> It's popular to say things like some government employees are "folks who can't hack it in civilian life," but there's basically no evidence this is true.
Have you ever worked for government? I'm a civilian contractor in a software architecture role to a public safety agency in a state government. Half the "senior application developers" haven't written code in 15 years and don't know what a unit test is. There are maybe 2-3 individual contributors for each manager. Not team lead, manager, and is in a $105-110k+/yr position that does annual reviews, on call scheduling, etc.
The floor I'm on has 25-35 developers, DBAs, and BAs, and I can count on one hand the number of people who could get hired into a junior technical position at my employer. There are people who are unironically counting the days they have left until they can retire and draw their pension when they have more than 5 years left.
> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town.
And they'd take a 60% pay cut to do so, wouldn't they? Anyway, this is about folks in technical roles. Running a register and handing out stamps isn't particularly technical.
> Second, take a look at what happens to people who do leave the government. Very often, their salaries go up in the private sector. This is especially true for specialists like the folks who work at the NSA. Seems like they can hack it.
Well that's sort of tautological, isn't it? "The people who get a civilian job are capable of getting a civilian job." These folks are in the "Patriot, not inept" section of the diagram.
> Firing has little to do with it.
Firing has a lot to do. I've spoken candidly about my colleagues here with higher ups in the agency. They've openly bemoaned their inability to fire anyone, especially the people who they know for a fact do nothing all day. Those people are soaking up hundreds of thousands, even millions a year, in taxpayer dollars, doing little work of substance or value, and preventing their positions from being filled by someone capable.
This is more in line with my experience. A friend of mine purposely sought out a job in government for the job security. He seemed to have had a rough time in the private sector as he was always getting laid off/fired and generally seemed to never like his bosses etc. He explicitly expressed that he wanted a job where he could be comfortable working at his own pace without having to worry about performance based evaluations and such. He's now in government and seems to be doing very well financially.
Why are people conflating "government work" with "NSA work"?
It's like saying "corporate work" instead of "Google work".
State level agencies are obviously going to be low-level dreck. The NSA is completely different, and has some of the smartest people on the planet.
It's intellectually lazy (read: dumb) to apply an anecdote to everything, like saying "black guy committed a crime, therefore ALL black guys are criminals". Be smart and more deliberate, instead of being intellectually lazy.
I've been in enough situations, both in the corporate and government sides, to know that each situation is unique. I worked at/with large companies (Intel, IBM), medium companies (Cadence, ATI), and several small startups, along with government (NSA/other agencies). They all have their own unique properties, and I can't say "huurr durrr government employees are all lazy" when it's obvious they aren't, just by looking at what the NSA does.
It's always fun to see Google introduce a new product that the NSA already made years ago...
I have not worked in the government because I haven't been willing to submit myself to that level of inflexibility in my work.
However, I know a lot of people who have worked or currently do work in government, up to and including innovation fellows at the federal level.
I think you're responding to a point that I didn't make. I never said that government tech workers are top notch; in fact I know they generally are not.
My point is that even if you could fire anyone with no process, you would still be stuck with the inflexible structure that government tends to impose on any employee. You would still have trouble recruiting. Why aren't you a government employee? Because it would be too hard to get fired there? No, because it's more enjoyable to work in private industry. Me too.
Management basics: you cannot fire your way to success. You have to hire and empower great employees.
Firing is about efficiency; but what customers and stakeholders really want is performance. It's like saying "my car is running out of gas--I better take off the roof rack." Cutting does not provide forward momentum.
Fundamentally, people want to believe that the reason that government sucks, is because government workers suck. The reality is that government sucks because it imposes structural limits on the empowerment of employees, which harms flexibility and recruiting too.
And those structural limits were put in place, because everyone thinks government workers suck! It's a circle of pain.
BTW I would not spend too much time feeling superior to government tech workers. Governments waste a shitload of money on contractors too. And the rest of the tech industry tends to look down on government contractors about the same as government employees.
> And the rest of the tech industry tends to look down on government contractors about the same as government employees.
Yes, I'm still a government contractor because after doing this for 10 years, nobody in private industry will touch me. Once you get that .gov stank on you, it seems nobody else wants you (the polite term is "not a cultural fit", which I've heard over and over and over again) :(
Payroll is the number 1 expense for government agencies. Easier firing would make a world of difference. I think the root cause is pensions. When people are tied to pensions for a retirement, firing people becomes a much bigger deal. Just pay a match into a retirement account and then when people can go, they go. Private sector pensions are for the most part long gone. Why should public sector keep them.
Pensions just don't make sense mathematically. If they're solvent based on the state's investments, then the employee is getting a raw deal compared to having just invested the money themselves. If they're not, then I as a taxpayer am getting a raw deal by helping to pay for someone's retirement because they worked for a state agency decades ago.
