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Could you explain this a bit for those of us that either never worked for a large enough organization, or that did not pay enough attention to the politics whil

by geeB 5y ago

Could you explain this a bit for those of us that either never worked for a large enough organization, or that did not pay enough attention to the politics while there? I get that a manager wouldn't want to put down their team since that puts them down too, but something this egregious seems so extreme that would not have those consequences, not to speak of the effect on the other employees' morale of having someone allowed to not work and get paid. I don't see how someone can threaten a manager's career without having something over them, either being part of organized crime, be related/friends with a much higher up person in the organization, or have something on the manager for blackmail.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Warning: I'm about to make a bunch of generalizations, this kind of crap isn't distributed evenly among government. You'll have good functional departments and you'll have backwaters full of deadbeats and everything in between. Same goes on the team level with a dept. In government it's pretty common to have dead weight employees who get no real work given to them and collect a paycheck so long as they show up (optional in Italy apparently). They can persist because they have connections higher up in the organization. Sometimes the jobs are just BS that doesn't exist so that politicians or their connected appointees at the top of the org chart can hand them out to people as favors (e.g. the deadbeat relative of a major donor could be given a 100k job as a thank you). There is also the union angle, we've all heard stories of toxic do-nothing employees who persist because they have seniority which lets them game the system. You get this to some extent in any large bureaucratic organization but the confluence of unions and government creates such a procedurally rigid environment that it makes it worse than you'd get in a BigCo shipyard or some other private sector workplace with lots of unions and bureaucracy >I get that a manager wouldn't want to put down their team since that puts them down too, but something this egregious seems so extreme that would not have those consequences, not to speak of the effect on the other employees' morale of having someone allowed to not work and get paid. You'd be correct in inferring that it's terrible for morale. In my observation it is a large part of why enthusiastic civil servants turn into jaded clock punchers who don't give a crap over the course of their careers. >I don't see how someone can threaten a manager's career without having something over them, either being part of organized crime, be related/friends with a much higher up person in the organization, or have something on the manager for blackmail. Imagine you get a green new manager that's promoted in from a more effective branch of the bureaucracy transferring into one of the more toxic branches. They notice someone's on their report list but not actually around or doing anything, etc. etc. So they contact the person. And the person responds "this is how things are done here", cites several examples of similar behavior done by people higher up the org chart than their boss that reporting them would threaten and point out why that may be unwise to do as a new manager. The new manager has a nearly infinite list of things that need fixing with the toxic area they've inherited. They know they need buy in from higher ups in order to fix things. If reporting their own 5day/wk deadbeat gets them on the wrong side of someone three levels up who's golfing 3day/week it may very well be a battle they don't pick, especially if they want to do good work and then move up and out. It's just money after all, being down one person or one person's salary is a much smaller problem than dragging that person into the office where they can cause problems or drawing the ire of higher ups.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Or you just make nice and slowly grind on them until they have a break down and/or leave.

by geeB 5y ago

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Warning: I'm about to make a bunch of generalizations, this kind of crap isn't distributed evenly among government. You'll have good functional departments and you'll have backwaters full of deadbeats and everything in between. Same goes on the team level with a dept. In government it's pretty common to have dead weight employees who get no real work given to them and collect a paycheck so long as they show up (optional in Italy apparently). They can persist because they have connections higher up in the organization. Sometimes the jobs are just BS that doesn't exist so that politicians or their connected appointees at the top of the org chart can hand them out to people as favors (e.g. the deadbeat relative of a major donor could be given a 100k job as a thank you). There is also the union angle, we've all heard stories of toxic do-nothing employees who persist because they have seniority which lets them game the system. You get this to some extent in any large bureaucratic organization but the confluence of unions and government creates such a procedurally rigid environment that it makes it worse than you'd get in a BigCo shipyard or some other private sector workplace with lots of unions and bureaucracy >I get that a manager wouldn't want to put down their team since that puts them down too, but something this egregious seems so extreme that would not have those consequences, not to speak of the effect on the other employees' morale of having someone allowed to not work and get paid. You'd be correct in inferring that it's terrible for morale. In my observation it is a large part of why enthusiastic civil servants turn into jaded clock punchers who don't give a crap over the course of their careers. >I don't see how someone can threaten a manager's career without having something over them, either being part of organized crime, be related/friends with a much higher up person in the organization, or have something on the manager for blackmail. Imagine you get a green new manager that's promoted in from a more effective branch of the bureaucracy transferring into one of the more toxic branches. They notice someone's on their report list but not actually around or doing anything, etc. etc. So they contact the person. And the person responds "this is how things are done here", cites several examples of similar behavior done by people higher up the org chart than their boss that reporting them would threaten and point out why that may be unwise to do as a new manager. The new manager has a nearly infinite list of things that need fixing with the toxic area they've inherited. They know they need buy in from higher ups in order to fix things. If reporting their own 5day/wk deadbeat gets them on the wrong side of someone three levels up who's golfing 3day/week it may very well be a battle they don't pick, especially if they want to do good work and then move up and out. It's just money after all, being down one person or one person's salary is a much smaller problem than dragging that person into the office where they can cause problems or drawing the ire of higher ups.

datavirtue 5y ago
Or you just make nice and slowly grind on them until they have a break down and/or leave.