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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)

The immediate "savings" reduced workforce (even assuming the same level of work gets done) can easily be obliterated by the long-term damage of needing to pay more to attract equally-qualified applicants away from the private sector.

Some quick napkin-math just to illustrate:

    * Assume the stupid and illegal firings continue, shrinking the workforce to 90%. 
    * Assume payroll expenses move the same, to 90%.
    * Now workers require 5% more to be hired at a flaky employer with dodgy benefits.
    * After just two years, the "savings" are erased. Every year the broken trust continues makes it worse.

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If a corporation did this, we'd rightly accuse them of pumping their quarterly numbers at the expense of long-term viability.

The saved money and the payroll for new money are both in dollars per year, not one-time costs. So the additional premium needs to be 10%, not 5%, to erase the benefits, and it doesn't matter how many years you look at.

(I'm ignoring one-time costs like severance pay and signing/relocation bonuses which I don't think were the point of your message, and also the elasticity effect where you can pay existing workers the same even if it costs more to hire new ones. And I agree with your point in general that this is not a sensible way to save money, I just think your numbers are wrong).

> Also, it's completely destroying an incredibly valuable asset: The reputation of being a stable long-term employer! (This is possibly their corrupt intent.)

Yeah but what's the plan? They already have crappy pay and now it gets unstable - who'd want to work for the government? Only desperates.

> who'd want to work for the government?

No one and I think that's the point. The current administration seems hell-bent on making corporations able to do whatever they please. Destroying government institutions is probably a good way to go about achieving that.

> This is possibly their corrupt intent.

Trump's OMB head has said as much: they want to demoralize the federal workforce and make them dread going to work every day. They want to give the federal government the reputation of being a bad, undesirable, unstable place to work. This is all no accident.

Nobody considers long term damage, particularly in a business sense.

If you look at the history of American company that have failed or are currently failing, there is one common denominator: short-term decision making.

As soon as business have even an ounce of success, they immediately give up on and start optimizing for the now, not the tomorrow. Take a look at Tesla. They invested a lot in the early days of their company and it paid off heavily. But as soon as they saw market success, they took a page from GM. Stop innovating immediately, start cutting quality. You’re safe now, no need to be competitive. No need to think about the future, it’s secured.

But it’s not secured, and this ambivalence is their downfall. Smarter, long-term thinking business will run Tesla into the ground, as history has shown with GM.

Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?

I generally wouldn't want those people to work for my company, so not sure why I'd want them to work in my government.

> Money is not the point of a government.

Yes, exactly. People who just want a stable job are in it for the (stable) money.

You just made an argument about government based on a comparison with the private sector, and now you're agreeing that government and the private secctor have fundamentally different goals. Got to admit, I'm a bit lost.

The argument wasn't based on a comparison to the private sector. The argument is based on the fact that I prefer people who passionate about their jobs vs people who just want a stable paycheck. However the argument also applies to the private sector, which is why I mentioned it.

Have you considered that government employees accept less pay because they are passionate?

So this begs the question why we need "stable employment" as a hallmark of the government sector in order to attract talent.

Hard to be passionate about a job that might not be there tomorrow.

Let's flip the script. How have young people felt about the private sector as their entry level jobs have focused more around a turnover based culture than ever? Do you feel Gen Z is passionate about work or even about trying to maximize their compensation? Do they seem happy or even tolerant of a 9-5 to (not) make ends meet?

What makes you think applying these practices to the public sector will work for the better?

99% of people who work are just in it for the money.

You’re a very blessed individual if you’re doing it for the love of the job rather than because you have to pay the bills and buy food.

An aside: I've never once heard the word "blessed" used where the subtext wasn't "fuck you". It's the American equivalent of Britain's "With all due respect..." I love it.

Citation needed, otherwise this sounds like psychological projection.

I don’t think you really need a citation for the fact that most people work to live rather than live to work.

I mean, that doesn’t mean that people can’t enjoy their job. But enjoying your job also doesn’t mean that you’d want to work if it wasn’t for the requirement to earn money.

Do you want to attract talent or people who take anything they can get? People who know what they're worth aren't going to waste investing their time into an employer who can't even guarantee that they'll still have a job next week.

Mundane government employees are some of the most dedicated workers I've met. There's a deep array of jobs that aren't flashy but are foundational and depend on staff who can build up long institutional knowledge.

> Mundane government employees are some of the most dedicated workers I've met

And you think the reason they are dedicated is because they mostly care about having a "stable job"?

