Singapore is known for channelling its best talent into the public sector and with GovTech it’s no different. The government aims to staff the agency with the same calibre of talent that would make its way to Facebook or Google, even going to the extent of trying to poach talent from these firms to staff this unit. Lee Hsien Loong, the country’s former prime minister, would make frequent visits to Silicon Valley where he would make it a point to reach out specifically to Singaporean talent working at big tech firms to try to get them to come back and work for government outfits like GovTech. Those who couldn’t be immediately convinced to make the jump were encouraged to try out working for the government for shorter stints, like with the Smart Nation Fellowship, a three-month to one-year programme to get talented Singaporeans to come back and spend some time with public agencies like GovTech. The fellowship is a useful on-ramp to get people involved. Some do their tour of duty and go back, others decide to stay, and both are desirable outcomes for the government, since they both bring fresh new ideas to the working of state institutions.
The appreciation for technical talent runs deep in the Singaporean government, even in managerial positions, which seems like an unremarkable thing to say, except it’s not. In most public sector institutions the world over, staffing skews towards people from economics and legal backgrounds rather than those who come from science and engineering. In 2015, the then Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who has a first-class degree in mathematics and a diploma in computer science from Cambridge, shared a Sudoku solver on Facebook which he had programmed himself in C, which racked up 36,000 likes and 12,000 shares within a day. One of his ministers, Vivian Balakrishnan, promptly translated the program to JavaScript and posted his own version online. That sort of alacrity for technology in the upper echelons of government is still rare in much of the rest of the world and Singapore has that to its advantage.
With the growing ranks of global tech companies opening offices in Singapore, the public sector has to fight hard to keep its people.”
The system is under pressure though. The government may have assembled an enviable collection of technical talent in public institutions, but with the growing ranks of global tech companies opening offices in Singapore — like OpenAI did in 2024 — the public sector has to fight hard to keep its people. At DGX, when I asked the head of the Singapore Civil Service, Leo Yip, what was top of his mind when it came to his day to day running of the country’s public administration, he said it was how to hold on to his best people. Private companies, especially those from overseas, have a strong preference for hiring people with civil service backgrounds, given that they bring not just technical expertise but also valuable insider connections, and have seemingly bottomless budgets to lure them away from their government jobs. The Singapore government isn’t exactly lacking money either, its functionaries are among the best paid civil servants in the world, but there’s an upper ceiling for what public servants can pay themselves beyond which things begin to look more than a little unseemly. So the government is in a bit of a bind. It wanted more foreign companies to move there. And now it has that. But now those foreign companies want the government’s people. So a government that isn’t much used to competing — Singapore being effectively a one-party state with a relatively weak domestic private sector — now has to get creative at figuring out non-monetary incentives to keep its talent in the face of heightened competition for its people from abroad.
‘Salary does make a difference but I think it is trivializing and in fact self-defeating to assume that that is the only and most critical factor,’ says Hongyi Li, the Director of Open Government Products at GovTech. Li has two degrees from MIT and worked as a product manager at Google before returning to Singapore to work in government. He studied in the U.S. on a government scholarship which obligated him to come back to serve the country, a scheme that has long been an important on-ramp to get more top-tier talent into public service. What started as what he thought would be a brief sojourn in the public sector before he headed back stateside has turned into a more than a decade long career in GovTech. Li tells me that even if he was better compensated in the private sector, those monetary incentives don’t quite make up for the sense of purpose he has gained doing what he does now.
In Singapore it’s the state that’s taken the lead in bringing more technology to itself and the wider country.”
Li, who is still in his thirties, is strongly invested in Singapore given his grandfather, Lee Kuan Yew, founded the country, and his father, Lee Hsien Loong, served as prime minister for twenty years. Singapore’s place in the world looms large on his mind and he thinks that the country’s hard-earned prosperity would be hard to sustain without better talent in government. ‘I find it offensive that as a society we are allocating our most precious resource, which is brainpower, in the stupidest way,’ he tells me. ‘The way I phrase it is that the smartest people are working on the dumbest problems.’ It’s a realization he arrived at while working at Google, where even trivial details were pored over with the most intensive engineering methods, but none of that sophistication was being brought to bear on much more consequential problems like health and education policy. ‘There was a shift in my perspective,’ he says. ‘The shock I would say came when I saw that at Google if you are trying to figure out the shade of blue for the ads there are literal teams of PhDs that run all kinds of experiments to control for all kinds of stochasticity, all the stuff you learned in school about controlling for all this heterogeneity and variables, all these things that you do because every mistake you make costs hundreds of millions of dollars. And you’re full of capability and you feel very empowered to solve really small things. But the way I think about it is, let’s say you were amazingly successful, let’s say you somehow managed to double web traffic and double their ad revenue, you would be some kind of messiah in the Valley, but if you made a national announcement about that, that people are searching Google twice as much, clicking on ads more, people will be like, who the hell cares? I think that put it in context for me, which is that even this absurd success that you could have of getting people to search the web twice as much and click on twice as many ads would just be nothing in the context of actual society despite the money it makes.’
In most countries the government is a bystander or an active impediment to the development of the tech sector, but in Singapore it’s the state that’s taken the lead in bringing more technology to itself and the wider country. So why can’t that model of public sector-led innovation, or, on a more basic level, just having more effective public administration in general, be adopted elsewhere? Why can’t we just take what Singapore is doing and do it in more places? It’s a question that comes up often, almost as often as the question of why more countries can’t have something like a Silicon Valley: shouldn’t it be about just doing what they’re doing over there and do it over here? And the answer in both cases is the same: it’s hard because they operate in a fairly unique environment. The Singapore example is not that easily replicable because it has the benefit of having a single layer of government in the entire country, the city is the state, which makes things a whole lot more manageable. The very fact that it can even conceive of an all encompassing technology strategy in the form of Smart Nation is because it doesn’t have to contend with a stacked bureaucracy that goes from the federal to the state, district and municipal levels which would make policy coordination that much harder. Singaporean officials would be the first to admit that even they wouldn’t know how to replicate the same degree of horizontal and vertical integration they have in their government functions at the scale of a China or India.
Great Job Mehran Gul & the Team @ Rest of World – Source link for sharing this story.
