USDS Alumni Network: Sabrina Williams
When you join USDS, you become part of a community that extends to life after your tour of duty. In this blog series, we share the stories of USDS Alumni. Find out what they worked on, where they are now, and why you should join us!
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Sabrina Williams (she/ her), Software Engineer, Devoted Health, previously Director of Engineering at USDS
Kelsey Hastings, USDS: What is your background and what were you up to before joining USDS?
Sabrina Williams, Devoted Health: I grew up in Monterey, CA. I went to Stanford where I got a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.S. in Computer Science. I spent several years working on printer software for HP up in Idaho, and then I moved back to the Bay Area to work for Google where I had stints in Chrome, Google Glass, and Ads.
KH: What made you decide to join?
SW: Honestly, I joined USDS because I wanted to just get away from my life for a little while. My dog had died a little while before and I was in a bit of a funk over that. So when the opportunity to join USDS arose, I thought it might be fun to pack up my cat, move across the country, and go work for the White House for a few months. Guess it worked out well since I stayed for nearly 2 years.
KH: What was it like working at a brand new startup inside the federal government?
SW: I joined October 2015. USDS was a little over a year old, and there were fewer than 50 people at USDS back then. We had a couple of agency teams, but were still trying to figure out that model. I was part of the HQ team, so it was expected I would hop around to different agencies as needed. One thing I remember about the culture back then was we ran a little hot. Not because it was always the right approach (there were sometimes when we probably could have been a little more tactful). More because we weren’t as established back then, and we never knew how long we had before we’d get thrown out of an agency or off of a project. So we would almost desperately speak truth to power, we didn’t care that much about optics, and it didn’t matter if people liked what we said or if we got blamed if something went wrong because we were there to help people, not to make friends! And boy was it dramatic! I think things have calmed down a bit and we’ve built up trust and relationships with agencies (which is good), but I love that we codified what made USDS useful into our values. I honestly love our values, and as long as USDS continues to stick to them, it may not be as wild as it was back in the day, but it will maintain its integrity and remain useful.
KH: What did you work on while you were here?
SW: As an engineer with HQ, I would move around to different agencies as needed. The first project I worked on was College Scorecard with the Department of Education. Then I worked on streamlining the refugee admissions process with the Departments of State and Homeland Security. Next, I worked with the State Department on a tool to help immigrants better understand the status of their visa application and we prototyped a tool for online passport renewal. After that, I was named Director of Engineering, so at that point, I took on more of an advisory role rather than being hands-on in specific projects.
KH: What are your most memorable technical challenges at USDS?
SW: We did a lot of work with the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). President Obama had promised the world that in 2016, the U.S. would admit 85k refugees, but we were not on track to hit that number. So USDS was brought in to help figure out how we could safely streamline the process without sacrificing integrity. There were a bunch of process improvements that we helped with (and of course the State Department and DHS did the lion’s share of the work). But one specific project I worked on was automating the process of loading the results of medical exams (which were in PDF format) into the system of record. That was fun because the PDFs weren’t form PDFs, so I had to figure out slightly more clever ways of extracting data from them since normal PDF parsing tooling wouldn’t work. I remember being slightly annoyed that I had to learn Ruby to do it because the folks who were going to maintain it after we left were Ruby folks, but it was totally worth it when we got it working and people could use this rather than trying to manually transcribe the medical exams between systems, which was very slow and error-prone.
KH: Did you have a favorite USDS sticker?
SW: I have two favorites.
- I say this one all the time: “I have some good news and I have some news.” — Sarah Sullivan.
- “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard Feynman
KH: What are you up to now?
SW: Around the time I was leaving USDS, Todd Park (former US CTO, founder of AthenaHealth, etc.) called me and said “Hey, some pals and I are starting a new company that’s going to change the way we do healthcare in this country. We are going to make sure that people get the care they need when they need it and that they are treated with the respect they deserve. You should join.” So I said “OK” and that was that. Plus it was cool to find a place where a few other USDSers were headed, so I was going on a startup adventure with friends.
Specifically, Devoted Health is a healthcare company that provides a couple of services. We are a Medicare Advantage insurance provider which believes that if an insurance company does right by people and treats them well, they’ll be healthier and everybody wins. We also have Devoted Medical Group, which are clinicians who can go to members who may need a little bit of personal attention and help them out. We already serve members in several counties in Florida!
KH: Do you miss anything in particular about working at USDS?
SW: Obviously, I miss the people, both at USDS and at the agencies. I didn’t always agree with everyone (both internally and externally), but I appreciated that everyone was working towards serving people the best way they knew how. I also loved doing discovery sprints. It was so much fun to have a couple of weeks to deeply dive into something that was broken, figure out why it was broken, and then help figure out how it could be fixed. Some sprints went better than others, but I always thought the process was so much fun. But I have to say the thing that I really miss most was that USDS was never boring. Every day, there was a new story. Some of them were happy stories, some of them were tragic stories, most of them were frustrating stories, and a handful of them are stories that I don’t know whether or not I’ll ever be able to tell them. But they’re all stories that make up two years of wild memories that I will never, ever forget. You know when you think back on something and you can’t help but shake your head and smile? That’s my USDS.
KH: Why should someone consider doing a tour of duty?
SW: There’s something for everyone here if you have the right mindset for it. Whether you’re driven by patriotism, duty, gratitude, a desire to be helpful, or the need for an adventure, USDS has something that’ll scratch your itch. Now…you have to be an independent thinker, willing to take some hits, and be OK with living in a world full of contradictions. You have to fight, but in the end, you’re fighting for a decent compromise because you’ll almost never get to do what you really want to do. You have to hack through bureaucracy without actually violating any rules. You have to figure out how to reconcile ostensibly competing views and then back it up with data. And you have to accept that there will be times when, regardless of what you try, it just doesn’t work out, and you have to pick yourself up and try the next thing. It is a humbling experience. But I think back on the moments when I managed to actually help a student, or a refugee, or an immigrant, or a veteran, and every blow is more than worth it. Nobody else is coming, and it is up to each of us to make this government and our country what we want it to be.
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If you have questions regarding employment with the U.S. Digital Service, please contact us at usds@omb.eop.gov and visit usds.gov/join.
