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Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effe

Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.

sepalous 2y ago
I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
- callamdelaney 2y ago
  Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
- koolba 2y ago
  > The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    Yes because if it’s one thing workers like is removing their bargaining power and relying solely on how future administrations feel about your job.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      unions should not be able to negotiate against the collective will of the people and seniority based leveling has been a disaster for the government in the US, at least.
      - pjc50 2y ago
        You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
        whimsicalism 2y ago
        the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have. Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
        Symbiote 2y ago
        > There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.
        azemetre 2y ago
        No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.
        2y ago
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Nothing says freedom like banning the right to strike. Which might work in the short term, but makes the strikes much, much more vicious when they do come.
    - yrxuthst 2y ago
      Federal employees already do not have the right to strike, see 5 U.S.C. §7311.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Do they have the right to quit?
        lupusreal 2y ago
        You know they do.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz. higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.
  - bumby 2y ago
    A counter point: Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing. It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      we should also start cutting doctor pay to make sure we get people who are in it to help others.
      - bumby 2y ago
        Do you think the best doctors are the ones who go into the most lucrative paths, like cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills? You're deliberately strawmanning. The equivalent statement on the other side would be: We should 10x doctor pay so we only get those people who are in it for the money. That's a disingenuous stance as well. Let's not pretend that "slightly below market rate" for specialized fields leaves people in the poorhouse. My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.
        LunaSea 2y ago
        Doctor pay is already 10x.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility. Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated. PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
- sumedh 2y ago
  > The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
aantix 2y ago
Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough? E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  You can solve this by either having wide bands or by preferentially promoting those that make extra contributions. Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
  - aantix 2y ago
    With that much liberty, there’s no point to the bands in the first place. They become meaningless.
  - Angostura 2y ago
    Certainly within the NHS, except for exceptional circumstances you start at the bottom of the band, irrepective of talent/experience - moving up throught the band purely on time-served. Depressing
  - Ziggy_Zaggy 2y ago
    The federal service DOES have a pay-banding system (AcqDemo) that CAN support the extra compensation but it's currently NOT being adequately implemented. If the system actually implemented the next pay-band to be cover roughly pay-grade that covers the $100k to $250k income level that wasn't MGT focused and instead technical "do the work in a team setting" focused (NOT tech director - useless position - should be eliminated). Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT buddies". The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of cases.
cbsmith 2y ago
One of the great things about arbitrarily breaking contracts is that you save money in the short term, and signal future contractors that they need to charge even more exorbitant rates in future government contracts because you can never be sure if/when you will get paid.
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  > arbitrarily breaking contract Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    Yes, they do often have such clauses, which carry a lot of weight when they aren't ignored.
DeathArrow 2y ago
I think consulting companies are outsourcing the work to lower wages countries like India, so it might not cost the taxpayer more.
- bumby 2y ago
  Oftentimes, the consulting companies are outsourcing back to the government but for free. The dynamic is something like: 1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem. 2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem. 3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor. 4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid. Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates, regardless of their own costs. Consultancies have never saved the government money. US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects. The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job. Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
patcon 2y ago
> for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that: 1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge. Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
- veqq 2y ago
  > grad students No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees. > effective institutional ecologies More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
- butler14 2y ago
  "but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies" Nah the secret sauce is "who you know" it's a tale as old as time
- zer8k 2y ago
  > Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation. > So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why. These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.
varispeed 2y ago
This is unlikely, because previous Tory government created even stronger bond by changing IR35, to basically remove small independent companies from the market and created virtual monopoly for these corporations. Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
parthdesai 2y ago
If you're from UK, you should read the book "When Mckinsey Comes to Town[0]", it has a chapter on how it fucked up NHS. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/dp/0593663322 https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...
AStrangeMorrow 2y ago
Yeah. Also might be a bias from my school, but for the software engineering specialty, in average the worse a student was performing the more likely they’d end up working for a consulting company after graduation. A few exceptions (student with a goal of moving into management positions) but none of the students that were either very good or passionate are working in the consulting world now. I am sure there are some skilled consultants, and these companies have their use, but I am always shocked to see how much governments spend on them.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Yeah, but that's going to make your spreadsheet look different.
cavisne 2y ago
In addition they use their government work to increase private sector profits, either implicitly "we work with your government" or explicitly (PWC offering briefings on tax policy they were helping with to the targets of the tax policy)

sepalous 2y ago

I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.

