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.
