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The Ambition–Infrastructure Gap

Zohram Mamdani will take office as Mayor of New York City on January 1 with something most incoming leaders fantasize about: a mandate for sweeping change and a flood of talent eager to help him deliver it. Within 24 hours, his team reportedly received 25,000 job applications. That number is a gift—and a trap. New York’s civil service system is not designed to harness modern talent or deliver modern services. It is a machine forged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to fight patronage, then barnacled over by decades of legal, procedural, and union constraints. Today, it is functionally hostile to software engineers, product managers, data scientists, service designers, and modern operators—the very people needed to implement Mamdani’s promises on childcare, housing, transit, and public benefits. The core tension is not ideological. It’s infrastructural. Like many progressive agendas, Mamdani’s vision assumes a capable state. New York City does not currently operate one. This isn’t a story about vibes or values. It’s about job classifications, eligibility lists, legacy exams, and the quiet technical architecture of government that determines whether policy is something people experience—or just something they retweet.

If Mamdani wants a Scandinavian-style social contract, he first needs a world-class deployment pipeline for public services.

A 19th-Century Fix That Became a 21st-Century Failure Mode

To understand how we got here, you have to go backwards. Civil service protections were a necessary response to the spoils system, where jobs were political currency. After President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a deranged office-seeker who believed he was owed a diplomatic post, reformers pushed through the Pendleton Act and its descendants. New York followed suit with its own merit-based rules, later fortified and extended to cities, towns, and agencies across the state. This architecture aimed to ensure:

  • Neutral exams over political loyalty.
  • Standardized classifications over arbitrary pay.
  • Protections from partisan firing.

It worked—until it didn’t. Over time, the system petrified. Job titles multiplied. Requirements ossified. Processes optimized not for capability, but for defensibility. What began as a shield against abuse calcified into a barrier against expertise. Robert Moses saw this early. Blocked from reshaping civil service, he built side-door power via public authorities exempt from many of these constraints. Whatever you think of Moses’s legacy (and tech audiences tend to prefer observability to autocracy), he understood the leverage point: if you control the hiring interface, you control what gets built. Moses’s workaround left the core system intact. Mamdani won’t have Moses’s escape hatches. He’ll have to walk through the front door—and fix the jammed lock.

The Absurd Theater of NYC Tech Hiring

The best way to grasp the scale of the problem is to view it through the lens of technology roles—the ones least compatible with 1970s bureaucracy and most essential to 2025 governance. Among more than 3,000 standard titles in New York City government, you will not find:

  • “Software engineer”
  • “Web designer”
  • “Product manager”
  • “Site reliability engineer”
  • “Data platform engineer”

Instead, technologists are funneled into titles like “Computer Associate,” a category whose official description leans heavily on “telecommunications hardware” and mainframe operations. Modern engineering disciplines are squeezed into roles that sound like they were written to support a VAX cluster. This is not just cringe copy. It is legally operative text. Here’s how the process typically works today:

  1. A hiring manager identifies a critical need—say, modernizing benefits eligibility systems or building APIs for childcare enrollment.
  2. They are required to map the work to an existing job classification, often archaic or misaligned.
  3. For many titles, the city (or state) periodically runs a civil service exam.
  4. Only candidates who previously took that exam—sometimes years earlier, for a job they couldn’t yet see—are eligible.
  5. If an exam was administered in the last five years, the hiring manager must choose from the top three scorers on that list.
  6. Those candidates may have:

    • No relevant technical skills,
    • No domain knowledge,
    • But a strong interest in “stable job, high protection from firing.”
If you are a genuinely talented engineer or designer who:
  • Found the job via a modern channel,
  • Has deep experience in accessibility, security, or human-centered design,
  • Actually wants to ship better public services,

…you are likely ineligible—because you did not, three years ago, pay $85 to sit for an exam titled something like “Administrative Business Promotions Coordinator” in a downtown Manhattan classroom.

Hiring managers, not being fools, try to game this.

They search for titles where no recent exam exists, in agencies that have been allocated that title, whose vague description can be stretched to fit the work. This can take weeks. Entire HR teams are effectively reverse-engineering a legacy rule engine, not building pipelines of mission-driven talent.

The result is a perverse anti-platform:

  • Inputs: motivated applicants, urgent public needs, modern tools.
  • System: brittle classification, eligibility lists, exam culture, unclear titles.
  • Output: slow hiring, misaligned skills, shadow workarounds, and failed implementation.

For a private-sector CTO, this would be grounds for a rewrite. For a mayor, it is the invisible dependency his entire program rests on.

Why This Is a Tech Story, Not Just a Governance Story

To a developer or infrastructure engineer, this entire setup is instantly recognizable: it’s a production system accreted over a century, with no owning product manager, no coherent architecture, and no observability.