callamdelaney 2y ago
Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.
koolba 2y ago
> The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
- azemetre 2y ago
  Yes because if it’s one thing workers like is removing their bargaining power and relying solely on how future administrations feel about your job.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    unions should not be able to negotiate against the collective will of the people and seniority based leveling has been a disaster for the government in the US, at least.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
      - whimsicalism 2y ago
        the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have. Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
        Symbiote 2y ago
        > There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.
        azemetre 2y ago
        No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.
        2y ago
- pjc50 2y ago
  Nothing says freedom like banning the right to strike. Which might work in the short term, but makes the strikes much, much more vicious when they do come.
  - yrxuthst 2y ago
    Federal employees already do not have the right to strike, see 5 U.S.C. §7311.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Do they have the right to quit?
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        You know they do.
whimsicalism 2y ago
the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz. higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.
- bumby 2y ago
  A counter point: Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing. It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    we should also start cutting doctor pay to make sure we get people who are in it to help others.
    - bumby 2y ago
      Do you think the best doctors are the ones who go into the most lucrative paths, like cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills? You're deliberately strawmanning. The equivalent statement on the other side would be: We should 10x doctor pay so we only get those people who are in it for the money. That's a disingenuous stance as well. Let's not pretend that "slightly below market rate" for specialized fields leaves people in the poorhouse. My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.
      - LunaSea 2y ago
        Doctor pay is already 10x.
pjc50 2y ago
> It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility. Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated. PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
sumedh 2y ago
> The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.

aantix 2y ago

Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough? E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.

bitmasher9 2y ago
You can solve this by either having wide bands or by preferentially promoting those that make extra contributions. Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
- aantix 2y ago
  With that much liberty, there’s no point to the bands in the first place. They become meaningless.
- Angostura 2y ago
  Certainly within the NHS, except for exceptional circumstances you start at the bottom of the band, irrepective of talent/experience - moving up throught the band purely on time-served. Depressing
- Ziggy_Zaggy 2y ago
  The federal service DOES have a pay-banding system (AcqDemo) that CAN support the extra compensation but it's currently NOT being adequately implemented. If the system actually implemented the next pay-band to be cover roughly pay-grade that covers the $100k to $250k income level that wasn't MGT focused and instead technical "do the work in a team setting" focused (NOT tech director - useless position - should be eliminated). Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT buddies". The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of cases.

cbsmith 2y ago

One of the great things about arbitrarily breaking contracts is that you save money in the short term, and signal future contractors that they need to charge even more exorbitant rates in future government contracts because you can never be sure if/when you will get paid.

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
> arbitrarily breaking contract Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  Yes, they do often have such clauses, which carry a lot of weight when they aren't ignored.

DeathArrow 2y ago

I think consulting companies are outsourcing the work to lower wages countries like India, so it might not cost the taxpayer more.

bumby 2y ago
Oftentimes, the consulting companies are outsourcing back to the government but for free. The dynamic is something like: 1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem. 2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem. 3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor. 4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid. Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
mrguyorama 2y ago
This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates, regardless of their own costs. Consultancies have never saved the government money. US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects. The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job. Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.

patcon 2y ago

> for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that: 1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge. Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies

veqq 2y ago
> grad students No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees. > effective institutional ecologies More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
butler14 2y ago
"but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies" Nah the secret sauce is "who you know" it's a tale as old as time
zer8k 2y ago
> Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation. > So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why. These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.

varispeed 2y ago

This is unlikely, because previous Tory government created even stronger bond by changing IR35, to basically remove small independent companies from the market and created virtual monopoly for these corporations. Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).

parthdesai 2y ago

If you're from UK, you should read the book "When Mckinsey Comes to Town[0]", it has a chapter on how it fucked up NHS. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/dp/0593663322 https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...

AStrangeMorrow 2y ago

Yeah. Also might be a bias from my school, but for the software engineering specialty, in average the worse a student was performing the more likely they’d end up working for a consulting company after graduation. A few exceptions (student with a goal of moving into management positions) but none of the students that were either very good or passionate are working in the consulting world now. I am sure there are some skilled consultants, and these companies have their use, but I am always shocked to see how much governments spend on them.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Yeah, but that's going to make your spreadsheet look different.

cavisne 2y ago

In addition they use their government work to increase private sector profits, either implicitly "we work with your government" or explicitly (PWC offering briefings on tax policy they were helping with to the targets of the tax policy)