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Comment by sepalous | Hacker News Reader

I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!

It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.

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the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz.

higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.

A counter point:

Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.

It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.

It shouldn't be market rate because you get job safety. Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea.

Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy.

People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant yet.

I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary increase for a long time.

Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got promoted which is basically everyone in every department has inflated grades. These promotion are also problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now more SCS1 than ever.

40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work are actually useful.

And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done. Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And if anything the power of a department is measured by how many staff it has.

But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this is not UK specific.

>Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea.

The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.

I can't speak to the UK at all, but I've met less than five people who started their government jobs right out of high school or college. They'll be able to retire on their pension 33 years later at about 3/4 of their max salary -- so, at roughly 51 or 55. (The pensions are funded by employee contributions.)

It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.

The tenure is for the job or overall in the government?

Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.

Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.

For the government. The stats are based on employer, so even if you switch roles or organization, you are still counted in the same “federal employment” bin.

I dont know about US. But in the UK there is a different between Public Servants and Civil Servants. And to the public or at least the discussion of the topic they are largely one and the same. However jumping through these jobs would technically put them out of Government employment.

we should also start cutting doctor pay to make sure we get people who are in it to help others.

Pediatric medicine in a nutshell.

Do you think the best doctors are the ones who go into the most lucrative paths, like cosmetic surgery in Beverly Hills? You're deliberately strawmanning. The equivalent statement on the other side would be: We should 10x doctor pay so we only get those people who are in it for the money. That's a disingenuous stance as well. Let's not pretend that "slightly below market rate" for specialized fields leaves people in the poorhouse.

My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.

Doctor pay is already 10x.

Doctor pay is already 10x doctor pay?

You also create a selection bias for people who are bad at what they do and can’t get a better paying job.

Again, this assumes the main motivation is money. Ie if they could get a better paying job, they would. You can select for highly skilled people who also aren’t putting money as the top priority. The point I’m getting at is that pay can be a noisy proxy for skill and we should probably not assume they are tightly correlated in all domains.

One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They’re more interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.

I guess the problem I see is that I can think of a lot of careers (teachers, basically all of healthcare, certain kinds of engineers, etc.) where "below market pay" is translating to shortages and the need to push under or unqualified workers into roles they're not suited for.

This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.

Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.

I think u/lotsofpulp addresses this in a comment below. I agree with that position: the reason it is becoming harder to fill those jobs has more to do with the lowered quality of the job than the pay.

I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.

A serious problem with teaching is that the quality of the job is lower the better you are as a teacher. Good teachers spend a tremendous amount of time outside of school hours on grading and preparation. They also have effectively lower pay as they’re buying classroom supplies with their own money. But if you don’t care much about teaching and just do what it takes to keep the job, you can skip most of that.

>this assumes the main motivation is money

People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out).

You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.

If you do not increase quality of life to make up for lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less capable people. Note that quality of life also includes security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.

I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about. To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they couldn’t get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what leads to the higher quality of life.

No one is passionate about taking care of too many patients and making sure they document everything to the T to prioritize not being sued for millions of dollars.

This is a different argument. And there are plenty of people who put up with the bad parts of a job because the good parts are rewarding. Nobody should be so naive to think every job is all rainbows and puppy breath.

If your stance is that the healthcare system needs improvement, I’d agree. If your point is that the best doctors are the people who have money as their top priority, I’d disagree. I’d extend the latter to say, we may not get a better healthcare system by just paying people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.

Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?

>Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.

There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of the scale.

>Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?

"A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform is the obvious way forward. From decreasing unnecessary requirements for new doctors (there must be a way to not have to completely sacrifice one's 20s and early 30s and still become a doctor), to tort reform that allows for sensible judgments, to increasing funding for residency and medical schools to allow for higher supply of doctors, etc.

Also, doctor pay (per hour or per patient) has been declining in real terms for many, many years now. Which is not bad in and of itself, but when you are simultaneously decreasing remuneration and quality of life at work, intelligent people will pick up on that signal to look elsewhere to sell their services.

