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The government has two different kinds of workers. Actual employees they pay directly and contract employees they pay through a private company. Actual employ
by pmorici 12y ago
The government has two different kinds of workers. Actual employees they pay directly and contract employees they pay through a private company. Actual employees of the US government are generally paid a mediocre salary at best compared to what they could get in private industry. Government contract employees on the other hand are generally paid very very well. In excess of what a typical private sector non-government contract company would pay. It's common knowledge among government employees that you can double your salary by getting a job with a private government contracting company.
The essential problem of the US government is there is no accountability. Poor performing employees are never fired and poor performing contractors are never penalized. If a project is a massive failure there are never any consequences for the people or companies involved. Over time anyone with any sort of skill whatsoever tends to leave and what's left are the poor and mediocre employees.
I'd like to say creating the US digital service is a positive step but unless the basic problem of accountability is solved it too will be just as bad at IT as every existing organization in a few years time.
In the real world this problem of organizational calcification would be solved when the incompetent company goes out of business because they are over taken by competitors. In the government since there is no competition there is no natural accountability mechanism.
- Tloewald 12y agoPart of the problem is that the contracting rules seemingly force contracts to be split among a bunch of contractors none of whom is fully responsible for the project, so when something goes wrong, it's a circular firing squad. My experience is that contractors do get fired, but the same people end up working for the contractors that are still there (and since they are often the only people who remember what the hell is going on, this is sometimes not a bad thing).
- Iftheshoefits 12y agoThat's by design: it's built-in pass-the-blame with an extra helping of spreading the bacon around. Government contracting is little more than legal, officially sanctioned nepotism and graft. The whole point is to allow Congressmen and other connected government officials to enrich their friends and family. In turn, these officials get high-paying "jobs" at the same places they helped funnel lots of money to. The people in these comments here on HN claiming that somehow that's "liberal government" at work don't know what they're talking about, at all, and I mean downvote-worthy, comically so. If we must label these antics with comparisons to American political ideologies, the government contracting system is closer to big-business, republican-style politics than anything else. Small-c-conservative and any-l-liberal are the last things I think of when I think of government contracting.