David Nesting
‘Everyone Around Me is Here for the Same Reason’: David Nesting on the Power of Shared Values
| David Nesting was a Site Reliability Engineer and then Director of Engineering at the US Digital Service from October 2014 to 2019. Prior, he was a Site Reliability Engineer and Technical Architect at Google and AT&T. |
David Nesting joined the US Digital Service from Google, lured by the potential of having an outsized impact in a short amount of time.
Once he joined, however, David extended his tour of duty from three months to four-and-a-half years, and from there to other roles in government. His initial focus was helping stabilize HealthCare.gov, but he also played a key role in USDS’s recruiting and hiring culture.
Below, David discusses long days, empathizing with government contractors, and the importance of socializing with colleagues.
June 28, 2019
Emily Tavoulareas:
David, tell us about your journey to USDS.
David Nesting:
I was at Google in 2014, and we had all heard of our fellow site reliability engineer (SRE) Mikey Dickerson’s exploits with HealthCare.gov with a bit of awe. When he came back to Google, he set up an internal talk to share some of his war stories. The hook? “No cell phones.” I had been interested in the civic tech space, but even at this point was just drawn to hear about the train wreck.
What we got was a fascinating story of good intentions, misaligned incentives, over-engineering, and under-engineering. With every story he told, we could all see what was coming next, where the bad assumption was, what the punchline would be. And so when he finally wrapped up, his last words to us hit hard for me: “Anyone in this room could have done what I did. Even two weeks of your time working on these problems could change your life.” I drafted an email saying, “I’m curious,” but never sent it.
On his last day, Mikey sent us all an email saying, “I can’t tell you where I’m going, but watch the news on Monday.” That Monday we would read about the founding of the U.S. Digital Service with Mikey at the helm. I immediately went into my drafts, rewrote my e-mail to say “I’m in” and couldn’t click Send fast enough.
The USDS Head of Talent Jennifer Anastasoff got back to me right away. She was going to be in the area in a few days, along with Todd Park, the White House Chief Technology Officer (CTO). We met up, and when I expressed how I wanted to do something with impact, Todd said something I will never forget: “If you really want impact, go where you are rare.” The CTO of America then gave me a hug. Turns out I’m a hugger.
Mikey told me about the three projects that we’d work on: immigration, HealthCare.gov, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). I asked, “Which of these needs me the most?” Mikey said, “Definitely HealthCare.gov.” On my very first day at the White House, they were having IT problems, which meant I couldn’t get in the building. I onboarded awkwardly in the lobby of the New Executive Office Building, and I took the oath on the flag by the door.
Later that day, I met the handful of people already at USDS. On day two, I was running out of things to read and nobody was telling me what to do, so I just emailed the HealthCare.gov team and told them I was coming out.
The next day I was in Columbia, Maryland, in the HealthCare.gov operations center, getting oriented and listening. Within the first few hours, we had our first outage. One of the contractors immediately had a diagnosis—a firewall issue connecting to the backend—but the dashboard on the wall was clearly showing a huge spike in errors on the backend system—definitely not a firewall issue. I raised my hand tentatively and asked, “Why do you think it’s a firewall issue?” The answer was a confident “because that’s what it was yesterday, and it feels like it’s the same problem.”
I realized this wasn’t a place where I could be tentative. Mikey was right: they were missing deep systems knowledge and data to drive their behaviors. And Todd was right: I could have an impact here. Over the next four months, I worked 12-hour days, living out of a suitcase at hotels and on couches. To keep my sanity and beat the loneliness of essentially living alone at the Columbia Mall in the middle of winter, I made a point to spend at least one day a week back in D.C. to try and spend time with my new USDS team.
Emily:
How important was the community aspect of USDS?
David:
The USDS team was my lifeline. It was wholly necessary to maintain my sanity by having contact with people who understood what I was experiencing.
Emily:
Were there any specific characteristics about the group that made you feel that connection so quickly?
David:
Most of us were these orphans pulled to D.C. from someplace else. All most of us had in D.C. were each other. I am a huge introvert, and one of Erie Meyer’s special powers is her ability to draw people out, with the patience to build what was essentially a family out of this insanely weird mix of amazing civil servants and Silicon Valley nerds. Her ability to bring people together is magical.
Kathy:
David, what are some other memorable moments from your time at USDS?
David:
Mikey and team had originally impressed upon the HealthCare.gov team the importance of doing postmortems—root cause analysis. But Nathan Parker and I quickly noticed that the contractors had made some changes to that process since then, removing important parts and adding others that didn’t seem to add any value.
