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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. First

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. First of all, let's make sure we look at the full scope of civilian life with a sober eye. Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. And any medium to large company has plenty of internal politics. Don't make the mistake of comparing the worst case of government to some idealized notion of private enterprise. 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. Folks who have not worked for the government, or very close to it, have a hard time comprehending the fundamental differences between government and private enterprise. For one thing, when you work for the government, many rules of your job carry the force of law. Being too flexible might not just get you fired, it might get you prosecuted. And there are so many rules. I'll give you one example scenario: a person leaves their job, and a subordinate steps up, takes on their workload, and does great. In a private company, you'd just promote the subordinate. You already know they can do the work, you retain institutional knowledge, and it's easier to hire junior positions. Efficient and effective. But in most federal agencies that would be illegal, as it might permit some form of corruption. The subordinate would have to keep doing the extra workload, while the supervisor requisitions a new position to replace the old one, and then runs a (highly regulated) open public application process. The subordinate can apply too, of course. This is not because the supervisor is some terrible inflexible or dumb person. The rules are just stricter and more burdensome in the government than in private enterprise. Why? Because everyone loves to believe the worst about the government, so it's easy to sell voters on the necessity of a shitload of burdensome rules. So: if you want people to act smarter in the government, you have to give them permission to act smarter. Firing has little to do with it. You have to give people the opportunity to try things and make mistakes in good faith.

