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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Folks interested in a taste of how the federal government manages people can take a look at:

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/

Much of the information in there carries the force of law; that is, a hiring supervisor cannot legally deviate from the process even if they think it is dumb and hurting their chances of getting the best candidate.

My example of the subordinate who can't just get promoted has happened to two personal friends who work for the federal government (both of whom have graduate degrees in their field of work BTW). To be clear, there are "promotions" in federal pay, from say a GS-9 to GS-10. I'm talking about a promotion into a different position, like from a specialist to a manager (to use generic example terms).

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Wouldn't all of these (legal) rules, red tape, stories from your two personal friends, etc support the original argument that they employ patriots or the less qualified? Otherwise, why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs? Especially in IT.

If the problem is attracting better people, how would that get fixed just by making it easier to fire people?

I wouldn't claim that the government has the best of the best across the board. In some areas they do, like fighter pilots or criminal investigators. In others, they generally don't, like web application developers.

What I disagree with is the idea that the government is full of incompetent people, who just need to get fired for things to speed up and get better. It ignores the reality of how the government really works, and therefore who joins the government and why.

> If the problem is attracting better people, how would that get fixed just by making it easier to fire people?

Because most high quality employees don't want to work somewhere where low quality is rewarded.

Nobody said it's full of incompetent people that need to get fired. But they are there as they are everywhere. I disagree with the idea that getting rid of lower quality employees won't help. It ignores the reality of quality disparity and implicitly encourages low quality due to no accountability.

It should be noted this same problem exists at many entrenched, older, large companies as well.

Most places don't work like IT where workers have easily transferable skills across a large market -- getting rid of somebody who you can't easily replace is not rational, suboptimal is better than none. It's not the people it's the organization and incentives around it that matter -- things get really complicated in larger orgs and systems of orgs. In your post it's like there is an easy and clear cut solution to this. You do understand that in an organization you take orders top down or you have a lack of information at the lower levels to make a decision right? You get what you measure and no rank and file employee controls that process + career progression depends on adherence to whatever incentive structure is set up before you started. Also hard as it is to believe, governments don't deal in stupid little apps that are based around some gimmicks. Quality is hard to measure, either you set up an arbitrary hoop for people to jump through or do it based on past performance which is almost completely tied to the environment -- which coincidentally dictates what problems are available to work on which also coincidentally dictates the skills you develop; it's not like implementing a ranking system is a perfect art either. I'm not a fan either of how things are, I know more about the pharmaceutical procurement process and pharma regulations than I ever wanted to.

> It ignores the reality of how the government really works

Have you ever worked or contracted for the government? Are you trying to say they're not incompetent? I'm just wondering which division of NASA you worked for.

It is not to say that the private sector is without problems completely. These rules around promotions and hiring in the public sector prevent certain other problems like favoritism, sexism, nepotism.

> These rules around promotions and hiring in the public sector prevent certain other problems like favoritism, sexism, nepotism.

If allowing those things results in a net better experience than forbidding them, maybe they aren't really problems after all. Maybe favoritism & nepotism, in particular, are good ways (within limits) to build strongly-functioning teams.

> why would a highly qualified person without any preference towards civic duty subject themselves to all of this when they have their pick of jobs?

Well, all other things being equal they wouldn't. We cannot infer that those who are civic minded are more/less competent from that though.

In practice there are numerous reasons why highly talented people are willing to sacrifice from organizational flexibility and freedom of expenditure work in those organizations. The easy one is meaning. You don't have to be civic minded to get more out of helping cancer researchers get research data than making Accounting Excel Plugin v12.3. Variety and scope of challenge is another. Few companies can offer the kind of influence that being on a national standards org can. And since the gov can't really be salary competitive, it tends to compete on work/life balance - pensions, paid vacation, flexitime, sane office hours, no unpaid time on-call over weekends, etc...

For people like us though the answer is even clearer: cool toys. Oak Ridge National Laboratory works at scales so large I've literally had to google what the metric prefixes they were using meant as they were so huge as to be unfamiliar. Data centers, tools, software packages, etc chosen for cost and market fairness, and not just because some VPs golf buddy got wood from a slide deck...

Me, personally, like many here could be making roughly an extra car a year by working at RandomConsulting Co. I would wake up earlier, yell at my family more, be sitting in random office environments with smelly people constantly, lie-smiling while blowing smoke up customer asses in dumb meetings routinely, travelling 15 hours more every single week, be in airports all the time, and fundamentally trying to trick customers into building my resume while also being forced to follow their crappy tech choices and crappy tech environments...

Instead I'm building highly scalable open source, license free, BigData solutions on Kafka, Kubernetes, and Akka driven by F#. We're saving stupid money we get to use for schools and hospitals instead. I can tell my boss to suck an egg if I want, wear comfy clothes, and there are formal processes in place to protect my decision-making... Worth the financial "hardship" to have a pure, tech-driven, position, IoW.

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