My state starts doling out pensions at 5 years. A friend of mine worked for a state senator in the 90s for 6 years. He's got something like $1200/mo guaranteed during his retirement for 6 years of borderline political work ~25 years ago.
I know it's a politically charged subject but I don't see why from an economic/mathematical perspective it's any better than moving the same investments to the market. Or at least if you're going to keep the pensions, only give them out for full service (20 years) like the military, and make it easier to fire a government worker for poor performance.
I shouldn't be able to sit on my thumbs for a few years and have my mortgage covered by the taxpayers during my retirement.
Pensions make a lot of sense mathematically. If I personally fund my retirement I have to save enough for the "worst" case scenario of living many years longer than average. A pension on the other hand only has to invest enough for the average lifespan because the person who dies a week before retirement and collects nothing helps fund the person who lives to be 105.
State pensions are in trouble because govt pensions are allowed to assume overly optimistic rates of return.
Mandatory safety net/insurance policies make sense because what we know from experience is that if you don't have a mandated program, some people will blow it off. And as long as we don't have the political will to let them die on the street alone in poverty, it'll be very expensive to try pick up the pieces of the mess once they hit the safety net. Especially if that's something like hitting the ER needing tens of thousands of treatment to stabilize, before just getting kicked back out to the street. Or wasting people's time in the ER without medical need because the ER has heating and a bed and the cold winter street doesn't.
Not everybody has family to fall back on in retirement, but we still don't want to let them simply die. So the money has to be given somewhere.
I fully agree with your statement, but would also like to point to the darker side of the coin, where some people managing the mandatory pension fund will probably make some nice amount of money out of it.
It sounds reasonable in theory to collectivize this stuff, but in practice the programs all run out of money. Politicians always over promise. This happens over and over again all over the world.
I see no real alternative to freedom here. Let people make their own choices. Over the long term you can't really conjure up better investment returns and better retirements for people by decree. The wealth has to be there.
> I know it's a politically charged subject but I don't see why from an economic/mathematical perspective it's any better than moving the same investments to the market.
It's worse on average, it's better at minimum (ignoring, for this analysis, municipal bankruptcy)
> My state starts doling out pensions at 5 years. A friend of mine worked for a state senator in the 90s for 6 years. He's got something like $1200/mo guaranteed during his retirement for 6 years of borderline political work ~25 years ago.
Assuming a 2% of highest full years salary per year of service formula at typical retirement age (a fairly generous public, non-safety pension), with 6 years of service that would require a base salary of $120,000 over the highest paid year of those six, that’s—today, not in the 1990s—a fairly senior staff salary for the California State Senate, which has the highest legislator and staff salaries in the nation.
Your description is not necessarily impossible, but it's extremely far from typical.
piling up overtime and sick and vacation days saved over previous years, people are frequently able to 2x and more their salary for pension calculations.
> piling up overtime and sick and vacation days saved over previous years, people are frequently able to 2x and more their salary for pension calculations.
Yes—with a long career over which to save (especially since public employers tend to have vacation allocation which increases with years of service)—and an hourly wage rather than salaried job so that they are eligible for overtime, and participation in one of the systems that hasn't adopted controls to prevent pension spiking, sure.
But not with a 6 year stint in political staff position.
Salaried workers can receive overtime as well. Your thinking of exempt/non-exempt, which has more to do with responsibilities (e.g. management is an exempt category).
And the "political staff positions" are the in the same state bureaucracy as the other agency employees. They're not treated differently for retirement based solely on the fact that they work for the legislature.
And it's certainly possible to build up a lot of vacation and flex time (not strictly OT but it's still paid out at a reduced rate) in 6 years.
Pensions make a lot of sense ... they spread out the risk (notice this also means they spread out the rewards :). Now, the actual level of pensions is a different matter ...
Notice, also, that if you only give pensions for 'full' service (say, 20 years) you create a big incentive for people to stay exactly 20 years ... both people who should leave at 18, but stay 2 more years 'doing time', and people who get screwed because their boss knows they have to stay 2 more years (kind of like H1 abuses). There's no good reason to not make them increase linearly with time.
> If they're solvent based on the state's investments, then the employee is getting a raw deal compared to having just invested the money themselves.
Institutional investors have access to investment opportunities that individual retail investors don't. Many pension funds are big LPs in VC, PE, and hedge funds.
It’s true that highly skilled government workers are underpaid. But non-highly-skilled government workers are overpaid. Both groups get pensions, and there are a lot more of the second group.
Which is worse: a government with overcompensated secretaries, or undercompensated scientists?
I'm a government scientist. Maybe I'm biased. But it seems to me that if your government cannot compete for the best and brightest in your country, you are doomed.