Thars like saying "the reason the best employees are good is that they are paid the most money". You're putting the cart ahead of the horse here.

They are dedicated partially because they can spend their time focused on doing their job and not grinding leet code looking for the next pay bump in 2 years. Those pay scales are very strict in government, and very predictable.

> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?

Yes, if you can't offer someone market rates then you need to offer them other things to fill that void. Stability is one of them, and is actually a good thing in government, when politics is so volatile. If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power, you don't have a stable government.

Working with those constraints, you _can_ improve things, by building better systems and processes, that better use the resources you have. That's far better long term, but it's not as fast and does not generate headlines for DOGE.

> If the workforce is fired every time a new party comes into power

What if the workforce is never fired, and government jobs acquire a reputation for ingrained incompetence, promotion from within for the unqualified, and a management so frustrated by their inability to turn over poorly-performing workers that nearly nothing productive gets done anymore?

What if the workforce is full of appointments by the Old-Boy network, and jobs are personal favors or quid pro quo rather than based on qualifications or education?

What about that sort of workforce?

What if we just arrested every person who broke every tiny archaic law we can think of? What if we run out of prisons and decide to outsource them to foreign counties? What about this sort of criminal system?

I don't know why we are talking in such extreme what ifs. If you really think the government let's anyone with a pulse in you never applied for a government position. At least not one in a medium-large city. You have a lot of test taking and a process that can take months. Maybe even longer if you need clearance (at that point it's best to go private sector since they'll get you cleared while you work on non-xlearajce stuff).

Yes, there is corruption and nepotism. Can you name a single industry where there isn't? How about we setup more channels to report and hold it accountable instead of using it to dismiss the concept of a government job? We'd all win there.

What you mean “we”, White Man?

Internet comments really need to get pronouns & antecedents under control. Use the Scientific “we” if we’re a tenured professor or scholar with credentials.

But the GP is perhaps not a police officer, a department of corrections administrator, or legislator, so please, leave AStonesThrow out of your speculative, hypothetical scenarios and TDS bloviations?

<Thx>

I think you should give the HN guidelines (specifically under comments) a re-read. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are saying that there's enough irredeemable people in government positions that there's no government job that could suit their skill level?

That sounds like a crisis to me. What happens when they're all dumped on the street in one go?

> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?

Yes. People looking for a stable job put down roots and grow communities. They gain deep knowledge of the systems and people they work with, and they gain valuable wisdom from experience. I have no idea why you wouldn't want people looking for a stable job at your company. Why would you want an employee who was looking to work at a place where they were likely to be fired for no reason at any moment and couldn't expect any of their co-workers to still be there tomorrow?

The comment I replied to was holding out the federal government as an especially stable employer, as compared to the private sector. Sure, you don't want a reputation for firing people a week after you hired them, but A. that is not what is happening here B. not doing that doesn't mean it is actually desireable for the federal government to be seen as a more stable alternative to the private sector.

Said another way: any company can have the reputation GC claims the federal government does, but most don't. Why is that?

Because most companies don't care about their employees. Many of America's largest private employers like Amazon and Walmart have extremely high turnover, so it's no wonder people are looking for a more stable employer. Government workers are far more likely to be unionized which means they can get better working conditions and actual pensions. Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.

Any company could have a reputation for treating employees so well that people want to work there and stick around until they retire, but they usually don't because screwing over their employees makes them more money. Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else.

> Government workers can take far more pride in being public servants than they would peeing in a bottle for amazon. It's no surprise there is less turnover.

See, this is where you're losing me. One the one hand you are arguing that part of what makes working for the government desirable is the job itself / the work being done (which sounds good to me), but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.

I don't want the federal government to be a jobs program that keeps people on payroll just because it "isn't worried about profits". Profits aren't my concern, spending is, and the federal government should absolutely be worried about spending, because money doesn't grow on trees. I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.

If we can't attract the right talent to run the government, we should either scale back our federal ambitions or we should pay more up front.

> but then you are immediately conflating that with a reputation for being a "stable employer" (read: not firing people when maybe you should), which is not how I want my tax dollars to be used.

You're using an incorrect definition for "stable employer". Employers with low turnover rates are stable employers. The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment, not a failure to fire people who should be fired. If you know of a government employee who should be fired you can apply political pressure on the people responsible and, if needed, vote them out of office and replace them with someone who will fire that person.

