Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

ugh, hard to imagine. As a former motor pool mechanic for a small county in Ohio, the government has some serious work to do before it will ever compete with google, and its all in management. Ive endured some truly idiotic days at government...including

- Racking up 8 industry certifications, fully paid, only to have all my ideas shot down because they didnt come from a manager with a degree in philosophy.

- Buying an expensive flush computer system for a type of truck that we already outsourced transmission flushes for, and that was being phased out in favour of something cheaper from International Harvester.

- Refusing...and i mean absolutely refusing...to fix any salt spreader hardware because meyer (the manufacturer) insisted everything would last 40k miles. - trying to explain we dont measure in miles, we measure in engine hours. all reports still list miles.

- watching the city basically sell off 5 salt spreading trucks because a lawsuit after one failed made them all 'a liability'

- replacing a fleet of Kodiak 4x4 HD salt spreaders with used Ford F250's from a construction fleet. - watching these all fail miserably after the first major snow storm.

- Borrowing...then buying and poorly repainting...trucks for salt spreading from the National Guard.

- Getting dinged on my performance review EVERY YEAR because management wouldnt buy parts I needed to make the sheriffs new mine resistant armored vehicle work.

> - Getting dinged on my performance review EVERY YEAR because management wouldnt buy parts I needed to make the sheriffs new mine resistant armored vehicle work.

Well I kind of understand the management here: why do the sheriff needs a mine resistant armored vehicle in Ohio?

That said of course this should not have an impact on your performance review..

You're comparing apples and oranges. So is the original article.

The government equivalent of Google would be working for an interesting branch (CIA, NSA, NRL, etc) of the federal government. Not working on trucks for the town.

And, as a DC local, I can tell you that there are plenty of applicants for federal jobs. People want the jobs - they pay reasonably well (not Google level, but comfortably upper-middle-class, with stable benefits).

A huge number of my peers from high school and college work for Uncle Sam. Almost all of them have post-graduate degrees, love their jobs, and are definitely smart enough and ambitious enough to pick and choose their employer.

I had a previous job in the trucking industry, and while I wasn't involved in maintenance, I swear we had scenarios occur that match your observations eerily well. As an aside, this may be a dumb question, but why does a Sheriff in a "small county" need a mine resistant armoured vehicle?

They don't. But, there are a few things that make them want them. First, the US military sells them cheap as surplus (or, at least did, they might have dialed that back recently). Second, police in the US fetishize the "operator" culture [1]. They've been trained to think that a large hammer will fix all their policing problems.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_forces

The US government sells used military hardware to civilian police forces for dirt cheap as a way to keep up demand for the military industrial complex.

China builds apartments to prop up their GDP, the US builds mine-resistant armoured vehicles (among other military hardware). Nobody needs these vehicles except the people building them.

Gotcha. Thanks for the replies. Those are, sadly, about what I figured.

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