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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Feds have a hard time hiring under current hiring requirements and resources, so this is just going to restrict that further.

Sounds inefficient.

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I work closely with federal employees and I have not seen that. The benefits are some of the best in the world. With near-guaranteed pay raises, cost of living adjustments, discount public transit, and countless other pensions and perks, it's not easy to get a federal job. I have friends who have been trying for years to get hired but it has been very competitive for them.

Not to mention the best health insurance in the US, which is very important as workers age.

You can buy the same on healthcare.gov. And if you retire early, you can plan it so your income stays below the ACA subsidy limits and the premiums go down to near zero.

Although, you will need to pay extra for concierge care/direct primary care either way to see a doctor in a timely manner.

I’ve worked at 10 jobs and 7 of those were after the ACA became effective. Out of those latter 7, I’ve worked for companies with 60 employees to the second largest employer in the US. The ACA has set an acceptable minimal of how bad private insurance can be.

Gov job in tech is like any other job, the best employees who can work together successfully to solve problems is best optimized over a wide area (spatially). There are other benefits of strong employee rights and stability in work, ability to transfer to other departments a pretty simple process (which opens the type of work you can do while still being employed so much easier), and good health/retirement packages. These are motivators for people to want to stay with the Gov when already hired in, but to new and existing talent that have more options, the lack of remote and/or telework can be make or break. If we actually want a Gov that can perform, because people do that work and thus would want good people, we should be not artificially constraining ourselves on how to achieve that goal.

The civilian government agencies spent 248B on contract services in 2023 [1]. Not all of that was professional services, but I expect that we will see an increase in that number as more services are contracted out and a decrease in direct government workforce; a government contractor can still work remotely.

[1] https://files.gao.gov/multimedia/Federal_Government_Contract...

The mindset for acquisition is typically anything not core to an agency's mission should be bought on the open market at the lowest price technically acceptable. This tends to select against small businesses who can provide stellar services but can't just cut rates willy nilly for extended delivery time periods.

In effect, government contracting is a large jobs program.

Government often goes too far. You should outsource not things that are not your core values, but things you cannot trust someone else to do. Maintenance often needs to be something you do in house because you cannot trust someone else to take care of it. That someone in house will of course outsource the labor (toilet clogged once - the in house person uses a plunger - if that toilet clogs often they call a plumber to fix what is wrong), but you need someone in house to decide if you need to hire the labor in the first place, otherwise you end up paying a plumber to replace a toilet that works fine but got too much put into it one time.

Not to mention the friction that getting a contractor who barely knows your jurisdiction does, or the contract and fiscal bureaucracy involved.

> The benefits are some of the best in the world. With near-guaranteed pay raises, cost of living adjustments, discount public transit, and countless other pensions and perks,

This also describes working at Amazon, minus the pension. The real difference is really just the pension.

Name checks out.

Up through this year a relatively large benefit of being a federal employee is that you're not nearly as susceptible to job loss as your private sector peers. Most new administrations promise to shake a bunch up but don't actually cut jobs in any meaningful way.

This administration may be different, of course, if it delivers what it promised.

Oh no, no, the REAL benefit is the JOB PROTECTION. As a federal employee, once you've made it out of your probationary period (6mo - 1 year) it is nearly impossible to be fired. There are no PIP's in the government.

Sounds like an intentional reduction of fed headcount, via enforced RTO and reduced hiring.

And sounds like intentional dismantling of government and government institutions. Also, cost of living for folks that stay will likely go up considerably with having to pay for commuting...

There's a hiring freeze anyway. The whole point of RTO is to push people to quit. That was outright stated in the announcement.

That’s the point.

I predict getting a government job is going to become increasingly popular as the private sector will be much much faster in eliminating positions using AI.

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