shaklee3 9y ago
I agree with what you say, but you attacked OP for not providing evidence, and you didn't provide any either.
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  They did not attack the OP, they criticized their argument. It's a fundamental difference.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Folks interested in a taste of how the federal government manages people can take a look at: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/ https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/ Much of the information in there carries the force of law; that is, a hiring supervisor cannot legally deviate from the process even if they think it is dumb and hurting their chances of getting the best candidate. My example of the subordinate who can't just get promoted has happened to two personal friends who work for the federal government (both of whom have graduate degrees in their field of work BTW). To be clear, there are "promotions" in federal pay, from say a GS-9 to GS-10. I'm talking about a promotion into a different position, like from a specialist to a manager (to use generic example terms).
  - kodablah 9y ago
    Wouldn't all of these (legal) rules, red tape, stories from your two personal friends, etc support the original argument that they employ patriots or the less qualified? Otherwise, why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs? Especially in IT.
    - snowwrestler 9y ago
      If the problem is attracting better people, how would that get fixed just by making it easier to fire people? I wouldn't claim that the government has the best of the best across the board. In some areas they do, like fighter pilots or criminal investigators. In others, they generally don't, like web application developers. What I disagree with is the idea that the government is full of incompetent people, who just need to get fired for things to speed up and get better. It ignores the reality of how the government really works, and therefore who joins the government and why.
smallnamespace 9y ago
I have no data to offer, but I do have a simple, heuristic model that might hint at GP's thinking process: 1. tolerance to short-term career uncertainty varies greatly between individuals (e.g. changing jobs, moving, having money in the bank to cushion the cashflow turbulence) 2. the gov't largely underpays in dollars in return for high career stability 3. if level of tolerance to short-term disruption is strongly positively correlated to general 'ability', then the government will end up with on average less capable workers Not saying this is necessarily true, and certain fields are probably exceptions (do people who choose to become cryptographers prefer a quiet peaceful life?) but certainly the movers and shakers of industry are people who can stomach enormous amounts of short term risk. And there are also heuristic arguments to think (3) might be true on average. Like, if people with more money in the bank can take more short term risks, and it's usually the most capable people with that cash available (because they had more earning power in the past), then 'valuing career stability' might be a negative signal for candidate ability.
- kodablah 9y ago
  I too agree with GGP's characterization of the majority of government employees and I too have no evidence beyond anecdotal experience. But I think a reasonable model for evidence would be accountability information. I'll settle for numbers on government employee termination for dissatisfactory work by department (I'm sure it's somewhere, link anyone?). If, as I suspect, termination rates are very minimal in areas requiring skills like IT, I think we can either assume accountability is lower than the private sector or they magically hire the best on first try most of the time. Based on my naive knowledge built from discussions with career-public-sector employees, I suspect the former.
  - metaphor 9y ago
    > ...I think we can either assume... If I may posit a third for consideration: for-cause termination is such an insurmountable bureaucratic hurdle that supervisors pragmatically opt to pursue inter/intradepartmental transfer, effectively making the employee "someone else's problem".
stale2002 9y ago
> 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 obviously. If the employee is competent, then of course they are more likely to leave. This exact method of adverse selection, where the good people leave, is the exact problem.
- vidarh 9y ago
  If the employee is competent, they're more likely to leave in private business too. Often exactly because companies tend to be really bad at offering raises and promotions relative to offering market rates for new hires. It's not a given that this is better (or worse) in private companies than government overall.
shortimer 9y ago
This is only personal experience, but multiple/many data points in that personal experience. I'm familiar with government departments where 20%+ of the employees do essentially no work whatsoever. Their assigned work languishes indefinitely, until it eventually looks bad enough on some chart that it gets assigned to someone else. That "someone else" is often a hardworking, loyal employee who does their best to earn their pay (thank you, to those people!!). But their attitude is ground down over time by watching those other people do literally nothing, and eventually get promoted "because seniority." So I fundamentally disagree with your premise that you could transplant that population into a business. I'm certainly familiar with freeloads in business, but I'd struggle to come up with an example company where 1/5 or more of employees do no work at all over multiple decades and then retire with a pension.
thorin 9y ago
I'm from a small city in a poor region of the UK. I find that many friends from that area work either at the local council or the NHS (hospitals etc), Education or decentralised government agencies e.g. Tax, vehicle licensing, immigration etc. They tend to be one of the few employers with highly skilled work available in those areas for people who don't want to or won't move to more affluent areas where the big companies are located. This is a primary reason for people working for the government and I'm sure this is true in small town US too. Not for me, I moved to London as soon as I graduated, but later moved back to a medium sized city, as a compromise.
jjkk0101 9y ago
This is a very good point. I recently moved to Denmark, and the biggest cultural shock is the huge trust Danes have with their public sector..
bonesss 9y ago
> Why? Because everyone loves to believe the worst about the government, so it's easy to sell voters on the necessity of a shitload of burdensome rules. There's also a fundamental difference between you being cavalier with your money, and me being cavalier with our money. Being tax payer funded changes accountability, investment horizons, and access to capital. The CEO of Twitter gets to put whoever he wants in wherever, and eats the costs if it works bad, but to ensure responsible fiduciary practices with our collective wealth we, the taxpayers, demand less aggressive and efficient practices to limit corruption and incompetence. This is a conscious social decision, to move slower and more carefully, and will hopefully be minimized with increasingly robust Civic Tech. Alternative federal structures would historically point towards oligarchies and widespread corruption.
- wbl 9y ago
  Why does Singapore have so much better administration?
- SiempreViernes 9y ago
  Uh, it's about as much your money in both cases, that is to say it's not. In both cases its their money in both a the practical and legal sense. The difference is that when a company takes your dollars and put it towards their new SAP system to hopefully upgrade their shitty web services, wasting $100 million, you don't fell you have any agency over what happens at all. On the other hand, when the government invests money in a huge SAP project that then fail, you do feel entitled to rage about it, since there are actual ways you could have acted to prevent this waste (convoluted that the process may be). But the money the government owns isn't yours in any real sense, since most of it is unaffected by any formal action you can take. In fact, you might in practice be more in control, by the avenue of complaints and media campaigns, of money you've given to private enterprises. At least on the extremes, it is certainly easier to get your favourite pub to buy new lamps than getting the Army to get some new artillery.
pc86 9y ago
> 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.
- fineng123 9y ago
  Thanks for telling it like it is