A lot of US healthcare is performed by smart people from poorer countries who just want a chance for their kids to grow up in the USA. That the country relies on that arbitrage has always been ridiculous to me.

I agree with basically all of this. The one distinction I would make is that the pay reduction is real terms is across all kinds of domains so I don’t think it’s particularly unique of physicians, but part of a larger issue. Same with the cost of education/training etc. In other words, I think the healthcare issues you highlight may be emblematic of bigger systemic problems.

With all that said, it’s still a different argument than “pay = ability”. Put differently: the $ amount in TFA could be used to increase Congress member pay from $174k to $10MM each. Do you think that would result in better politicians?

I do think substantially increasing Congress’s pay would result in better politicians. Dishonest people who are only in it for the money can find plenty of ways to profit from the office. As it stands, $174k is not a whole lot of money for a job that requires a ton of travel to the extent of basically requiring you to own two houses. This low pay means that non-wealthy members of Congress have a hard time of it. Non-wealthy people who would be good in Congress but don’t want to have that much hardship will bow out, or work around it with corruption. Low pay selects for rich and corrupt politicians. Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.

>Low pay selects for rich and corrupt politicians.

Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.

Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.

This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.

If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.

*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.

> But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money.

Everyone has some motivation for money. So this introduces bias towards the corrupt at any level. That’s especially true for a pay level that really is not enough for the expenses the job requires.

You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption. I don’t think that’s even remotely true. There are plenty of honest people who value high pay. As it currently stands, Congress attracts dishonest people who are in it for the money because there are plentiful opportunities to make money dishonestly in that job. It doesn’t attract honest people who are in it for the money, because the honest pay sucks. If you pay them really well then that second category will compete for positions. It won’t be corrupt people versus true believers, it’ll be corrupt people versus true believers and honest people who want a well paid job. This would be far better than what we have now.

>You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption.

No. There are plenty of other ways of selling your constituents out for money that aren't corruption. I am assuming that people who value money over most everything else will tend towards decisions that optimize money at the expense of other values. It is a self-evidential claim.

Yes, there is a balance. My point is I don't wish for people where the balance is biased towards favoring money as a primary motivation for the above reason. I would much rather have someone willing to forgo excess money to help their constituents when they are in conflict.

Consider a sports analogy. There are baseball players who will put their team winning at jeopardy to pad their stats. They may refuse a sacrifice fly because it hurts their batting average. That doesn't mean they'll cheat (the equivalent of your corruption claim). But it does mean I don't want them on my team; I'd much prefer someone with winning as their primary motivation, not maximizing their personal stats.

Why should they come out of university with $300k+ in debt and do 80 hour weeks?! Sounds insane to me!

It assumes that money is a motivation, which is generally true.

With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.

With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.

As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.

> The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.

Yes, to an extent.

Looking at the costs of housing, especially in a market like DC, the motivation isn't "making lots of money" per se, but rather "maybe I can actually make enough to afford the mortgage on an 800k crapshack" and the acknowledgment that gov roles aren't likely to cover that.

Inevitably, that way of setting up an organization leads to one of two end-games:

1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.

2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.

Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.

Re: 1. Cause and effect are backward. Imperial service was actually more meritocratic than the domestic British government of that time. Look how many names of colonialists are Scottish or Irish. The former were tossed out of their land during the Highland clearances or lost influence when the Union shifted power to London. The latter were barred from high office due to their Catholic religion. But if you had talent and ambition you could go to Africa or India (and then become wealthy and ultimately join the ruling class)

Fair, I won't pretend to know much about the British empire. But feels like a decent strawman for my argument.

Singapore has been independent since 1959, while the USA got its own in 1776, and Britain has been around for more than a thousand years.

I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly successful system, considering most of the time since its independence has been under a father or his son.

Fair, I won't pretend to know much about Singapore. But feels like a better way to set things up than what came before.

Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their “work from home.”

It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people.

This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to correct over time - hence big tech’s layoffs, especially of managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of 2021-2022.

I don’t think this is true of all state employees, but it seems to happen more with the educated professional class with more abstract work.

It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor.

The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.

All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.

That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.

Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.

But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.

That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.

I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.

