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Comment by bingidingi | Hacker News Reader

Many people simply don’t know about them! I grew up poor and the amount of work that goes into finding and using some services is ridiculous. We bought a house using some assistance programs and at a couple points were speeding across the city to get paperwork in by sone deadline no one told us about (luckily we had a car!).

Not to mention that services like foodstamps can be unreliable… I’ve probably spent hours of my life holding up checkout lines because my card didn’t process…

not having money is one thing, but being poor also obliterates your time if you use various services…which in my experience is worse… you’re always tired and agitated. Someone is always messing up your paperwork, because of course civil servants are often underpaid and overworked themselves.

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I had a similar upbringing. All the hours of my childhood in the local health and human services offices and WIC nutritional centers turned me off of civil servants and bureaucrats. It felt like they were always condescending and snippy, or pretending my parents' English was way harder to understand than it is, or just delighting in telling us our stuff was out of order.

Looking back they were probably just overworked and exhausted, but man.

I felt the same for a while too, but then I met someone that happened to work for child services. These are some caring and empathetic people working for peanuts and they aren’t really treated well by anyone, management and clients alike. This person in particular hated the work but didn’t want to quit for fear of letting their clients (children) down.

People blame bureaucracy, and maybe there’s some truth there, but if these people were treated half as well as many tech workers are then maybe we could actually start making progress against the stereotype of miserable experiences.

It's real easy to become a jaded clock puncher when you're a social worker on a six person team that can barely eek out three people's worth of work because three of the people are deadbeats who's only qualifications are an ability to deposit paychecks and knowing someone who was owed a favor by a politician or appointed high level bureaucrat. The one party states have it the worst because the "next guy's cronies" can't clean house without annoying people within their own network because they're all from the same party. That's assuming they're not union positions and they can actually be fired or laid off in a practical manner.

Nobody who has drive and wants to get shit done lasts very long in that environment. There are occasional pockets of "good" but they don't last because when they accomplish too much people move up and out or they get reigned in by the rest of the system.

Source: members of my household work in government providing social services.

Ah yes. The new administration's "house cleaning."

Better known by the people who actually work there as, "Shoving a bunch of people and papers around to show you're changing things, with no plan, strategy, or even background information to support a single thing."

If you think alternating parties solves the problems, you have another think coming your way!

Call me cynical but I don't think that's necessarily seen as a downside by the people in charge. It lets you have it both ways to technically offer assistance that many people find too difficult to actually get.

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