- zip1234 9y ago
  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.
ataturk 9y ago
What you mention never happens in private business, either. I'm far more competent than pretty much everyone I ever worked under and it didn't mean I got promoted to their job. Far from it--US private corporations reward idiocy because idiots are loyal.
1024core 9y ago
> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. Not really. Don't get me wrong: I like the people in our post office. But they'd be killed in the private sector. At my local grocery store (Safeway), they'll add a new cashier if the line becomes long. The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. Or the DMV. Visit the SF DMV if you want to see government at "work".
- pcwalton 9y ago
  > The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. > At my local grocery store (Safeway), they'll add a new cashier if the line becomes long. The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. Because Safeway has enough manpower to do that. > Or the DMV. Visit the SF DMV if you want to see government at "work". I've actually been reasonably satisfied with the approach the CA DMV takes, which is to do everything possible to make people not have to visit the DMV in person. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy online driver's license renewal was (they even had a mobile version). I'd take the USPS over, say, the customer service experience on the US legacy airlines any day.
  - 1024core 9y ago
    > Because Safeway has enough manpower to do that. I can assure you, the cashiers at Safeway make significantly less money than the USPS staff. And accounting for guaranteed pensions, even more so. Most are minimum wage employees with no job security. And to answer your speculation: there are employees at the Post Office. You can see them through the doors. And finally: why isn't the office staffed properly, given that these holidays like Christmas aren't exactly new and unforeseen?
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      I suspect a lot of this has little to do with government vs. private sector and a lot to do with the APWU [1]. There are unions in the private sector too. I'm personally just fine with paying the postal workers a living wage, even if it means the lines are a bit longer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Postal_Workers_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Postal_Workers_Union
alexanderstears 9y ago
>Second, take a look at what happens to people who do leave the government. Very often, their salaries go up in the private sector. There's a serious selection bias here. You'd only expect people to leave if their new job is better. Why aren't the DMV clerks clamoring for walmart jobs? Because we probably overcompensate a lot of government employees and undercompensate others. This is another example of government incompetence and I bet they'll double down. Someone right now is trying to increase the pay grades, I promise it won't be enough to retain NSA talent but it'll make some high school congratulate in a cushy position very well off.
phaus 9y ago
>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. I'm not aware of any scientific studies, but I spent a decade on active duty, and seven years as a reservist so far. When it came to technical jobs, almost everyone was terrible at their job, which was usually an incredibly narrow and overly simplified version of what the job would actually be in the civilian world. Everything is compartmentalized to the point where even if you excel at your individual responsibilities, you would still be terrible in the broader field. Almost every marketable skill I learned during my time in the military was something I did on my own time that was completely unrelated to my day job. After I left the military and transferred into a different kind of technical role, eventually I started helping with interviews. 15-20-year government service veterans with incredible resumes and sr. titles are regularly found to be unfit for even an entry level job. There are exceptions, but the rule in the military is incompetence. Its not that there's something inherently wrong with people, its just that the military recruits intelligent people, trains them very poorly, and then never lets them do anything remotely interesting or challenging. They just follow whatever steps they were told to complete in training over and over again for the rest of their careers. As with anything, there are exceptions. Some tiny parts of the military do interesting work and have developed a culture that's reasonably conducive to innovation and fostering talent. From what I've heard, parts of the NSA used to be like this, but the lack of ethics among the organization's senior leadership ended up being partially responsible for the reorganization. Additionally, there are other people that manage to become really good at something in spite of being constantly strangled by the government's attempts to hold them back. Some of the most brilliant people I've ever met started out in the military, but the overwhelming majority of people that serve in technical roles are unfit to do anything besides put asses in seats for the defense contracting industry (which 95% of the time isn't any more capable of specialized technical work than the military).
majormajor 9y ago
I've worked extremely close to the government and, yes, everything about the process screamed inefficiency in the name of positions and purchases not being abused. So you spend massively inflated amounts as a result of that bureaucracy for subpar quality (because a lot of people who can easily find alternatives don't have the patience to deal with the red tape, leading to an over-time retention bias towards the mediocre). I disagree that firing isn't a big part of it, but you can't just have more firing. You need to let managers do their jobs in a way that isn't just following a checklist in a binder, which also involves hiring latitude, pay latitude, etc. All stuff that could be abused, but some abuse is better than uniform shit quality at high expense. One easy example from both government and big industry: how much money do we spend on sending people to get mediocre extra degrees from mediocre schools that don't actually have anything to do with their job responsibilities but is a requirement for a certain promotion level?
wefwej2388 9y ago
> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. Anyone going on line trying to re-org reality based upon their un-authorized opinions needs to take a look at themselves with a "sobering eye". As if one's life goal should revolve around lowest common denominator jobs as snowwrestler sees it. HN: Where discourse that considers how others should be doing everything. Basically Reddit, where the only rule is "wrap your self-righteousness in utilitarian logic, but ignore that you're still just talking into the aether, since you have no ability to do any of this."
ryguytilidie 9y ago
"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." I worked at NASA for 6 years and almost fell out of my chair when I read this. Switching from NASA to Google was the most stark contrast of incompetent people late in their careers having political infights to keep "their" funding to people who didn't care about funding and just did the fucking work. I can think of 10 people I worked with at NASA who absolutely could never hold a professional position in a place that requires revenue or useful contributions.
bowlich 9y ago
I think you hit it the big difference between public/private sector work -- the rules. My spouse has spent seven years in a land agency specializing into a position that really entails knowing, and keeping abreast of a very narrow, specific body of legislation and regulation that is applicable only to that land agency and only in very specific agency/business relationships. There is no comparable position in the private sector (there isn't even a comparable position in different land agencies), and there is no way you could pick someone off the street and expect them to be versed in that legislation without a similar timeframe (and no agency will ever foot the bill to train you on it either. They'll just leave the position empty and the work to pile up for years or decades until a similarly skilled person becomes available). Unfortunately, the biggest issue that this particular agency is facing has been a multiple-decade campaign to hire externally to the agency rather than promoting internally. The result has been a body of upper management from the public sector that neither understands said legislation or how it applies.

