4 ms·

Almost all DMV problems are due to understaffing, not any laziness or incompetence on the part of the people who work there. In California the DMV experience w

by JJMcJ 4y ago

Almost all DMV problems are due to understaffing, not any laziness or incompetence on the part of the people who work there. In California the DMV experience was greatly improved by having appointments, and for walk in, you get a number and at least have an idea when you'll be called, so you can sit in a waiting area, not have to stand for hours. COVID has reduced staffing so that makes appointments harder to get. Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error.

nobody9999 4y ago
>Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error. Absolutely! I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems. The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their customer service reps off IBM 3270[0] terminals which were locked in to a single application (with significant retraining required for different apps) with X terminals (what they used to call thin clients) that scraped database queries and stored them in a local database and had a unified UI across all apps. The app was complete, the roll out team purchased ~USD$300,000,000 worth of systems and infrastructure, and then realized that it would cost USD$150,000,000/year to support/maintain the environment. So the project was canceled, with hundreds of millions of dollars in Unix boxen and related hardware sitting in warehouses, now without a clear purpose. When moving folks off of the mainframe, we always pushed them to use the hardware already purchased (a sunk cost). All a group needed to to was put the capital depreciation for whatever equipment they used on their budget lines. The vendor (again who will remain nameless) priced out equipment (on purpose, I'm sure) so it was cheaper (on the budget line) than the depreciation on the equipment the corporation already owned. In every single case, these groups chose to spend real money buying new equipment rather than taking on the depreciation of the equipment already purchased. What's more, when evangelizing these changes, I was strongly cautioned to never use the phrase "increased productivity," as that (apparently) made the heads of these groups concerned about losing head count. tl;dr: The corporation was so fractured and inefficient that group heads would waste corporate dollars in the millions just to maintain their budget and headcount. I'd love to hear about something like that happening at the DMV or other government office. But I won't, because if folks in the public sector pulled shit like that, they'd be hounded out of their departments. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 Edit: Added the missing link.
- Brybry 4y ago
  My dad worked at a public university where his department would charge for services provided to other departments at the university. At the end of the year the department's surplus went to a general fund (and I think this was also a factor in deciding future budget allocations for the department). So everyone in his department was incentivized to buy equipment they didn't actually need so that they didn't "lose" their money. The old, perfectly working, hardware would be put out into hallways and get thrown away in the trash. Granted a public university is a lot different from an actual government department.
- halffaday 4y ago
  Not that long ago, California paid $2B in fraudulent benefits. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-america-estimate-2-billion-california-unemployment-fraud https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-... That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    Do you specialize in non-sequiturs?
  - riizade 4y ago
    There are a lot of ways to compare these numbers, and I think "absolute dollar amount" is not particularly enlightening among them. On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B). $300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents. In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste. But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy. That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.

by JJMcJ 4y ago

nobody9999 4y ago

>Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error. Absolutely! I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems. The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their customer service reps off IBM 3270[0] terminals which were locked in to a single application (with significant retraining required for different apps) with X terminals (what they used to call thin clients) that scraped database queries and stored them in a local database and had a unified UI across all apps. The app was complete, the roll out team purchased ~USD$300,000,000 worth of systems and infrastructure, and then realized that it would cost USD$150,000,000/year to support/maintain the environment. So the project was canceled, with hundreds of millions of dollars in Unix boxen and related hardware sitting in warehouses, now without a clear purpose. When moving folks off of the mainframe, we always pushed them to use the hardware already purchased (a sunk cost). All a group needed to to was put the capital depreciation for whatever equipment they used on their budget lines. The vendor (again who will remain nameless) priced out equipment (on purpose, I'm sure) so it was cheaper (on the budget line) than the depreciation on the equipment the corporation already owned. In every single case, these groups chose to spend real money buying new equipment rather than taking on the depreciation of the equipment already purchased. What's more, when evangelizing these changes, I was strongly cautioned to never use the phrase "increased productivity," as that (apparently) made the heads of these groups concerned about losing head count. tl;dr: The corporation was so fractured and inefficient that group heads would waste corporate dollars in the millions just to maintain their budget and headcount. I'd love to hear about something like that happening at the DMV or other government office. But I won't, because if folks in the public sector pulled shit like that, they'd be hounded out of their departments. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270 Edit: Added the missing link.

Brybry 4y ago
My dad worked at a public university where his department would charge for services provided to other departments at the university. At the end of the year the department's surplus went to a general fund (and I think this was also a factor in deciding future budget allocations for the department). So everyone in his department was incentivized to buy equipment they didn't actually need so that they didn't "lose" their money. The old, perfectly working, hardware would be put out into hallways and get thrown away in the trash. Granted a public university is a lot different from an actual government department.
halffaday 4y ago
Not that long ago, California paid $2B in fraudulent benefits. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-america-estimate-2-billion-california-unemployment-fraud https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-07/bank-of-... That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  Do you specialize in non-sequiturs?
- riizade 4y ago
  There are a lot of ways to compare these numbers, and I think "absolute dollar amount" is not particularly enlightening among them. On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B). $300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents. In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste. But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy. That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.