Leaving Google and getting a job at the White House? It definitely sounds interesting. If you live in U.S. you might recall what a disaster HealthCare.gov was when it first launched last year. Site’s performance was awful, the site was barely working at all. Obama administration actually decided to seek help with resolving these issues, the current employees obviously couldn’t deal with it on their own. In comes Mikey Dickerson, the man who already worked on the Obama campaign in the past. Mr. Dickerson and his team managed to resolve the issues HealthCare.gov had though basically all of them admitted that wasn’t easy to do, not in the slightest.
Mikey Dickerson was a Google Site-Reliability Engineer before he became a government employee. He was actually quite renowned in his field of work, which actually shows considering the White House contacted him personally in order to help out with the issues they were having. Fast forward for about 8 months and Mr. Dickerson is a government employee or as his official title says, deputy chief information officer of the federal government and administrator of the United States Digital Services Team. The ex-Googler now leaks a small team which takes care of problems similar to the ones HealthCare.gov had, actually makes sure they don’t occur again. The White House’s official YouTube channel released a 4 and half minute video dubbed “Introducing the U.S. Digital Service”, about Mr. Dickerson and his work there. He talked briefly about the changes he had to make in order to adapt to his new line of work. We all know that Google doesn’t exactly asks its employees to dress professionally or anything of the sort, they are actually famous for their laid back looks at work. You can imagine that’s a completely different story when it comes to the White House, so Mr. Dickerson had to make some adjustments. Even though he still doesn’t wear a suit and a tie (unless President Obama is there holding a meeting or something like that), he did meet them half way and is at least wearing a nice shirt with buttons and a collar.
It was kind of hard not to notice the smartwatch he was rocking during the video as well. Once a Googler, always a Googler. Mr. Dickerson also made some interesting remarks, compared doing your taxes with a visit to the dentist for example, as in you might not like it, but you have to do it. He also mentioned that stuff like that shouldn’t be such an issue, things should work smoothly, you do it and you forget about it. It is quite obvious he has brought some quality to HealthCare.gov, hopefully he can do the same thing with some other government services in the future.
