Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

by Jennifer Pahlka

Small teams work, if they have the right mindset and the right skills. And the reality was that many of the thousands of people from the thirty-four outside vendors did not have the skills. One of Todd’s recruits told me about finding a flaw in the code and asking one of the contractors to log in and make a change. The contractor was a member of the technical team, but this recruit had an uneasy feeling about him, so he wrote out exactly the change the contractor was to make in the code. The next day, the error had not gone away, so Todd’s group asked to look at the codebase. There was the change, just as directed—but it was preceded by two forward slashes. Two slashes before a line designated a comment, essentially a note programmers leave for the next programmer who’ll come along. The slashes told the computer not to read that line as code but to ignore it. Why did the contractor do that? “I saw other lines had these slashes so I thought I should put them in too,” he explained. This supposedly technical staff member had never written a line of code.