from Hacker News

Former DOGE engineer on his experience working for the cost-cutting unit

by yibg on 6/4/25, 8:22 PM with 12 comments

• by Centigonal on 6/4/25, 10:23 PM

  > I, probably stupidly, was asked by a — not even a journalist but a writer who just has a blog about my business going open-source, and I spoke to him. He had a bunch of questions about me working for DOGE and I felt that Elon was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent. That's something he said a lot in private and publicly. And so I felt, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent and sort of "ask forgiveness not permission" sort of thing. I said mostly that the government was not as inefficient as I was expecting.

  > And then, my access got revoked pretty shortly after. I didn't get notified. I was basically ghosted and I just got an email notification that my access was no longer valid.

  > Unfortunately, they did not tell me directly that the reason I was let go was because of my transparency. I don't know if irony is the right word, but I do think that it's maybe, as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely, and letting someone go for being transparent in the most maximally transparent organization is a little bit entertaining.

  Despite having been fired by DOGE, he is performing a lot of verbal gymnastics to avoid using the word "hypocrisy."

• by workworkwork71 on 6/6/25, 1:36 AM

  Of course there is waste in the federal gov but somehow I think Elon ripping food from starving children and torching the agencies that regulate his businesses isn't actually going to solve that problem.

  People who proudly attached their names to doge will go down in the history books as the people responsible for hundreds of thousands (or millions, in time) of deaths and the outright larceny of structure & privacy from the American people.

  Nothing could be more shameful.

• by legitster on 6/4/25, 9:09 PM

  > And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing.

  An insanely insightful statement.

• by shaldengeki on 6/5/25, 2:58 AM

  This strikes me as disingenuous:

  > I like when my software gets used by a lot of people and people send me nice emails. In this case, people weren't sending me the nicest emails, unfortunately. But they also didn't really know what I was doing. They saw DOGE, weren't a fan of certain things that they were associated with. But I think at the end of the day, like, the role of the U.S. Digital Service is to improve the UX (user experience) of being an American, which is pretty exciting. And anyone who lets me do that, I will try to work for, even if my friends and family aren't huge fans.

  People weren't mad at him because he was trying to improve UX. They were mad at him because DOGE was doing a bunch of other stuff like "harassing government employees who talked about climate resilience", which he actively contributed to but conveniently omits from the interviews he's been giving recently:

  https://github.com/slavingia/va/blob/main/eos/analyze_eos.py...