Not sure where you get your information. Many civil servants are motivated to do what is right for their country, civil service tends to draw mission-oriented people. People who are typically willing to go above and beyond to make things work.

Think about the teachers who buy classroom supplies out of their own meager paycheck because they want them for the lesson, and 'cost-cutting' means they don't have enough resources in the school.

Think of all the people at the CDC, or at NOAH, or similar.

In any large organization, and the Fed Government is > 2m employees, so it counts, you can easily find example of people who are driven and people who coast.

And actually, people are sacked in the fed if they don't make their numbers, or they are quietly sidelined.

Yes I think those things are true too. I also think there's a national stigma around salaries at the level we'd need to pay people in STEM to be competitive with industry which may be an additional political roadblock.

> It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.

Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.

PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.

> The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!

Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.

> The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs.

They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.

Nothing says freedom like banning the right to strike. Which might work in the short term, but makes the strikes much, much more vicious when they do come.

Federal employees already do not have the right to strike, see 5 U.S.C. §7311.

Do they have the right to quit?

You know they do.

Yes because if it’s one thing workers like is removing their bargaining power and relying solely on how future administrations feel about your job.

unions should not be able to negotiate against the collective will of the people and seniority based leveling has been a disaster for the government in the US, at least.

You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.

the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.

Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.

Poppycock. Being able to collectively bargain against the government is more than legal, it should be encouraged.

They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.

Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.

One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?

If you just want to talk about outcomes, there are a number of studies showing the negative impact public sector unions have on outcomes - for instance there is clear research causally linking union penetration in school districts to decline in student outcomes in Wisconsin. [0]

> One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?

Not everyone fits into two political buckets. I am extremely anti for the reasons above as well as additional reasons particular to police unions. I also favor big tax hikes, banning guns, and higher spending on housing subsidy, snap, etc.

I just also think governments should be capable, student outcomes are important, the interest of voters are greater than that of govt employees, etc.

0: https://morganfoy.github.io/papers/Foy_JMP.pdf

> There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people

Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.

No you see only capital is allowed to bargain with the government, labor is not allowed to for "reasons" that somehow always seem to benefit capital at their expense.

workers are allowed to bargain against the government, as in “i will not take the job at the pay you are offering.”

both private companies and workers should not be allowed to band together to deny the government all contracts until they get the one they want.

Your stance seems to be at odds with the freedom of association protected by the US Constitution.

It's way easier to understand when they just want to attack labor and absolve capital, it really is that simple for 99% of the discourse you read online.

The protections offered to unions goes far beyond standard freedom of association. Generally I think that is okay, but not in the case of public unions.

I think you may be misunderstanding. The right to join a union is the right to association. Right to association is not something provided by a union. In other words, you have a right to collectively bargain for certain working conditions and that is guaranteed by the 1st amendment.

> workers are allowed to bargain against the government, as in “i will not take the job at the pay you are offering.”

In the same way that someone is allowed to not breath underwater.

A lot of people don't have the luxury of choosing.

Unemployment is currently 3.5%.

Every sector of the economy is looking for more workers.

Is unemployment rate meaningful in a country where one full-time job is not enough to cover the bills?

That'll change soon, don't worry.

No random federal workers have veto power over the law. Never did.

Having an executive with contempt for the law and the concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a perversion of democracy.

The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law. What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these actions?

what specific actions are you talking about?

e: christ, why am I downvoted for earnestly asking a question

Many of the administrative actions, through the purging of 200k employees, are preventing activities that are required to be done by law from being done.

I agree it’s unreasonable that you’re being downvoted. I disagree strongly with your position, but you’re expressing it in a completely appropriate manner.

> There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.

That makes it easy for people to leave the government.

The question you should be asking is: are there enough people who are sufficiently competent to take on the government roles?

Case study where the workers had less power than expected: Reagan vs. air traffic controllers.

Case studies where the government had less power than expected: Every coup ever, UK's Winter of Discontent (even if the long-term result was electorate going for Thatcher who gutted the unions), Polish Solidarity Movement.

Yes they should. There are multiple wills of multiple peoples.

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