The consequences show up in all the places Mamdani has promised to act:

  • Free childcare at scale requires:
    • Eligibility and enrollment systems that actually work on mobile.
    • Data pipelines across agencies.
    • Provider onboarding workflows that don’t feel like 1998.
  • Tenant protections and housing policy require:
    • Integrated case management.
    • Secure, auditable records.
    • Cross-checked datasets instead of dueling spreadsheets and fax machines.
  • Transportation, public safety, climate resilience all depend on:
    • Real-time data collection and analytics.
    • Modern procurement and vendor oversight.
    • Engineers who understand both city infrastructure and distributed systems.

These are software and systems problems wrapped in legal constraints. If you can’t hire the people who know how to solve them, the policy will fail. Not philosophically. Operationally.

This is the same structural flaw Joseph Heath pointed to in his critique of American progressives: the desire for “pudding without meat”—a high-functioning welfare state without first doing the unglamorous work of building a high-functioning administrative state.

The IRS anecdote is instructive: a national tax authority with 108 conflicting systems and 50,000 fax lines is barely capable of running an income tax, let alone a sophisticated wealth tax. The idea that you can just “add a form field” is fantasy.

New York risks the same fantasy at city scale if it treats civil service reform as a footnote.

What a Serious Fix Looks Like (And Why It’s Hard)

If Mamdani treats this as Robert Moses’s unfinished business—not the power-hoarding, but the structural modernization—what should his team prioritize?

Not another press conference.

A surgical rewrite of how the city attracts, evaluates, and deploys technical and operational talent.

Key moves, framed the way a senior engineering or platform leader would see them:

  1. Make the job taxonomy legible.

    • Introduce modern titles: software engineer, product manager, UX researcher, security engineer, data engineer, SRE, policy engineer.
    • Map them to standardized, public career ladders with transparent pay bands.
    • Deprecate or refactor the most anachronistic titles; stop forcing 2025 roles through 1970s abstractions.

  2. Decouple eligibility from obscure, infrequent exams.

    • Replace generic, one-shot multiple-choice tests with:
      • Structured interviews,
      • Work samples,
      • Practical exercises, and
      • Portfolio reviews.
    • Preserve merit principles by making assessments rigorous, repeatable, and related to actual job functions.

  3. Build a centralized, modern hiring platform.

    • One canonical system for:
      • Posting roles in plain language,
      • Processing applications,
      • Managing candidate communication,
      • Tracking diversity and equity metrics,
      • Sharing talent pools across agencies.
    • No more PDF scavenger hunts. No more “you had to be here on that one Saturday.”

  4. Stand up a high-leverage digital service and operations core.

    • A city-level team modeled on U.S. Digital Service, UK’s GDS, or New Zealand’s digital government unit, but with stronger permanency and local context.
    • Embedded engineers, designers, product leads, and operations experts who:
      • Partner with line agencies,
      • Rotate across high-impact projects,
      • Set and enforce technical standards.

  5. Use Mamdani’s political capital to go upstream.

    • Much of the machinery is locked in state law.
    • The administration should define a precise reform package and relentlessly lobby Albany.
    • Make it about delivery, not ideology: if you support better childcare, safer streets, and functioning benefits, you must support the ability to hire the people who can build and maintain that infrastructure.

None of this is trivial. It cuts across unions, entrenched bureaucracies, and real risks of reintroducing patronage if reforms are sloppy.

But there is a rich international and domestic playbook now: agile procurement pilots, competency-based hiring frameworks, job family taxonomies, protected digital service corps. This is implementable engineering work, not speculative theory.

Eating the Vegetables First

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The easy story about Mamdani’s victory is ideological: left vs. center, bold vs. cautious, redistribution vs. austerity.

The harder, more relevant story for anyone who builds systems is this: New York City’s capacity to execute is a legacy platform problem hiding in plain sight.

Moses understood that real power lived in concrete, steel, and authorities. Today, real power lives in:

  • Clean data models and interoperable systems.
  • Hiring pipelines that surface mission-driven technologists instead of exam-gamers.
  • Governance structures that guard against both corruption and paralysis.

If Mamdani spends his first year simply wrestling with the existing hiring maze, starving his own agenda of the engineers, designers, and operators it requires, the narrative will write itself: big promises, predictable failure.

But if he treats civil service modernization as the keystone—a precondition, not a side project—New York has a shot at something rarer: a progressive government that actually ships.

For engineers watching from the outside, that’s the real question. Not whether the rhetoric is inspiring, but whether the operating system of the city will let 25,000 willing contributors become the delivery team for a new social contract.

New Yorkers voted for dessert. Mamdani’s first serious act of leadership will be insisting the city eat its vegetables.

Source: Adapted and analyzed from Jennifer Pahlka’s “Robert Moses's unfinished business should be Mamdani's priority,” Eating Policy (Nov 12, 2025). Original: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/robert-mosess-unfinished-business