I tried to get it back on track: How did we detect the problem? Did our monitoring work? What worked well? What didn’t? But the contractors couldn’t accept my changes. They were contractually obligated to use the template they were using, and needed me—as the SRE leading incident response in the moment—to just fill out everything on the form. I remember getting increasingly frustrated and saying, “This isn’t why I came here. You’re asking me to do paperwork exercises. I didn’t come here to help you meet your contractual obligations. I came here to get people healthcare.”
The contractor I was speaking with paused, got really quiet, and said, “That’s why I came here, too.”
Up to that moment, I had cynically seen everyone in these rooms as government contractors who were here to make money, not to do the mission. But that wasn’t true at all.
In that moment, my whole mental model of government service and contracting changed. I realized that I am not special or unique in my desire—or even personal sacrifice—to come out and do good; everyone around me is here for the same reason. So maybe I could drop some of those preconceptions and work together.
Kathy:
Tell us about your role in USDS hiring.
David:
When I was at Google, I was very involved in the SRE interviewing process, and had done several hundred interviews over the years. I knew hiring was going to be critical for USDS, so I told Jennifer I wanted to help here.
She and I started with something that resembled a typical Silicon Valley interview process: Start with standardized questions, take detailed notes, and mitigate bias in hiring decisions by having a panel evaluate the feedback separately. I went on to write some of the early interview questions we would ask people and we started hiring.
Kathy:
How did USDS hiring evolve from there?
David:
As time went on we hired more and more people opinionated about hiring, and we eventually did a “what makes a good USDS engineer?” exercise and tried being more methodical about interviewing by organizing our process around a specific set of core competencies. But after a few months of hiring, I started feeling like we missed some: the ability to be entrepreneurial, self-directed, and successfully navigate ambiguity. And so while we maintained a high bar for technical engineering skills—a bar that would be tested many times over the years—we slowly lost some of the most important traits that made USDS so uniquely valuable in the beginning.
It wasn’t necessarily for the worst. USDS ended up staffing many amazing teams who delivered some amazing products. But I do see it as a failure to pay attention to what USDS was uniquely good at, and what about those early hires made them successful at it, and then distill that into a competency that we could assess. I think we lost some of our identity in the process, and that hurt us culturally and in terms of how we were perceived by the agencies we worked with.
Emily:
How did that become apparent?
David:
I noticed in a few different ways. When I interviewed people and asked why they wanted to join USDS, they would no longer talk about doing something different and having an impact. They were saying instead, “I need a job and this seems like a fun place to work.” When I would ask, “How long do you plan to spend at USDS?” instead of hearing “six months” I heard “I don’t understand the question. Indefinitely?” People stopped thinking about it as a tour of duty and it seemed to just become another civic tech gig with some fun perks.
Kathy:
How did that affect the actual work on the ground?
David:
It caused us to double down on this strategy of hiring. Once these new engineers started to participate in the hiring process, it became increasingly difficult to talk about the change we were experiencing without the more junior engineers feeling like it was a commentary on whether they should be there or not. To compound that, it also happened around the time when USDS got too big for our personal group chat to be useful, and cliques started forming in part around this divide.
It also changed the capabilities USDS had. If you have a team of very senior and experienced engineers, you approach delivery by helping the agency build capable teams and change their processes and procurement strategy, and you’re engaging with the principals at an agency to do that. More junior members expect to just keep their heads down and build and ship products. So that’s what USDS had to start doing more of. I think this changed what rooms we ended up in, and caused us to miss some opportunities for more lasting change.
Kathy:
David, in what ways did you leave a foundation for USDS? And what work are you most proud of? I can think of so many things you did that created room for other people or changed how we operate.
David:
The hiring side of things wasn’t perfect and it evolved over time, but it was pretty foundational. It spawned an entire Talent organization, which you rarely see in government, and it feels good seeing agencies today adopt similar practices when trying to hire roles like these.
Socially, Erie was my mentor and though I’m an introvert, when she left I threw all of myself into trying to keep the culture going, hosting board game nights for the digital service family, that sort of thing.
The work I’m proudest of was with the Refugees program. We were fixing software bugs that were literally keeping people stuck in refugee camps. It’s hard to get impact like that elsewhere.
Kathy:
David, do you get to hang out and work with USDS people still?
David:
I do! To this day my most meaningful friendships, memories, and growth came out of this experience.
Before USDS, I had never used the word “love” to describe what I feel for my friends around me.
Kathy:
We went through some really intense things together. And I’m grateful.