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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Kind of a silly article. If you're working in education administration or local government then why would you even expect career progression? These are not growth industries.

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I work as staff at a state university in what as been ranked as the highest cost of living city in California. In my field, I have the highest classification I can get. I am on step 20 out of 20. My salary is $88,000 a year. That is considered “low income” where I live. There is nowhere I can go higher in my chosen profession. The union is more interested in bringing up the lowest paid members than helping people in my situation, which is probably the right thing to do. The university is still attempting to hire people at $55,000 a year (ridiculous), and wondering why they have so much trouble filling positions. About half of the search committees I have been on ended with a recruitment failure.

Career progression is of course nice, but the larger issue is just being paid a living wage. In my case, I have money, I can walk away from my job any time that I want to, but I love what I do. Most people aren’t so lucky. The politics are hard, because there is this characterization (and I have seen it here at HN) that state employees are lazy, incompetent, inefficient, have huge pensions, collect large amounts of overtime, and more. In my experience, while there are exceptions, this really isn’t true.

I don't think that white-collar state employees are necessarily lazier or less competent than employees in other sectors. The problem is with the surrounding system, not the individuals. Much of their work could be automated away, or done more efficiently, or simply not done at all. It's time to take a step back and assess how many government employees we really need. Why has total government employment (federal + state + local) been growing faster than the rate of population growth? Something doesn't add up.

Those have always offered career progression, though. Whether the industry is growing is a different variable to whether someone is growing in competence.

Some environments require progression as a sort of anti-stasis measure. Famously including army officers, not exactly a growth industry either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

Always? Growth in educational administration and local government employment is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon. Fortunately that's now starting to turn around as the level of waste is enormous: the majority of white-collar workers in those fields produce very little value that contributes to the organization's core mission. They're not directly teaching students or fixing roads. Some level of administrative overhead is necessary to keep things running but in general we're way past the optimal level. Ideally there should be huge cuts to save costs and negative career progression with some management employees being moved back to individual contributor roles.

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