shaklee3 9y ago

I agree with what you say, but you attacked OP for not providing evidence, and you didn't provide any either.

lazyasciiart 9y ago
They did not attack the OP, they criticized their argument. It's a fundamental difference.
snowwrestler 9y ago
Folks interested in a taste of how the federal government manages people can take a look at: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/ https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/ Much of the information in there carries the force of law; that is, a hiring supervisor cannot legally deviate from the process even if they think it is dumb and hurting their chances of getting the best candidate. My example of the subordinate who can't just get promoted has happened to two personal friends who work for the federal government (both of whom have graduate degrees in their field of work BTW). To be clear, there are "promotions" in federal pay, from say a GS-9 to GS-10. I'm talking about a promotion into a different position, like from a specialist to a manager (to use generic example terms).
- kodablah 9y ago
  Wouldn't all of these (legal) rules, red tape, stories from your two personal friends, etc support the original argument that they employ patriots or the less qualified? Otherwise, why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs? Especially in IT.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    If the problem is attracting better people, how would that get fixed just by making it easier to fire people? I wouldn't claim that the government has the best of the best across the board. In some areas they do, like fighter pilots or criminal investigators. In others, they generally don't, like web application developers. What I disagree with is the idea that the government is full of incompetent people, who just need to get fired for things to speed up and get better. It ignores the reality of how the government really works, and therefore who joins the government and why.

smallnamespace 9y ago

I have no data to offer, but I do have a simple, heuristic model that might hint at GP's thinking process: 1. tolerance to short-term career uncertainty varies greatly between individuals (e.g. changing jobs, moving, having money in the bank to cushion the cashflow turbulence) 2. the gov't largely underpays in dollars in return for high career stability 3. if level of tolerance to short-term disruption is strongly positively correlated to general 'ability', then the government will end up with on average less capable workers Not saying this is necessarily true, and certain fields are probably exceptions (do people who choose to become cryptographers prefer a quiet peaceful life?) but certainly the movers and shakers of industry are people who can stomach enormous amounts of short term risk. And there are also heuristic arguments to think (3) might be true on average. Like, if people with more money in the bank can take more short term risks, and it's usually the most capable people with that cash available (because they had more earning power in the past), then 'valuing career stability' might be a negative signal for candidate ability.

kodablah 9y ago
I too agree with GGP's characterization of the majority of government employees and I too have no evidence beyond anecdotal experience. But I think a reasonable model for evidence would be accountability information. I'll settle for numbers on government employee termination for dissatisfactory work by department (I'm sure it's somewhere, link anyone?). If, as I suspect, termination rates are very minimal in areas requiring skills like IT, I think we can either assume accountability is lower than the private sector or they magically hire the best on first try most of the time. Based on my naive knowledge built from discussions with career-public-sector employees, I suspect the former.
- metaphor 9y ago
  > ...I think we can either assume... If I may posit a third for consideration: for-cause termination is such an insurmountable bureaucratic hurdle that supervisors pragmatically opt to pursue inter/intradepartmental transfer, effectively making the employee "someone else's problem".

stale2002 9y ago

> 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 obviously. If the employee is competent, then of course they are more likely to leave. This exact method of adverse selection, where the good people leave, is the exact problem.

vidarh 9y ago
If the employee is competent, they're more likely to leave in private business too. Often exactly because companies tend to be really bad at offering raises and promotions relative to offering market rates for new hires. It's not a given that this is better (or worse) in private companies than government overall.

shortimer 9y ago

This is only personal experience, but multiple/many data points in that personal experience. I'm familiar with government departments where 20%+ of the employees do essentially no work whatsoever. Their assigned work languishes indefinitely, until it eventually looks bad enough on some chart that it gets assigned to someone else. That "someone else" is often a hardworking, loyal employee who does their best to earn their pay (thank you, to those people!!). But their attitude is ground down over time by watching those other people do literally nothing, and eventually get promoted "because seniority." So I fundamentally disagree with your premise that you could transplant that population into a business. I'm certainly familiar with freeloads in business, but I'd struggle to come up with an example company where 1/5 or more of employees do no work at all over multiple decades and then retire with a pension.

