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Comment by CYR1X | Hacker News Reader

Part all of this BS is sure at twitter if you pull this you might get a decent attrition rate but isn't the federal government known for people never quitting? If they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing. Isn't that generally the purpose behind this too? Like...good luck get a real amount of people to quit they are going to hold on for dear life

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> they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing

You think air traffic controllers are “doing nothing”? What VA staff, park rangers, food inspectors, etc.? I realize this stereotype is something a lot of people spend money reinforcing but you should consider why you believe it to be true of a nationwide group doing a huge range of jobs and what evidence that’s based on.

I'm convinced a lot of people who espouse this view have never worked at any large[1] private sector organization. My last stint working at a big company included seeing people routinely taking naps at work and generally behaving in the ways people associate with government employees. Smaller organizations are more efficient, but are limited in possible scope of impact.

[1] "large" here generally meaning over 100k employees, relatively concentrated (so a hypothetical org with 5k employees in each of 20 countries likely does not fit). For scale, the US has any number of domestic bases where personnel count exceeds Meta's total staffing, with a couple being roughly the size as Microsoft's US employment.

That matches my experience, too. I’ve worked in .com, .edu, and .gov and people are the same everywhere. The main thing I notice is that there tends to be a lot of selection bias when people talk about the private sector where the most successful companies are used to represent the whole concept, when almost everyone has had to interact with, say, a cable or health insurance company (my local DMV is sooo much better than Comcast).

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