisions are being made continuously in response to new data. So forget the past. Seriously, forget the past. The data and the models are being altered daily. The most powerful of them are being altered moment to moment. So the past is not relevant anymore. Not really. Not meaningfully.  What’s the best path forward towards a better future? In the final chapter of Coming to Terms With Chance, you call for “a social movement to oppose expanded use of statistical techniques for the identification, classification, and evaluation of individuals in ways that contribute further to their comparative disadvantage.” Might that offer a path forward? It’s lost. There’s no chance. That’s gone.  The future is the algorithm. The future is what Pascal König calls “the algorithmic Leviathan.”  Tell me more about this algorithmic Leviathan.

Response: In the Foucauldian panopticon, you have a central tower. The central tower has tremendous power because the population believes that observers within the tower are able to see what everyone is doing—even though there is no way to know for sure. The way the tower operates is that we learn the behaviors that are expected of us, and modify our behavior accordingly.  The Leviathan is similar. But there is no central tower. Rather, you have an algorithmic system that doesn’t need to be located in a central place because we are now in a networked environment. It doesn’t need to be in a place at all, it just has to be in the network. More specifically, it has to be in a position within the network where it has access to the data that has been gathered by all of the responsible elements within the network. Those responsible elements within the network have their own subsystems and their own sub-networks for gathering the information that matters for them. The Leviathan provides the control systems for this gathering and consumes the data that results from it.


Prompt: In the panopticon, the central tower is feared. The Leviathan, however, is a trusted figure. A god-like figure that is trusted to act in our individual and collective interest.  But I don’t want to trust. And I don’t want the rest of us to trust. I don’t trust systems. Systems are built by designers who work for corporations that have very specific ideas about how such systems should work.  Is there any hope then of taming the Leviathan? One could imagine a community of algorithmic systems. A plethora. These systems would be designed to have a socially agreed-upon wisdom. I’m not ready to grant a single Leviathan that wisdom. I believe in the multiple. I believe in the differences among us. We can make systems that embody those differences: not quite Leviathans, but committed resources that stand in for the differences among us. That’s about as close as I can get to envisioning a better future at the moment.	 I’m not ready to write about it yet. I’m thinking about it. I’m working on it. If you look at my resume, you can see that I write books ten years at a time. But I don’t think I have ten more years. I really don’t. So if I’m able to make the Leviathan my next thing, or my last thing, that’s good enough for me.

Response: Why did you make EvictorBook? Erin: Particularly since 2008, we’ve seen the rise of corporate landlordism. We’ve seen huge investment companies—Blackstone and Invitation Homes are two of the biggest in the US, but there are many others—that will buy up swaths of property with unique limited liability company (LLC) or limited partnership names.  Take 55 Dolores Street LLC and 49 Guerrero Street LLC. These two LLCs are subsidiaries of Urban Green Investments, which is a big investment company that evicted many tenants in San Francisco in 2013. In the process of buying those properties, the company established a separate LLC for each one, which helped them with a number of things in terms of finance and liability, and also afforded them anonymity. It’s often very hard for tenants to know which other buildings in the city are owned by their landlord if each property has a unique-sounding ownership name.  When that was happening in 2013, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was just getting started, and we didn’t have a tool like EvictorBook, so we were doing property research manually. We’d create static websites where we’d list all the LLCs and all the evictions that we were able to connect to that investment company, with the idea that this information should be public and that tenant organizers should be able to use it for campaigns—ideally, multibuilding campaigns against large-scale landlords. They were essentially profile pages on different landlords. That’s useful because you have a much stronger chance of winning a fight against your landlord if you’re working together with other tenants across that landlord’s other buildings.


Prompt: We also created a lookup tool and pledge map back in 2014. You can type in an address, see if there’s been an eviction there, and then pledge to not rent from that landlord. The map was pulling in public eviction data from the San Francisco Rent Board. The obvious next step was to connect other data to it, like parcel data and corporate ownership data. That turned out to be a lot harder than we realized, so it’s taken us some time. But that’s what the EvictorBook website does: it brings together a lot of those tools that we’ve already been using for years and makes it easier to see the landlords, LLC networks, and eviction histories of different buildings in San Francisco. You can enter an address or a landlord’s name, and we’ll show you a profile page with evictions connected to that entity.

Response: Search EvictorBook by entering an address, landlord, or neighborhood name. How did you all build it? Erin: The work began in early 2019 in collaboration with other member organizations of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC), and in collaboration with the Mapping Action Collective (MAC) in Portland, Oregon.  Since then, we’ve done some workshops with different tenant groups to figure out what needs and questions they had given the new Covid conditions, and we’ve been really lucky to get new frontend people involved in development work. Right now, we’re making the site more user-friendly and doing more user testing in LA and Oakland.