I blame this on IPv4 and the obvious resultant address exhaustion leading to NATs making pure peer to peer communication harder, ensuring that we needed centralized places to meet up instead of making it normal to gather at your friend's house figuratively.
![Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work.
“In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.”
Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might.
“I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2rrp7amblhg3xoly5n5huiqv/bafkreignzunuto2j42vbchtvzg26ablavrjq7e3cq3pbcicwskvpyddlzu)
