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Just going to toss in my own anecdotes but not so much productive but surprisingly inefficient. My current employer is currently contracted for the federal gove

Just going to toss in my own anecdotes but not so much productive but surprisingly inefficient. My current employer is currently contracted for the federal government and it's painful to do anything. Just an example, I put in a request to order a $40 network module to replace a failed one. On our side it's already painful enough, I had to get approvals from 3 different managers that have to align all of the budgeting before bringing it forward to the federal government's representative for approval. The rep in tern has to bring it to his bosses for approval as well. Typically this takes 12 weeks but this was put in as a critical priority because this was impacting about a hundred people. Probably costing the federal government (cause they're footing the bill) about $12,500 a week in lost productivity because our teams can't do their job properly. Thus their director got to it in a blazing fast 4 weeks. $40 part. $50,000 in lost productivity because they couldn't get a $40 approval for done faster then 4 weeks. The other anecdote I've had is with the Canadian Firearms Center in Miramichi. For those that are unaware, Canadians are required to be licensed under a federal program to own a firearm privately. Miramichi handles much of the paperwork for firearms registration. This was a while ago but last time I saw, they were still manually entering in data from paperwork but also from electronic submission as well. Stuff that could be readily automated and something I demo'd in an afternoon. As it turns out, the inefficiency is intentional because there's a very real fear among the line staff of job reductions if they get too productive per person. And there's not many jobs in Miramichi that pay as well as the federal government (or at least that was the case when I was visiting there probably 20 years ago). So unfortunately there is justification to be as inefficient as possible. But it's always left me wondering how much how much further this attitude extends to other government departments.

Scoundreller 3y ago
uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation". Meanwhile my Canadian tax return is pretty straightforward: open my tax app, click some download function, it pulls in stuff my bank/employer/etc has already electronically submitted to government. The most annoying part is calculating "Adjusted Cost Basis" for cap gains/losses on stock sales. It's technically fairer than a simpler FIFO approach, but brokers/gov refuse to understand that most people do everything through 1 broker and calculate these figures for us.
- all2 3y ago
  It's to the benefit of the parasite to make it easier to feed on its host. It is also to the benefit of the parasite to ensure that its host cannot get rid of it. Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.
- transcriptase 3y ago
  Firearms license renewals were at a standstill for over a year because apparently the single license card printer for the entire country was out of order.
  - lcssthrowaway 3y ago
    That was COVID lockdown caused I thought. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20200930/008/index-en.aspx https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
- lcssthrowaway 3y ago
  > uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation". Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so. Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2]. The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense. All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-gun-registry-s-1-billion-price-tag-1.353468 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-billion-1.513990 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-...
transcriptase 3y ago
It does extend to other departments. I’ve worked alongside entire teams of longtime federal employees who would spend 10 minutes cleaning up and changing out of work gear, drive 5 minutes to the building with a cafeteria, take a 15 minute union mandated break, then spend 5 minutes driving back to a work site, 10 minutes getting back into their gear and readying tools, only to work for 20 more minutes to finish the job at hand. Then get cleaned up, change, put tools away, and drive back to the building just about in time for lunch. Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable. There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment. That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.
- BeefWellington 3y ago
  If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen in private sector tech companies, even after all the layoffs, I've got some bad news for you. Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.
  - jq-r 3y ago
    The big difference is that the private sector is burning their own money. If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later. Whomever was involved in this will naturally wise up next time. On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.
BeefWellington 3y ago
I'll two-up you: I've worked at two very large tech companies in the past. At both shops I have experiences that make that $50k in lost productivity look like a joke. First company invested tens if not hundreds of millions chasing the idea of scaled clustered deployment using Spark. I'm sure they saw some kind of technology return but the actual investment was never returned nearly a decade on and turned out to be a blunder. Second company had a far worse procurement issue than what you describe in your post. $50k in lost productivity would've been welcomed. They had a hardware failure in one of their datacentres affecting the cooling systems. Some customer systems impacted but mostly internal stuff. It took about seven weeks to replace during which time hundreds of employees basically got to twiddle their thumbs. Yeah, it shouldn't take four weeks to get approval for a $40 part but let's not pretend these kind of problems don't also happen in the private sector too. It's one of the reasons I left and won't go back -- I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.
- rdm_blackhole 3y ago
  I agree with your point that things may not be more efficient in certain big companies of the private sector but there is a crucial difference between the two. The difference is that the government's employees are paid from taxes collected from productive companies, aka companies that create jobs and achieve a profit big enough to warrant paying taxes in the first place. A private sector company, unless it is subsidized in some way or has a monopoly on a certain market will eventually try to rectify these inefficiencies because its makes it more resilient in the fight against it's competitors. On the other hand, there is no incentive on the government side to make things more efficient. If a government looses money, they can just borrow more, increase the national debt and sweep any kind of reform under the rug. Because of this lack of incentives, some state and government agencies act as de facto subsidized job's programs. It's the same problem in many western nation, just look at how many people are employed in France by the government. Many basic services are actually decaying but the government keeps hiring more people. If we remove the employees who work as teachers, cops, in the military, and all other essential services, the rest of them, I am just not sure what the hell they do with their time. My point is that it should be a duty of the government to be as efficient as possible. To do more with less, should be a priority unless the tasks require more people. So I can understand when people complain of the inefficiency of a government agency.

