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Comment by refractal | Hacker News Reader

If you look at what the UC Office of the president does, there's a huge scope there that the other examples probably do not have http://www.ucop.edu/about/

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It's easy to make an impressive looking list of responsibilities for administrative offices. The thing is many of those bullet points include words like "help", "support", "promote", and "oversee". It's very hard to judge just how much work is going into those things and how important it is. You can have endless rows of "support" staff doing important sounding things that are actually totally superfluous to getting actual productive work done.

Anecdotally, when I was IT student sysadmin at a major university, I don't recall ever seeing admin staff doing actual work. Often times, you'd walk through the hallways and see rows and rows of offices of people screwing around on the Internet, or even playing video games. A good part of our job in IT itself was super slow as well except for the first two weeks of every semester, so we weren't much better. My boss would play WoW on the clock.

I love anecdotes! When I was an IT admin at a major UC Berkeley university, all of the admin staff that supported our group worked super hard from 9am to 6pm, then they went home.

There was an extremely old clerk who as far as I can tell had been sentenced to entering in data on a Mac SE. No WoW.

I'll throw in my anecdotes. Used to be a sysadmin at a "Rather shiny" east coast university.

Mixed bag. Some IT worked extremely hard, carried whole group, others did almost nothing. I have stories about coworkers that make WoW look positively productive as a workplace activity.

Same went for admin staff. A few of them clearly did 90% of the work, whereas a few did almost nothing. (and this was widely accepted and known)

This is why I hate these sorts of criticisms; they just talk about how much money is spent but never talk about what you are getting for the money. It still might be a waste of money, but we can't know that until we really look at what we are getting for the money, what would happen if we didn't spend it, and then decide if it is worth it.

The annual budget of $29B certainly puts the half billion in perspective.

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