Spending is a legitimate concern, and there are situations where money in government is being wasted, people are bribed, no-bid contracts are awarded, etc. That happens much less than you'd think though and you can run into the same kinds of problems in the private sector too. It's much easier to spot when it happens in government because the books are open records.

> I want the federal government to be exactly as big as it needs to be in order to deliver on the democratically decided goals of the American people.

Consider that governments are capable of proving a service at cost while a private company cannot because on top of the cost they also need to fill their own pockets with taxpayer money. Private companies must make profit, which means that they must charge taxpayers more than necessary.

I'd agree that we want talented government workers, and we often get them, but most of all we want the goods and services we're paying for. We shouldn't have to lower our ambitions, if anything we should be demanding more from our government, and that includes getting more for our money.

> That happens much less than you'd think though

Hard disagree. My dad worked for the federal government and he was railroaded for pointing out where money just disappeared down some corners. In his case it was untracked doctor reimbursements.

This happens everywhere in government because the taxpayer just doesn't care and spending money itself is largely considered to be the metric of effectiveness -- goodhart's law. The public generally thinks that if we allocate funding to X or Y bleeding heart cause it's magically done and we don't have to think about it anymore; conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y. By the year 2025 the system of consuming funds without voter accountability has optimized itself to do as little as possible with as high a price as possible, as evidenced by 45 billion dollars for broadband.

Okay, so we have 3 options.

1. Make the taxpayer care and properly have them vote in not corrupt people. This can be from awareness campaigns, stronger community identity, or more frequent town halls as a start

2. Establish an ombudsman who can care and root this out of blatant corruption happens. So you don't feel like talking to a wall when trying to expose corrupt.

3. Blame the government as an entirely and shut it down.

So which seems more logical in your eyes?

Here's an optimistic story. Organizations managing 20 billion dollars in funding in Los Angeles had no audit records of how they used the funds. It "disappeared". A judge noticed this and came down extremely hard. Watching their future funding like a hawk

Surprise, they used the money in a proper matter and the homeless situation in LA started to improve for the first time in who knows how long. Enforcement does indeed work if someone takes the time to notify the right authorities on it. But instead we fell for decades of trying to erode authority. This one didn't even involve the voters needing to oust someone.

Some mix of all the solutions depending on how bad it is. At some point the net social benefit becomes negative. When that happens incremental reform is not preferable to tearing it down, exploring alternatives (e.g. 501c(3)s), and rebuilding as government if and only if a reasonable mechanism for accountability can be created without the meddling of the people who messed it up before.

But can we afford to tear it down? The decision sounds just as radical in the private sector as the public sector. You don't just shut down your core product without there being a very swift handover process.

The example here was doctor reimbursement. So, can we afford to just not reimburse doctors as we architect a new solution to solve corruption? That strategy seems to be what people whope to achieve with Social Security. Put it "on maintenance" for a few years to "weed out corruption".

You are arguing from this bucket

> conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y

I am saying you can't assume that because money was allocated for something it went to the critical thing you wanted. Like 45 billion for rural broadband.

> The example here was doctor reimbursement.

Yes. If the doctor reimbursement is improper you don't pay it out. It is the hospital's job to get things right when asking for money. If the hospital sent an invoice for a procedure the patient did not actually get (this was a large amount of the waste), you REALLY DO NOT PAY, if you pay then you are signaling to the hospital that it's OK to keep overcharging the VA.

> The usual reason for low turnover rate is employee satisfaction with the job and their work environment

Citation almost certainly needed, especially when the government is being presented as exceptional in this regard.

And I do not know why you have started talking about private companies taking taxpayer money – I was never proposing privatizing anything.

This isn't just common sense. But basic business practice.

https://www.innovativehumancapital.com/article/understanding...

>A wealth of academic research since the 1970s has established a clear and consistent inverse relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. Meta-analyses synthesizing hundreds of individual studies consistently report a moderate to strong negative correlation between the two variables across cultures, industries and occupations (Cotton & Tuttle, 1986; Griffeth et al., 2000; Hom et al., 2017; Tett & Meyer, 1993). In other words, higher levels of satisfaction are linked to lower probabilities employees will contemplate leaving their roles. The strength of this association has remained stable over time despite changes to workplaces and economies.

It's one of those few universal values across time and cultures. A basic query will give you all the citations you want.

> was never proposing privatizing anything.