Scoundreller 3y ago

uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation". Meanwhile my Canadian tax return is pretty straightforward: open my tax app, click some download function, it pulls in stuff my bank/employer/etc has already electronically submitted to government. The most annoying part is calculating "Adjusted Cost Basis" for cap gains/losses on stock sales. It's technically fairer than a simpler FIFO approach, but brokers/gov refuse to understand that most people do everything through 1 broker and calculate these figures for us.

all2 3y ago
It's to the benefit of the parasite to make it easier to feed on its host. It is also to the benefit of the parasite to ensure that its host cannot get rid of it. Bureaucracy will always seek its own survival, even at the cost of its chartered mission.
transcriptase 3y ago
Firearms license renewals were at a standstill for over a year because apparently the single license card printer for the entire country was out of order.
- lcssthrowaway 3y ago
  That was COVID lockdown caused I thought. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20200930/008/index-en.aspx https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
lcssthrowaway 3y ago
> uhhhh, I'd say that inefficiency is intentional for firearms because they just want it to be difficult/time-consuming/delayed to acquire/possess firearms. Then they can justify increasing the fees because "they need to recover the costs of program operation". Kinda doubt it, there's already a mandatory wait time for getting your license. If anything Ottawa wanted them to process the paper work faster, I just don't know if they could have done so. Circa early 2000's the Canadians were in the process of trying to get long guns registered (handguns and some other types of firearms always had to be registered), but it turned into a debacle. The cost to build the program should've been $119 million, with fees covering $117 million. The cost that the auditor general found was $140 million registration fees trying to cover $1 billion in costs that she could account for at the time. Didn't help that her team didn't have time to crunch the numbers. CBC went in and estimated that it was closer to $2 billion dollars[2]. The program was already controversial in the first place, but the problems just kept getting problem after problem thrown at it. In protest a man named Brian Richard Buckley sent in firearms registration for a Black and Decker soldering heat gun. There were already huge error rate in the registry at the time; something like 70% error rate of licenses and 90% error rate for registrations but that little stunt he pulled revealed a much deeper problem occurring. I can't find the article anymore but the backlog had become so severe that the staff were instructed to no longer validate any of the information they were getting, even if it didn't make sense. All that to say that say, if things were being run inefficiently intentionally, that probably would've just given even more opposition even more ammunition to embarrass the government at a time when they were already taking a beating about the mismanagement of the new firearms program. So I sincerely doubt it was a mandate. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-gun-registry-s-1-billion-price-tag-1.353468 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/auditor-general-takes-aim-at-... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-billion-1.513990 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/gun-registry-cost-soars-to-2-...

transcriptase 3y ago

It does extend to other departments. I’ve worked alongside entire teams of longtime federal employees who would spend 10 minutes cleaning up and changing out of work gear, drive 5 minutes to the building with a cafeteria, take a 15 minute union mandated break, then spend 5 minutes driving back to a work site, 10 minutes getting back into their gear and readying tools, only to work for 20 more minutes to finish the job at hand. Then get cleaned up, change, put tools away, and drive back to the building just about in time for lunch. Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable. There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment. That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.

BeefWellington 3y ago
If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen in private sector tech companies, even after all the layoffs, I've got some bad news for you. Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.
- jq-r 3y ago
  The big difference is that the private sector is burning their own money. If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later. Whomever was involved in this will naturally wise up next time. On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.

BeefWellington 3y ago

I'll two-up you: I've worked at two very large tech companies in the past. At both shops I have experiences that make that $50k in lost productivity look like a joke. First company invested tens if not hundreds of millions chasing the idea of scaled clustered deployment using Spark. I'm sure they saw some kind of technology return but the actual investment was never returned nearly a decade on and turned out to be a blunder. Second company had a far worse procurement issue than what you describe in your post. $50k in lost productivity would've been welcomed. They had a hardware failure in one of their datacentres affecting the cooling systems. Some customer systems impacted but mostly internal stuff. It took about seven weeks to replace during which time hundreds of employees basically got to twiddle their thumbs. Yeah, it shouldn't take four weeks to get approval for a $40 part but let's not pretend these kind of problems don't also happen in the private sector too. It's one of the reasons I left and won't go back -- I shouldn't need paperwork signed in triplicate to get a new monitor.

rdm_blackhole 3y ago
I agree with your point that things may not be more efficient in certain big companies of the private sector but there is a crucial difference between the two. The difference is that the government's employees are paid from taxes collected from productive companies, aka companies that create jobs and achieve a profit big enough to warrant paying taxes in the first place. A private sector company, unless it is subsidized in some way or has a monopoly on a certain market will eventually try to rectify these inefficiencies because its makes it more resilient in the fight against it's competitors. On the other hand, there is no incentive on the government side to make things more efficient. If a government looses money, they can just borrow more, increase the national debt and sweep any kind of reform under the rug. Because of this lack of incentives, some state and government agencies act as de facto subsidized job's programs. It's the same problem in many western nation, just look at how many people are employed in France by the government. Many basic services are actually decaying but the government keeps hiring more people. If we remove the employees who work as teachers, cops, in the military, and all other essential services, the rest of them, I am just not sure what the hell they do with their time. My point is that it should be a duty of the government to be as efficient as possible. To do more with less, should be a priority unless the tasks require more people. So I can understand when people complain of the inefficiency of a government agency.