thorin 9y ago

I'm from a small city in a poor region of the UK. I find that many friends from that area work either at the local council or the NHS (hospitals etc), Education or decentralised government agencies e.g. Tax, vehicle licensing, immigration etc. They tend to be one of the few employers with highly skilled work available in those areas for people who don't want to or won't move to more affluent areas where the big companies are located. This is a primary reason for people working for the government and I'm sure this is true in small town US too. Not for me, I moved to London as soon as I graduated, but later moved back to a medium sized city, as a compromise.

jjkk0101 9y ago

This is a very good point. I recently moved to Denmark, and the biggest cultural shock is the huge trust Danes have with their public sector..

bonesss 9y ago

> Why? Because everyone loves to believe the worst about the government, so it's easy to sell voters on the necessity of a shitload of burdensome rules. There's also a fundamental difference between you being cavalier with your money, and me being cavalier with our money. Being tax payer funded changes accountability, investment horizons, and access to capital. The CEO of Twitter gets to put whoever he wants in wherever, and eats the costs if it works bad, but to ensure responsible fiduciary practices with our collective wealth we, the taxpayers, demand less aggressive and efficient practices to limit corruption and incompetence. This is a conscious social decision, to move slower and more carefully, and will hopefully be minimized with increasingly robust Civic Tech. Alternative federal structures would historically point towards oligarchies and widespread corruption.

wbl 9y ago
Why does Singapore have so much better administration?
SiempreViernes 9y ago
Uh, it's about as much your money in both cases, that is to say it's not. In both cases its their money in both a the practical and legal sense. The difference is that when a company takes your dollars and put it towards their new SAP system to hopefully upgrade their shitty web services, wasting $100 million, you don't fell you have any agency over what happens at all. On the other hand, when the government invests money in a huge SAP project that then fail, you do feel entitled to rage about it, since there are actual ways you could have acted to prevent this waste (convoluted that the process may be). But the money the government owns isn't yours in any real sense, since most of it is unaffected by any formal action you can take. In fact, you might in practice be more in control, by the avenue of complaints and media campaigns, of money you've given to private enterprises. At least on the extremes, it is certainly easier to get your favourite pub to buy new lamps than getting the Army to get some new artillery.

pc86 9y ago

> 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.

fineng123 9y ago
Thanks for telling it like it is
zip1234 9y ago
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.

ataturk 9y ago

What you mention never happens in private business, either. I'm far more competent than pretty much everyone I ever worked under and it didn't mean I got promoted to their job. Far from it--US private corporations reward idiocy because idiots are loyal.

1024core 9y ago

> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. Not really. Don't get me wrong: I like the people in our post office. But they'd be killed in the private sector. At my local grocery store (Safeway), they'll add a new cashier if the line becomes long. The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. Or the DMV. Visit the SF DMV if you want to see government at "work".

pcwalton 9y ago
> The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. > At my local grocery store (Safeway), they'll add a new cashier if the line becomes long. The Post Office? Nope! During busy times, I've seen the line go beyond 15 or 20, and there's this only 1 slow clerk taking his time, chit-chatting, in no hurry at all. Because Safeway has enough manpower to do that. > Or the DMV. Visit the SF DMV if you want to see government at "work". I've actually been reasonably satisfied with the approach the CA DMV takes, which is to do everything possible to make people not have to visit the DMV in person. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy online driver's license renewal was (they even had a mobile version). I'd take the USPS over, say, the customer service experience on the US legacy airlines any day.
- 1024core 9y ago
  > Because Safeway has enough manpower to do that. I can assure you, the cashiers at Safeway make significantly less money than the USPS staff. And accounting for guaranteed pensions, even more so. Most are minimum wage employees with no job security. And to answer your speculation: there are employees at the Post Office. You can see them through the doors. And finally: why isn't the office staffed properly, given that these holidays like Christmas aren't exactly new and unforeseen?
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    I suspect a lot of this has little to do with government vs. private sector and a lot to do with the APWU [1]. There are unions in the private sector too. I'm personally just fine with paying the postal workers a living wage, even if it means the lines are a bit longer. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Postal_Workers_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Postal_Workers_Union

alexanderstears 9y ago

>Second, take a look at what happens to people who do leave the government. Very often, their salaries go up in the private sector. There's a serious selection bias here. You'd only expect people to leave if their new job is better. Why aren't the DMV clerks clamoring for walmart jobs? Because we probably overcompensate a lot of government employees and undercompensate others. This is another example of government incompetence and I bet they'll double down. Someone right now is trying to increase the pay grades, I promise it won't be enough to retain NSA talent but it'll make some high school congratulate in a cushy position very well off.

