The government is one of the few places where you can get a job in your twenties and retire comfortably in your 60s having made a decent, but certainly not outstanding, amount of money with consistent raises and cost of living adjustments.
What some people will call government waste - other people will call ethical employee treatment... sure there are a lot of other sources of inefficiency outside of your comment - but complaining about overpaid government bureaucrats is essentially advocating for the same race-to-the-bottom that has stagnated wages in large parts of the labour pool.
Please don't conflate State Public Employee retirement systems with State Teacher retirement systems. They each have their own rules.
The teacher retirement systems I know of have rules like (age + years_worked)>=80 ==> full pension benefits.
Retiring after 20y will earn you a smaller monthly and is only possible (under that rule-of-80 above) if you start teaching at age 40. Teachers are much more likely to retire after 25+y (age_start=30, age_retire=55).
A relative of mine works for a state level LEO targeting financial crimes - they've spoken often about how "smaller government" advocating politicians have repeatedly hamstrung the organization when it tries to go after large corporations. They've still managed to do good work going after smaller scale offenders that fleece investors - but I wouldn't put the blame on those employees for doing work you don't find useful... it's mostly up to politics.
That's the whole point. Powerful proponents of small government want to do anything and everything with no consequences. They've duped a lot of less-wealthy suckers into believing that having fewer public services will benefit them somehow, and/or that the only thing standing in the way of personal success is the government. They talk a lot about figures like word count in legislation and other easy to understand concepts (even to folks with low education).
Any govt office, focusing on the US here, seems to have a huge back log and understaffed like the IRS, Immigration services, DMV etc. For e.g. earliest appointment I can get is perhaps a month or two out. A huge backlog and understaffed makes a case of overworked employees. Surely, they are doing work, and so I can only think that by "they do too little useful work", you mean that the work itself that they do is of little use. Are they? Seems like getting my driver's license or tax refund is pretty useful, no?
It's actually not sure that they are doing work. There are backlogs because the employees and management are slow, inefficient, and don't make changes that would be made by a private organization either staying up to date or being replaced by a competitor.
(There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)
Defund the organisation to point of total chaos and near-collapse. Blame employees for collapse in work quality.
Here are some more generally true statements:
Increase profits and improve efficiency by cutting out maintenance tasks and firing the people who do them. Blame accidents or outages on employees, customers, bystanders.
People die? Company goes bust? Who cares? Even if there are consequences, the executives/officials to blame have already taken the money and moved on to the next thing. You can't prosecute them or get the money back (unless they were stupendously dumb and got directly involved and stayed on 'til the bitter end and centres of power were so affected that prosecutors can't ignore it: see Theranos, Enron, etc.).
Even without governments being overthrown, government agencies get deeply reorganized fairly often; often for reasons of politics rather than efficiency, but nevertheless.
We don't share preconceptions (I see multiple problems at multiple levels of public org charts, and in the electorate), but I see and appreciate why you might have that priority.
While I myself am frustrated with the bureaucracy and inefficiencies of govts, but I am not sure if its entirely fair to compare a govt with a private company/org - at least based on the scale they operate on and the profit motive, which make it very different.
> It's actually not sure that they are doing work.
> (There are complexities and counter-examples that moderate this generally true statement.)
Guess, based on that I cannot really have a counter argument here :)
From what I understand, queueing theory would say a backlog that doesn't go away but also doesn't keep growing means you're staffed to just barely keep up on average.
It's not given that the queue backlog is staying even, but you would also have to factor the externalities of better or worse performing offices into the queueing analysis. Slower government workers have consequences like the public giving up and bothering to add to the queue, and occasionally, lawsuits due to failure to perform a required task, legal cases being a less desirable budget spend than bureaucratic staffing.
Parents point is that there must be slack in a system in order to have a stable queue size.
But slack can also be perceived as waste, which can be cut.
And if your budget is cut, you are likely to see that slack as "first thing on the copping block" with the consequence that the queue begins to expand. But most systems have natural buffers which delay catastrophic failure. By that point there have been elections, you have retired, etc. and someone else is left holding the bag.
At that point you can blame the organisation for being "slow", or "inefficient", and then you can cut it's funding further, or destroy it outright or maybe outsource it to the private sector.
Then the private sector can drive profits by asset stripping and cutting safety or vital maintenance work, then when the whole system collapses, you can hold the taxpayer hostage by demanding a bailout of the, presumably vital, service (or you can renationalise it), and the whole cycle starts again.
Welcome to our planet, enjoy your stay, it's likely to be a brief one :)
Ah, if that was their only point, then I should have pointed out that a better operating department can achieve a lower waiting time with the same degree of slack. I understand the utilization rate tradeoff and that's not the issue.
I'm glad you've enjoyed writing your comments--like your style. :)
Ah sorry, slightly misinterpreted, my understanding was that without slack you cannot stabilize queue sizes which makes OP incorrect(?)
Yeah, more efficient nodes can delay that effect, but it seems that in real world system the existence of buffers means that consequences are delayed in ways that have significance (across careers, elections, etc) and those factors tend to dominate.
yw, nice that anyone reads it, without that i'd just be another mad shouty bloke on the internet, maybe i still am :)
I've worked public and private sector and know plenty of people in both and I've not noticed a huge difference in the number of people just coasting vs those who really try to make a difference.
What makes you think government is that much worse than the private sector in this regard?
> What makes you think government is that much worse than the private sector in this regard?
Sure a lot of people coast in the private sector, hiding in the corners of their organizations. But if the business allows too much of that to happen, they go bust. In government, they just go get a tax increase.
