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Comment by generatorguy | Hacker News Reader

I recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students whereas mostly i see the top students avoiding government bureaucracy in favor of private industry as it is more lucrative and there are not many prestigious positions in public service.

I believe the atmosphere within these institutions isn’t conducive to action either. Put your time in and get your pension. Do nothing and nothing bad will happen, try something big and it might fail and you look worse than everyone who did nothing.

So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California.

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>So we need to start offering 300k/yr for middle level public servants just like programmers in California.

I agree with this, but you have to accompany that with making it just as easy to fire a public servant as it is to fire a programmer.

I check San Francisco City worker salaries on occasion (all public) and there are plenty of people making $300K+ a year for a secure job with a pension and not super stressful.

In my city pay rate is entirely based on tenure. People just starting out for the city have very low pay, people about to retire have insane salaries. Maybe it is more helpful to just generically say compensation and ease of removal needs to compete with the market.

I don’t think if you increased the pay you’d start seeing creative people at the entry level suddenly want to work for the government.

The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.

I went into the private sector over the public sector solely due to pay. If you do well in the private sector in your first couple of years, your compensation will shoot up. In the public sector your compensation is tied to years of experience so when I wanted to work for the gov, they required me to take a demotion and take only 40% of what I got in the private sector.

Purely Extrinsically motivated people are not going to solve the build problem.

Everyone has bills and debt. Make the compensation closer and intrinsic motivation can come into play.

Au contraire, it's far too easy to fire people in government for issues that have systemic root causes due to the nature of politics and public pressure. So the poor schmuck who pushed the button gets fired, and that's the end of it. No deeper evaluation or reports on how to prevent the issue from occuring in the future.

This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy.

This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".

I see many of these same problems in large companies. Every one just tries to avoid being blamed. Those best at avoiding blame while assigning it to others rise up. Its politics.

And I would guess that the companies that have "blame" cultures end up doing much worse than companies that have "fixing" cultures.

This sounded wrong to me so I googled and according to the first source I found, the layoff and discharge rate is 1.3% in the private sector, and 0.4% across federal, state, and local government.

The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...

Uhm have you looked at some government salaries? It’s all posted online.

In San Francisco there are plenty of government workers making well over $300K/year for a safe secure job that you can coast in. That is part of the problem.

Can you link to the data you're talking about? I did some searching and I see about 20 people making more than $300k a year and almost all of them are director level positions.

https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Cities/City.aspx?entityid=4...

As of 2018, about 90 people making 300k or more in SF County, probably over 100 by now.

90 or 100 seems small in comparison to the number of tech workers in SF making that kind of cash

Most of that is equity comp for engineers.

For government you have to factor in job security, generous pension and benefits, and guaranteed annual pay raises.

Engineers have none of those things.

Not small if you consider total govt. employees in SF.

The link that showed the 90 employees making $300K or over is a link to a page about San Francisco city employees specifically, and says there's 40,951 total. (And it is 90 exactly according to that page.) So is 0.2% of workers earning that much a lot compared to tech companies, do you think?

How about employees making $200K or over? That's 1790, or just about 4%. $100K or over? 15997 employees, or around 39%. So over 60% of SF city employees make under $100K. The median salary, in fact, is just under $86K.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that's lower than Facebook's median salary.

Pension, overtime, benefits, job security.

According to this website the single highest paid person in SF was a sole police officer making 1/2 million? https://i.imgur.com/8uj2HBU.png

Overtime pay. There was a story about a BART janitor who made $250K or so in a year with overtime.

Correct, every cop I know is loaded due to overtime pay. You'd think it'd make more sense just to hire more cops out the agency, but then that cuts into everyone's earnings which discourages them from acting financially responsible.

It's actually from a settlement that resulted in him getting several years of backpay at once.

police offer making > 500k ???

These systems are amazing. The rules are different everywhere, people game the systems, and the leadership is in on the game.

My anecdata is from a different police force elsewhere in the country. There, your pension is based on the average of your last 2 years of service. When you reach retirement age, it is orchestrated for you to get a promotion and as much overtime (at time and a half) as you're able to work. So people double or triple their last years' salary and then retire making more than they legitimately made before the scheme. Millions and millions of dollars are stolen from the people just through this one law enforcement pension program.

Wow that is egregious. I've known professors whose pensions were 70% of the average of their best 4 years.

> I recently read that the CCP only accepts the top students

My understanding is that's not really true. They do ask a few high-achieving students to join, but those people tend to not be very active in the Party. They accept a lot more based on personal connections (first) and bribery (second).

Singapore is similar, in that pay for top public servants is competitive with top private sector pay. And they try to attract the best and brightest.

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