Just magically finding the lowest number the government can get away with for functioning. Not taking into account the bus factor. Redundancy, natural turnover as people retire, die, or simply change life goals, and a dozen other factors.

And apparently not the idea that when a strained organization needs a big job done but lacks people, they bid a contract to private companies (hence, privatization). We already see the result of this with Defense in how we contract everything to be made. Trillions of dollars of "efficiency" and relatively little knowledge in-house.

This isn't even a government issue. This is basic business. You can't run 100% lean. It's never the most efficient means because a pebble means catastrophic delays.

> Government workers are far more likely to be unionized

Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest -- this is why FDR banned unionization of federal workers (versus the private sector where there is no obligation and the relationship is generally adversarial).

> Governments are freed from having to prioritize maximizing profits at the cost of everything else

That's a huge problem. The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, the burden to repay the debt falls on future generations who can't vote against spending that happened in the past! And spending by printing money hurts the poor the hardest, which I can't imagine you would be in favor of.

> Isn't this a problem? Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest

I don't think so. Government workers have faced the same problems as workers in the private sector (excessive overtime, unpaid wages, pay not keeping up with inflation, workplace safety issues, etc.) and unions are the best way we have to combat those kinds of issues to ensure that workers are treated fairly.

> The legitimacy of government is predicated on the ability of the voter to yank the money from the government if it's ineffective -- otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability.

We can certainly vote out people who commit fraud and decide democratically what we want the government to spend money on, but we can also decide that some things are worth having even when they don't make money. Governments can even run programs at a loss if we feel that those services are worth having. That doesn't mean printing money.

> unions are the best way

They are when labor is fungible, and when you're not paid by the public. Lots of crazy effects happen when the second condition is not met, for example prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.

> That doesn't mean printing money

In principle, it does not. In practice you can count the countries that don't deficit finance on one hand.

>prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.

People in America always vote in attorneys who are "hard on crime though". I simply see that as unchecked reflection of the people's will. To double down on it, my state had a recent proposition rejected that would have addressed some prisoners rights regarding treatment and compensation. The bluest state you can imagine and we still can't properly say that prisoners aren't slaves.

The only people America trusts less than authority is their own people, apparently. If they vote in people who want to lock more people up instead of focusing on rehabilitating: well, that's they get what they vote for, huh?

> People in America always vote in attorneys who are "hard on crime though"

They don't. For example chesa boudin in San Francisco (there are others too). Also don't forget that those tough on crime electees get campaign funds from those unions.

> Government workers are supposed to be working for the people, involvement in a union is a conflict of interest

Whats the logic here? Unions protect against employers, not consumers. Where does "the people" come in this relationship?

Securing your ability to not be fired because the new president doesn't like the color of your suit is indeed a benefit to both of us, even if you disagree with that person's views.

>otherwise the government can just vote itself more and more funds for whatever without accountability. Since we're all deficit spending, t

Yeah, it's almost like that's a career Killing move presidents avoid like the plauge. I wonder why. Must be because the people care so little about politics.

Oh, but tarrifs? That's a great strategy.

> Since we're all deficit spending,

I wish the people at large cared even 10% as much about balancing the budget as they love to discuss about during the election season. You'd see from basic research that thr defecit oft rises during republican terms (over guess what? Tax breaks) and not as much over democrats. In fact, the fee times it fell came under democratic administrations.

So the solution? Vote in the republican. One that already set a record for the biggest deficit increase and made a tarriff war that cost Americans billions. Surely he has the solution.

Maybe a similar process occurred in Trump's head when he approved Musks cleansings. The weak point of this attitude is that those folks had a job with crappy pay but at least some stability, now they have none, so good luck finding people desperate enough to work for the government.

> Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?

Yes, absolutely.

>Do we actually want "I just want a stable job" people being a significant part of the federal governments workforce?

Yes we do.

Software development is unusual in that if a coder's mind goes off the rails and he starts committing bad code, the organization can easily use `git reset` to revert his changes.

Most jobs aren't like that. For example, on the factory floor, if a machine operator gets too creative, inspired or enthusiastic about the work, people tend to start losing limbs. And the managers of the factory floor are keenly aware of that, which is why passion is not a quality they want in their machine operators and neither is wanting to change the world.

Governments are not startups. Boring and predictable is what the public and the markets want.

We had federal employee turn over every political cycle. It was horrible to the point the two parties got together and created the Federal Civil Service concept so that positions would have stability.

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