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I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work
by christophilus 2y ago
I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. I put my two week notice in after the first few weeks. There’s no way I could “work” like that. They had teams and teams of people doing the job of a single person at a normal startup. I’ve never seen such bureaucratic waste anywhere in the private sector. It made my stint at Microsoft look like a lean startup by comparison. I talked to them about it, and they shrugged it off by noting, “We are way more efficient than our competitors.”
I’m not defending DOGE’s specifics or competence here, but do we need to clean house? Absolutely, yes.
- Neywiny 2y agoThat's why I like where I am. We usually work in really lean teams. One person in each role. And usually we're making a physical product so that's one mechanical, one electrical, one sideways, etc. Has its downsides but I don't feel like we're wasteful.
- aSanchezStern 2y agoYeah, if you're actually interested in government efficiency, Ro Khanna has been advocating for significant cuts to the federal budget in a way that actually improves efficiency.
- k3vinw 2y agoGood. We need a lot more representatives genuinely interested in eliminating government waste. Because the graft is real regardless of political party.
- bamboozled 2y agoI love the narrative that some how “startups are efficient”. I’ve worked at 6 startups, they basically all failed due to “inefficiency”, burned through money before they made money or were acquired. I’ve worked for one major success story, and that was the most inefficient startup of all, they just had some luck and the founder was a great salesman. We literally hired morons at scale to appear bigger and more successful prior to acquisition. So yeah , sorry, startups can be extremely inefficient too. I’ve also worked for some of the biggest tech companies or have friends that work there now, including Meta, they are extremely wasteful in nearly all cases. They just make a lot of money. Probably like the collective United States. The moral of my story is that efficiency isn’t necessarily profitable, desired or even required. In my opinion DOGE is telling stories to distract and achieve other ends. Last I hear most of Musks companies actively received government welfare :)
- amarcheschi 2y agoMost of the startups fail, I hope we don't want that in government things
- dustingetz 2y agoin evolutionary biology, almost all cells die, but some of those that survived evolved to become humans
- taeric 2y agoStrictly, no? No cell has been alive through that whole process. Rather, many laid the foundations that lead that direction. Yes, this is very much a Ship of Theseus argument. But, I think that is very apropos?
- lolc 2y agoI'm not a biologist but I thought there are no new cells, just old cells splitting.
- 2y ago
- dustingetz 2y agodid 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!
- brightball 2y agoStuff like this is why the Skunk Works at Lockheed was such a big deal. Just a whole department of people who innovated without any of the red tape, in a government setting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pdfernhout 2y agoYou might find this Washington Monthly article interesting as it echoes your point: "Fire the Contractors" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractors/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it. ... That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."
- cuuupid 2y agoYes, I maintain anyone who has spent any measure of time in govcon will come to the same conclusion. Our government is endlessly wasteful -- this was a universal, bipartisan take 3 months ago but now people are getting successfully gaslit into believing every dollar the government spends is efficient and critical.
- SubiculumCode 2y agoYou spent a few weeks somewhere and knew all that? Seems doubtful to me.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoThere's no question this exists. But firing a bunch of government employees doesn't fix this problem. Where there is waste, it mostly comes in the form of contractors bilking the government, not the government employees themselves. Is DOGE going after the private sector and their bilking of the government?
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoPerhaps the private sector and their bilking of the government is what we are witnessing.
- cuuupid 2y agoWho do you think hires contractors and puts out contracts? The only way to get promoted at and above gs-12 is to amass reports and budget authority. The wasteful spending is not handed down mandatory by congress, it is conducted using budget authority afforded to federal employees. If you lay off 70% of federal employees especially those in gs-12 to 15 range, you could probably easily cut 70% of discretionary spending with literally no negative impact. You will never see them reduce their budgets because it reduces their political power; look up “Washington Monument Syndrome” for how they have evaded cuts for the last two decades.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoCongress wants to _increase_ the defense budget by $150B instead of decreasing it. You could gut as many employees as you want, and that money is still going to be spent somehow. The only way to reduce 70% of the discretionary spending is for Congress to reduce the discretionary budget by 70%.
- matwood 2y ago> I spent a few weeks working at a contractor who specialized in VA contracts. As an aside, you're actually making the argument that we need more federal employees. The push to privatize everything has led to higher costs and more abuse. So DOGE is currently doing the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
- joquarky 2y agoAre they going to clean the entire house, or will they ignore the parts that benefit their cronies?