Part 3 of “Before I Go”, a career retrospective. Sixteen years. That’s how long I worked for LA County before I understood what it actually meant to serve the public. I didn’t arrive at that understanding in a meeting or through a training program. I arrived at it by walking into a lobby. It was
Part 2 of “Before I Go”, a career retrospective I’ve spent 35 years inside government IT, and in that time I’ve watched the same cycle repeat more times than I can count. Someone discovers that government IT is slow. They write about it, speak about it at conferences, and build a startup to fix it.
Part 1 of “Before I Go”, a career retrospective. In the summer of 1986, I walked into a building in Industry, California that looked nothing like a college campus. There was no quad or clock tower, only an office park with classrooms. I was 18, just out of high school, and almost certainly the youngest
