This TED Talk features software engineer Matt Cutts, recorded live at TED 2019.

Hi, everybody. My name is Matt Cutts, and I worked at Google for almost 17 years.

As a distinguished engineer there, I was pretty close to the top of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

Then I decided to follow some inspiring folks and do a short tour at the U.S. Digital Service.

That's the group of geeks that helped rescue healthcare.gov when that website went down hard in 2013.

Yeah. So I signed up for a three to six month tour and almost three

years later, I'm still in Washington, D.C., working for the federal government because the government

really needs technologists right now. At my old job, every room had video conferencing integrated with calendars, power cables were built

right into the furniture. When I moved to a government agency, I had to call a person

to set up a phone conference. And when we moved to a new office, we didn't have furniture

for a while. So we set up the phone on a trash can.

One of the things that surprised me whenever I moved to D.C.

is how much the government still has to deal with paper.

Paper has some downsides.

Here's a pop quiz.

If your last name starts with H or higher, H or higher, would you raise your hand?

Wow. I have some bad news. Your veteran records might have been destroyed and a fire in

1973. Yeah. Paper processes are also slower and more prone to errors.

If you're a veteran and you're applying for your health benefits using a paper form,

you might have to wait months for that form to be processed.

We replace that with a web form,

and now most veterans find out if they can get access to their health benefits in 10 minutes.

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