Ideally, of course, we'd compensate both secretaries and scientists appropriately. But we don't seem to be able to manage that.
> What about getting rid of pensions in order to be financially solvent is a race to the bottom?
The idea that the little guy needs to be made more financially insecure so those at the top can benefit from something more "financially solvent." This applies to business (less pensions, more dividends and share buybacks) and government (less pensions, lower taxes [for the rich]).
Also, IIRC, private sector pensions are quite common for CEOs and executives. They're only less common for the little guys.
> The floor I'm on has 25-35 developers, DBAs, and BAs, and I can count on one hand the number of people who could get hired into a junior technical position at my employer. There are people who are unironically counting the days they have left until they can retire and draw their pension when they have more than 5 years left.
This pretty much sounds like the majority of fortune 500s I've worked for. Software Engineers started by being interviewed by non-technical managers, worked there for 20 years becoming 'Senior' or even 'Enterprise Architects', when at most they'd be very junior or intern level developers / engineers at my current employer.
I work at a Fortune 500 (non-tech) company, and your first two paragraphs are very familiar. I’m not sure why people often act like the government has a monopoly on lazy and incompetent people.
It's not something special to government, it's just that any place with a lot of red tape, a lot of organization/bureaucratic process, and where one person is a relatively insignificant contributor will have it. The problem is that for many government is the biggest example of that type of organization.
Do taxpayers pay for your Fortune 500 company's employees' salaries?
These things happen everywhere, but in the private sector, that inefficiency only lasts as long as the rest of the company carries it. It's the taxpayer funding and political difficulty in fixing that make the incompetence of government employees more problematic.
That's such a load of bullshit. If it's an oligopoly or monopoly in a market where the consumer has very little market power, you are just as unable to avoid funding this profligacy.
I guess you could give up medical care, internet and having an education, but if you're going to do that why not just 'vote with your wallet' with your taxes too and move abroad.
I don't disagree with your argument, but I do call attention to your opening sentence.
> That's such a load of bullshit.
Assuming you don't know each other and talk this way IRL, then it seems to me a violation of HN guideline 1:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You hit the nail on the head. I've found that people can't grasp that there are a decent amount of federal employees that go to work and actually do nothing. I think some individuals take it as an attack on "big government" instead of a reality. Sure, it does sound a bit absurd if you haven't worked in that environment before, but people aren't exaggerating.
Firing has everything to do with it. It takes a herculean effort to fire one direct government employee. Replacing the prime contractor and their hundreds of employees and subcontractors' employees on a work order is much easier.
I once heard some "war stories" from someone who had previously worked in a state government office, about the fistfights that broke out between government employees, and the difficulties in keeping malware off the boss-of-the-boss's computer as he routinely visited NSFW sites on state-owned hardware during the workday. That stuff simply doesn't happen in workplaces where people can easily be fired for gross misconduct.
There's good money to be made in actually doing the work that government employees don't do. And that's why no one close to the matter makes a great deal of fuss about them not doing it. If the work needs to be done, and there is no way to force those nominally responsible for it to actually get it done, they can throw more budget at the problem and get a contractor. If you know enough about the problem to say why the direct employees can't fix it, you also know enough to do it yourself and get paid.
I worked for a large government organization and fortune 100 organizations that didn't specialize in writing software. And they were comparable, if not the government job was probably a little better done.
I think in general large organizations that don't specialize in writing software are often pretty bad at it.
Do you think that some of the hiring practices are out of whack as well? I've heard it claimed that sometimes the government treats hiring as welfare employment programs - which adds a whole new spin on this.
I've never heard it phrased like this specifically but there is absolutely a mindset during interviews that the applicant gets the job unless you can find a specific reason not to give it to them. To @dragonwriter's point the rules surrounding Civil Service are even more extreme. Here is a real world example of CS hiring procedures:
0. CS Commission sets a minimum written score for oral interviews. Score is arbitrary and largely designed to limit number of interviews to an acceptable number (20-30 total per vacancy).
1. Commission asks applicants the same questions, in the same order, asked by the same commissioner. Scores are subjective but on a 1-7 scale.
2. Does the mean score surpass the 60% pass rate? If yes, applicant moves to next step.
3. Does the applicant, in their background investigation or oral interview, admit to any explicitly listed disqualifying acts as listed in the Commission's rules & regulations? If no, applicant moves to next step.
4. The written and oral scores are averaged based on a prescribed weighted formula. This weighted score is 0-100.
5. Is the applicant a veteran? Add a certain number of points.
6. Give the top three names to the hiring body (varies by position).
7. Is a veteran in the top three? Guess what, they get the job no matter what.
You'd be hard pressed to convince me that someone who fought for their country in the military should not be preferred as a civil servant. It seems like a very strong qualification for these jobs.