They do not go bust, they just find ways to bilk their employees, or customers, or the general public, or they find a way to make the government nanny them by shredding regulations or what not.
You seem to think that people cannot escape the consequences of their actions, and that consequences arrive swiftly and fairly. But I should think a quick look around the world we actually live in will disabuse you of that notion in short order. Especially when it comes to gigantic centres of power with vast reserves of cash and well protected revenue streams.
And if you've worked in any tech company, you've probably already seen that the people who coast do not "hide in corners" they make up an entire class, called "management", especially "middle management", they're front and centre because they have no productive work to do so they can devote the majority of their time to extravagant displays justifying their existence and their elevated positions and compensation.
One place I worked, was a Big Company providing overpriced services to other Big Companies. There were loads of low skilled IT workers, taking too long, making mistakes. Adding a BA and/or PM to drive every project when a competent dev could've done it solo a few years ago. But when you keep getting issues, you keep adding process and now every job is 1000+ hours.
But eventually the work got done and we kept getting work because Big Companies buy from other Big Companies. You're not going to risk tendering to a 3 man office who gets it done faster, cheaper, better because if it doesn't happen questions will be asked. Unfortunately there are a lot of talented small businesses out there but they just don't get the work due to this.
Do that enough, and Big Corp gets overtaken by a smaller, nimbler company that does better. See the book "The Innovators Dilemma" for one aspect of this.
Which Big Corp though? The provider or the consumer? The dilemma is, this all feels like a bit of a Boy's Club where they all agree to just help each other and ignore the little people. Not always formally, it's just how things work out. They have an interest in maintaining the status quo and ignoring upstart-startups.
Of course, eventually yes it's impossible to ignore the value gap. But I've seen companies threaten to leave but keep paying the bills for many years because in a big company, it's not really anyone's problem in particular and it's easier to just keep going along to get along. One example we had was B2C email communications, there are so many cheaper more capable players out there but they just got us to do it because we did other stuff for them.
> this all feels like a bit of a Boy's Club where they all agree to just help each other
Come on. They often try to sue each other out of business, get the government to declare competition illegal, "cut off their air supply", "knife their baby", etc.
> because we did other stuff for them
There you go. Not because of the goodness of their hearts.
Big Companies today are not the same Big Companies of yesterday. There is constant churn at the top. The ones at the top today are all newish companies.
Companies go bust all the time. One of the corporations I've worked for simply disappeared (Data I/O). Corporations disappear all the time. Remember RCA? No? How about Kmart? Sears? Kodak? Tektronix? Novell? Lotus? Wordstar? AOL? Zilog? Myspace? Zenith? Curtis-Mathis? RCA was once the biggest corp in the world.
I've known people in every corporation I've worked for who accomplished nothing and were not managers. I was often given the job of trying to turn whatever they did into something useful. Everybody knew who they were. I remember one person, we'll call "Smith". "Smith" would check in code, and it was always so bad that someone else would have to redo the whole thing. After a while, the term "smith-code" became a generic term for code that was worse than nothing.
How bad can you be that your name becomes a generic term for useless work?
"Smith" eventually got laid off. The team was relieved.
Sure, I was imprecise, I mean, they do not necessarily go bust. And even if they do, it can be delayed by decades, even centuries, by techniques that are too numerous and well known to list here.
I've known a few Smith's in my time, one thing they all had in common was the protection of a manager who had no interest in the quality of Smith's work, as long as Smith would take his side in any disputes. When the consequences became too great, the manager would suddenly understand the problem and approve the minimum of changes to fix it, while taking credit for the work. Smith would not complain about this slight because he understood the nature of the transaction.
Edit: btw. congrats getting rid of your Smith, these people can be very difficult to dislodge. Presumably your guy did not have the protection of a manager.
None of those companies have gone bust though. RCA got purchased and integrated by/into GE, Kodak filed bankruptcy but still exists with a significant number of employees, Tektronix is currently a fortune 500 company, Novell is now owned by Micro Focus, Lotus was never that big of a company, but they still exist and are doing pretty poor but still sell cars, AOL still exists and is owned by Yahoo, MySpace still exists and is owned by an advertising company and the other 2 or 3 I've never heard of.
The Lotus that the GP refers to is probably Lotus Development Corporation / Lotus Software, the makers of the hugely popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet from the 80s. It's still around-ish: it was owned by IBM until 2017 then was sold to the Indian company HCL Technologies for $1.8 billion. Pretty good for a company thought to be two decades obsolete!
Zilog was the maker of the Z80 microprocessor that powered a huge number of games consoles and simple computers in the 80s. Also still around - its parent company was acquired for $750 million.
I had to look up Curtis-Mathis because it wasn't a thing in the UK.
And MicroPro / WordStar International does seem to be legitimately dead: acquired by SoftKey who were acquired by Mattel who have since gotten rid of all the associated brands.
Yeah, I know they didn't literally go bust, some company always winds up buying the remaining value in the company, as its trademarks and IP have value.
But in any practical sense, they ceased to exist. (I meant Lotus of 1-2-3 fame, not car fame.)
You're right, I thought I'd remembered they'd gone bust.
> part of an umbrella corporation
meaning their former glory is gone. When I was starting out Tektronix was a very big deal in computers and electronics. I haven't even heard their name in 20-30 years.
What some people will call government waste - other people will call ethical employee treatment... sure there are a lot of other sources of inefficiency outside of your comment - but complaining about overpaid government bureaucrats is essentially advocating for the same race-to-the-bottom that has stagnated wages in large parts of the labour pool.