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. Then government IT remains slow, and the cycle starts again. What those observers usually miss is that the slowness isn’t the problem. In most cases, it’s the point.
The structures that govern how government IT operates exist for reasons that predate your frustration with them. Procurement rules exist because public money was abused. Civil service requirements exist because hiring was once done as political patronage. Oversight layers exist because, without them, accountability disappears. These aren’t bureaucratic accidents. They’re responses to real problems, encoded into policy over decades.
When you’re waiting 12 to 18 months to hire a single position, you’re not experiencing organizational incompetence. You’re experiencing the full weight of that history.
Here’s what that process actually looks like from the inside. You identify the need for additional staffing early in the year. A budget request goes in during October or November. After budget hearings and multiple reviews, if approved, it clears the Board of Supervisors in late April. The hiring process can’t start until the new fiscal year begins in July. Then the civil service process begins. The job listing is posted; applications are accepted; civil service exams are scheduled, taken, and scored; candidates are ranked; and finally a candidate list is certified and promulgated. That list is only valid for one year. Candidates are contacted, interviews are scheduled and conducted, and finally a selection is made pending a background check that can take three months on its own. If top candidates accept other jobs while you’re waiting, the list shrinks. If it expires before you hire, you start over.
The best case is 12 to 18 months from request to first day. That is the optimistic scenario.
I’ve had this conversation with department managers, executives, and people who were genuinely just trying to get someone hired. The reaction is almost always the same. They hear the explanation, they nod, and somewhere behind their eyes I can see them deciding that I’m either making excuses or describing a problem I should fix. They accept the answer. I’m not sure they ever fully believe it.
After three and a half decades, what I’ve learned is that you can’t fight the structure. You can learn its shape and plan around it. Start the budget request before you think you need to. Anticipate the exam cycle. Know which steps have flexibility and which ones don’t. The people who get frustrated and try to find shortcuts usually end up taking longer than the people who work the process. What seems like the easy way is usually the hard way. The hard way is usually the only way.
I’ve come to think of this as steering into the curve. It’s a concept loosely borrowed from physics. When space curves, the straight path isn’t the one that looks straight to you. It’s the one that follows the curvature. You don’t fight the bend. You work with it, let the structure do what it’s designed to do, and get where you’re going by following the geometry rather than ignoring it.
There’s also something worth saying about what the CIO of a government department actually controls, because the assumption from the outside is usually everything with a power cord. The reality in LA County is that the mainframe, the network, the firewall, and the servers are all managed by central county departments. When something goes wrong with the network, I’m making a phone call, not a configuration change. When a security policy conflicts with a business need, I’m navigating an interagency conversation, not issuing a directive.
LA County employs roughly 110,000 people. The District Attorney’s Office, where I serve as CIO, has about 2,000. We are one department inside a very large county government, operating under shared infrastructure and shared governance. The idea that an executive at the department level can simply decide to implement a technology and have it done, without procurement, without central IT involvement, without security review, runs into reality quickly. The County is not a small independent office. It is a large, complex, interdependent system, and IT reflects that.
I think about this when I look at how the County is approaching artificial intelligence. A tool that a private company might adopt in a week requires a county AI governing board review before any department can authorize it. That once struck people as excessive caution. I’ve come around to thinking it’s exactly right, at least for AI. The technology is moving faster than anyone’s full understanding of its implications, particularly in criminal justice contexts where the consequences of getting it wrong are serious. The same structural slowness that frustrated me for decades when I was trying to hire a programmer is, in this case, doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is slow down something moving too fast for proper consideration.
The hardest part of a career in government IT isn’t the bureaucracy itself. It’s the gap between what you imagined you could accomplish and what the system actually allows. I had ideas about how I wanted to improve things, move the organization forward, make the work better for the people doing it. Some of those ideas happened. Many didn’t, or happened so slowly and incrementally that it’s hard to feel the distance traveled. You look back across 35 years and wonder whether you moved the needle enough.
I don’t have a clean answer to that. What I know is that the people who fared worst in this environment were the ones who spent their energy fighting the structure rather than learning it. The ones who fared best understood early that working within constraints isn’t the same as accepting defeat. It’s a different kind of skill, less visible and less celebrated than the technical work, and in my experience more necessary than almost anything else government IT asks of you.
The curve is real. You can’t make it straight. What you can do is learn to steer.