I didn't mean to imply they shouldn't, only used it as one of a list of examples in which civil service hiring is formulaic and not really open to personal opinion. That there are equations and rules for everything, and at the end of the process the "hiring body" is basically told who they have to hire for a given post, unless they can find a reason to disqualify that person.
Fair enough. I definitely agree with your broad point. My wife manages grants (many of which are federal) for a research institute and even though they aren't governmental themselves, just being federally funded creates many of the same circumstances you're talking about here. Being able to fire people more easily would not solve any problems: they need to be able to incentivize good work much more flexibly.
Maybe we're better off loading the dice so that they pursue other lines of work. They may be good at being government workers. They may want to be government workers. It may be better for society over all if we do not give them preferential treatment in some roles but do in others.
This question obviously only applies to a subset of veterans. There's a civilian analog to many military jobs and the military's training and experience in those fields can stand on its own without preferential treatment for the most part.
A combat veteran may make a good post office manager or a good cop but it's probably better off for everyone if he's only given preferential treatment in the latter role.
Maybe? None of what you're saying is obvious to me in either direction. But it does seem to me that "served country in the past" is a reasonable thing to consider when hiring for largely thankless civil service jobs.
Worked as a contractor for a federal agency, can confirm true, with a few variations: written score was weighted, and a cutscore eliminates candidates before oral portion. The written cutscore is adjusted downward until enough women and marginalized groups pass, and then candidates are weeded out in the oral phase, special consideration given to veterans and a few other categories.
Close. #7 is actually not true (although a lot of hiring managers seem to think that it is). You are not required to hire the veteran per OPM regulations. They only get the point based boost.
In practice, the veterans benefit becomes meaningless once you advance in specialist grades (GS-09+). But it will get you the glorious position of elevator operator in Carlesbad.
I'm not talking about OPM, I'm talking about my state's Civil Service rules. If there is only 1 veteran in the top three candidates, the veteran gets the job unless the hiring body explicitly disqualifies them.
> I've heard it claimed that sometimes the government treats hiring as welfare employment programs
There's two ways this is true in state and/or federal government:
(1) hiring into specific programs which are essentially designed as welfare hiring programs (these aren't big today, but there are a few of them still.)
(2) special, broadly-applicable civil service hiring preferences (mainly for certain disabilities and military veterans.)
I've worked onsite at a federal customer as a contractor (software developer). There appears to have been a big push over the last few years to replace contract sysadmins with civil servants (wonder why). So all of the good ones left for better paying jobs elsewhere, while the slugs converted into government employees.
At first I thought the sysadmins were deliberately slow-rolling all of my requests, many of which amounted to running a single UNIX command... turns out they honestly didn't know what they were doing (I asked you to fix the permissions on this directory - 6 weeks ago).
We've gone from:
Me: Can I have sudo privileges so I don't have to bother
you?
Them: No
to
Me: Can I have sudo priviliges so I can fix it myself?
Them: What's soo dough?
I'm actually shocked when I encounter a competent sysadmin these days. "Oh, you made it work. You didn't break something else in the process. Wow." but it makes me sad because I know they won't be around long, as some company willing to pay for competent staff will eventually poach them.
And at the same time we are arguing for basic income. It is not all bad, these people at least have an income and they allow you to make your income because of their incompetence. Chances are that if their employer could fire them you would not have your job either.
Have you ever worked for government? I'm a civilian contractor in a software architecture role to a public safety agency in a state government. Half the "senior application developers" haven't written code in 15 years and don't know what a unit test is. There are maybe 2-3 individual contributors for each manager. Not team lead, manager, and is in a $105-110k+/yr position that does annual reviews, on call scheduling, etc.
The floor I'm on has 25-35 developers, DBAs, and BAs, and I can count on one hand the number of people who could get hired into a junior technical position at my employer. There are people who are unironically counting the days they have left until they can retire and draw their pension when they have more than 5 years left.
> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town.
And they'd take a 60% pay cut to do so, wouldn't they? Anyway, this is about folks in technical roles. Running a register and handing out stamps isn't particularly technical.
> Second, take a look at what happens to people who do leave the government. Very often, their salaries go up in the private sector. This is especially true for specialists like the folks who work at the NSA. Seems like they can hack it.
Well that's sort of tautological, isn't it? "The people who get a civilian job are capable of getting a civilian job." These folks are in the "Patriot, not inept" section of the diagram.
> Firing has little to do with it.
Firing has a lot to do. I've spoken candidly about my colleagues here with higher ups in the agency. They've openly bemoaned their inability to fire anyone, especially the people who they know for a fact do nothing all day. Those people are soaking up hundreds of thousands, even millions a year, in taxpayer dollars, doing little work of substance or value, and preventing their positions from being filled by someone capable.