S.F.’s top-paid employee makes $640K. Here’s what every city worker gets paid | Hacker News Reader

S.F.’s top-paid employee makes $640K. Here’s what every city worker gets paid

sfchronicle.com

22 pointssystemvoltage21 comments

"Owyang, the senior deputy sheriff with the highest overtime pay, logged more than 3,300 overtime hours over the year, meaning he worked an average of 63 overtime hours per week. Two other deputies, Barry Bloom and Kristian DeJesus, also worked more than 3,000 overtime hours."

Excuse my French, but how is this not blatant fraud? A deputy sheriff working an average of 103 (40+63) hours a week? To do what, exactly, maybe check that no one gets arrested when a department store is looted? Where are the auditors who are supposed to check these embarrassing embezzlements of public funds? I am appalled that my taxes are being used to make these individuals live their best lives.

I wouldn't really call working an average of nearly 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, living their best lives. I would argue that that is actually a really shit way to live your life.

I guess you think they are actually working 103 hours per week. I have a bridge to sell, in case you are interested.

They aren’t. People doing this in public sector are usually unionized folks who are jailhouse lawyers working the loopholes in contracts.

For example, sometimes contracts have a concept of standby and recall pay. You may get a percentage of your pay for being on call.

I'm fine with government employees being paid handsomely as long as they're qualified and effective. Currently, public employees are typically underpaid; however, a lingering problem in California is that public employees, once hired, have a "right to employment" that makes them considerably more difficult to fire than employees in the private sector. The guarantee of employment often removes any incentive for continued improvements in performance. If it were easy to shape the public employee workforce by selecting for the best, it would be easier to justify having salaries of public employees that are competitive with the private sector, which is how it should be if we want effective government run by competent and ambitious professionals.

"right to employment" is a concept that applies to many jobs in Germany, often beyond public employees. It is one of the biggest internal debates I had: Give people guaranteed employment (which sounds fair, benevolent), but how to continue to motivate improvement? Often I come to the conclusion that the US "fire & hire" system is better than the "hold & secure" approach of Germany. Primarily because it also makes switching jobs in Germany much harder.

I think you guys are both worried about how to motivate people to become more efficient and productive by keeping up to date "In their own time", while in Germany companies usually pay for courses, so yeah if a company is scared of improvement, they just need to pay for their people to improve

It'd be amazing if we had honest, loyal, productive workforce in the Government. Many people do amazing job, but many don't. And they cannot be held accountable. I want extreme sense of accountability for government employees, tracking their performance and ability to fire them if they do not meet standards. Media should be doing that but media is in bed with the Gov.

If people missed, please check more departments, the default view in the article is just Police. There is similar crisis in gazillion other departments in the drop down menu.

We've create an incentive structure to make permanent administrative bloat of the magnitude mankind has never seen. What deeply bothers me is that most people are OK with that, they are OK with lazy government employees. They are OK with a state employed dystopia. They are OK with increasing bureaucracy and love participating in newer ways to expand the government.

Has anyone read the Chips Act? There are so many non-tech spending line items in there. It's just adding more and more administrative and managerial class of people.

I don't agree at all that "people" are okay with this. If I, like many others, had a choice, we certainly would not want people, for example, to work so many overtime hours that no sane person could reasonably justify.

But what to do? You will say, vote! Or, protest! But have you ever seen a government visibly reduce administrative bloat, unreasonable government spending, coddling public servants? Because I have not seen it, either here in the United States or in the country where I come from. This is not a "things will never change" statement, but the impact that "people" can have on the way government works is very limited, if not negligible. The older I get, the more I realize that "elites" live in and govern a world in which I participate as a mere spectator.

Vote for the least worse. There is one party that wants to reduce spending and at least try to be fiscally responsible.

I am probably 100% wrong, but isn't there something about how your police pension is based on your final three years of work?

There is an arrangement where the guys getting ready to retire get a ton of overtime to inflate their final three years of salary, so when their pension calculations are done, they get a big $$$ boost?

This is just what I heard, and I don't have anything to back this up...

Edit:

Retirement benefits: 3% of final compensation per year of service at age 58, with a maximum of 90% benefit based on years of service.

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/careers/sworn-j....

The state of Delaware had a similar pension program years ago when a member of my family abused the system in the same way to receive a similar inflated pension payout. It made local papers at the time, and did result in some changes.

Does no one else find it disturbing to publish the identities of these public employees with their salaries? Even if the data is freely available somewhere, this is high visibility. Would the article have been any less interesting if their names were anonymized and their privacy slightly respected?

I find that publishing the names and salaries of random S.F. security guards is quite an unsettling level of transparency.

This is just not very interesting. Compensation is far more messed up in the private sector.

imagine the turmoil that would break out in tech if there was such radical salary transparency?

Once again, sf lacks decent managers and the political will to ensure that the citizens are receiving good value for these rather outsize compensation plans

So what? That's a private entity vs govt comparison? Why not look at CEO/entry level for every city out there?

No one's making that comparison? The whole article is only talking about public employees. There's no mention of anything private sector.

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