phaus 9y ago

>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. I'm not aware of any scientific studies, but I spent a decade on active duty, and seven years as a reservist so far. When it came to technical jobs, almost everyone was terrible at their job, which was usually an incredibly narrow and overly simplified version of what the job would actually be in the civilian world. Everything is compartmentalized to the point where even if you excel at your individual responsibilities, you would still be terrible in the broader field. Almost every marketable skill I learned during my time in the military was something I did on my own time that was completely unrelated to my day job. After I left the military and transferred into a different kind of technical role, eventually I started helping with interviews. 15-20-year government service veterans with incredible resumes and sr. titles are regularly found to be unfit for even an entry level job. There are exceptions, but the rule in the military is incompetence. Its not that there's something inherently wrong with people, its just that the military recruits intelligent people, trains them very poorly, and then never lets them do anything remotely interesting or challenging. They just follow whatever steps they were told to complete in training over and over again for the rest of their careers. As with anything, there are exceptions. Some tiny parts of the military do interesting work and have developed a culture that's reasonably conducive to innovation and fostering talent. From what I've heard, parts of the NSA used to be like this, but the lack of ethics among the organization's senior leadership ended up being partially responsible for the reorganization. Additionally, there are other people that manage to become really good at something in spite of being constantly strangled by the government's attempts to hold them back. Some of the most brilliant people I've ever met started out in the military, but the overwhelming majority of people that serve in technical roles are unfit to do anything besides put asses in seats for the defense contracting industry (which 95% of the time isn't any more capable of specialized technical work than the military).

majormajor 9y ago

I've worked extremely close to the government and, yes, everything about the process screamed inefficiency in the name of positions and purchases not being abused. So you spend massively inflated amounts as a result of that bureaucracy for subpar quality (because a lot of people who can easily find alternatives don't have the patience to deal with the red tape, leading to an over-time retention bias towards the mediocre). I disagree that firing isn't a big part of it, but you can't just have more firing. You need to let managers do their jobs in a way that isn't just following a checklist in a binder, which also involves hiring latitude, pay latitude, etc. All stuff that could be abused, but some abuse is better than uniform shit quality at high expense. One easy example from both government and big industry: how much money do we spend on sending people to get mediocre extra degrees from mediocre schools that don't actually have anything to do with their job responsibilities but is a requirement for a certain promotion level?

wefwej2388 9y ago

> Anyone working the counter at your local Post Office could easily work the register at any grocery store in your town. Anyone going on line trying to re-org reality based upon their un-authorized opinions needs to take a look at themselves with a "sobering eye". As if one's life goal should revolve around lowest common denominator jobs as snowwrestler sees it. HN: Where discourse that considers how others should be doing everything. Basically Reddit, where the only rule is "wrap your self-righteousness in utilitarian logic, but ignore that you're still just talking into the aether, since you have no ability to do any of this."

ryguytilidie 9y ago

"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." I worked at NASA for 6 years and almost fell out of my chair when I read this. Switching from NASA to Google was the most stark contrast of incompetent people late in their careers having political infights to keep "their" funding to people who didn't care about funding and just did the fucking work. I can think of 10 people I worked with at NASA who absolutely could never hold a professional position in a place that requires revenue or useful contributions.

bowlich 9y ago

I think you hit it the big difference between public/private sector work -- the rules. My spouse has spent seven years in a land agency specializing into a position that really entails knowing, and keeping abreast of a very narrow, specific body of legislation and regulation that is applicable only to that land agency and only in very specific agency/business relationships. There is no comparable position in the private sector (there isn't even a comparable position in different land agencies), and there is no way you could pick someone off the street and expect them to be versed in that legislation without a similar timeframe (and no agency will ever foot the bill to train you on it either. They'll just leave the position empty and the work to pile up for years or decades until a similarly skilled person becomes available). Unfortunately, the biggest issue that this particular agency is facing has been a multiple-decade campaign to hire externally to the agency rather than promoting internally. The result has been a body of upper management from the public sector that neither understands said legislation or how it applies.