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 an ordinary morning at the Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office, the kind where you come in, get your coffee, and start working through your list. Except when I walked through the entrance that day, there were about a dozen people clustered in the lobby, holding each other up. Some were crying. Others stood quietly with that particular stillness that grief produces in people who have run out of words. At the counter, one of the staff was at the computer looking up information, while an investigator stood nearby explaining the process of what happens next, what the family needs to do, and what the office can tell them and when.
I had seen public-facing service before. I just had never seen it look like that.
The sixteen years before the Coroner were a good career. A real career, even. I moved through Internal Services, the Superior Court, the Public Defender’s Office, and ISAB offices in Cerritos. I built things, solved problems, and got promoted. But those assignments shared a common feature: I worked in buildings where the public didn’t come. Internal Services was exactly what the name suggests, a support organization that served other county departments, who then served the public. The connection to the people LA County actually existed to help was real, but it was indirect, abstract, and easy to lose sight of on a busy Tuesday.
I understood, intellectually, that the systems I maintained mattered to someone. I just rarely saw who that someone was.
There’s a particular kind of drift that happens when you work that way for long enough. It isn’t negligence or indifference, just distance. You optimize for the system in front of you because that’s what you can see and measure. The person whose life is actually affected by whether the system works becomes theoretical. Someone you’d describe in a requirements document as a user or a stakeholder, but never actually meet.
The Coroner fixed that for me.
Getting the job required passing a biology tour first. The department wanted to make sure candidates could handle the environment before hiring anyone into it. The work was, to put it plainly, icky sometimes. You’d sit in meetings where the conversation moved casually from budget line items to bone saws to the particular challenges of cases that had been left too long. I wasn’t entirely sure I could handle it before I walked in. Fortunately, the person running the tour kept things moving and we didn’t dwell on any one thing for too long.
I took the job but I stopped eating red meat for about a year.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much the environment would change how I thought about the work. Families came to that lobby every day. They came because someone they loved had died, often suddenly, often violently, and the Coroner’s Office was the first place they had to go to begin understanding what happened. They came with questions, they came needing information that was hard to give, and they came in the middle of the worst days of their lives.
The IT systems either worked or they didn’t, and now I could see exactly what that meant.
For the first time in my career, I could trace a direct line from the work I did to the experience of a specific person in a specific kind of pain. When the case management system was slow, someone at that counter was slower to answer a question. When a database was unavailable, a family waited longer for information they had driven across the County to get. The abstraction I had been living inside for sixteen years was simply gone, and the work carried a weight it hadn’t before.
I’ve thought a lot since then about what those first sixteen years cost me in terms of perspective, and what they cost the people I was serving, indirectly, without knowing it.
I don’t think bad work gets done in government IT because people don’t care. I think it gets done because distance makes it easy to optimize for the wrong things. When you can’t see the person at the end of the chain, you optimize for the system. You solve the technical problem in front of you and call it done. You measure success by uptime and ticket closure rates and project milestones, because those are the things you can see.
The Coroner taught me to measure by something harder to quantify: whether the person in the lobby got what they needed.
I’ve argued ever since that every County IT employee should spend time in a public-facing role. Not a one-day field trip, but real time, long enough to feel the connection between what you build and who it affects. I held that view before hybrid work became a policy question, and I hold it more strongly now. I understand the arguments for flexibility and I support them for the right reasons. But something is lost when the people building and maintaining public systems never have to look at the people those systems are supposed to serve.
The lobby at the Coroner’s Office was not always a comfortable place to be, but It was, in a way I’m still grateful for, exactly the place I needed to be.