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Comment by claar | Hacker News Reader

This is a great point.

However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done.

A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.

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Your description of the work could describe a large corporation. I think its really difficult to separate the inefficiencies of government organizations and the inefficiencies of large organizations (public or private). And unfortunately, space projects are often large ventures with an added complicating factor of being funded by political budget whims.

Hierarchical management structures have nothing to do with government organizations. They exist in the private sector too as you described it.

Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?

Government is a classic example of a system where most members of the system can be good and efficient, yet the system as a whole can be clogged up by even a few crappy folks.

It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down.

Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow).

Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted.

Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.

" I worked for 13 years in the public sector"-What does that mean in this context? You're implying that all public sector work is inefficient, shoddy, etc. For all we know, you worked at a DMV for 13 years programming COBOL mainframes.

It's all DMV COBOL mainframes.

I've seen equal or worse inefficiencies in the private sector.

While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the same whether it is public or private.

While their are also massive inefficiencies in the private sector, the public sector does not have the same ability to fail. Those private companies need to be efficient enough to avoid bankruptcy.

Note that some of the private sector can't fail now either.

Yes, but the private sector is more willing to restructure in order to become profitable; I never saw a single case of restructuring in 13 years. Instead people were promoted or moved to other roles in the few cases changes happened.

I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.

Truly, I think planetary science could really use a shit-hot startup.

So, like Space-x...?

Yes, sort of. There were some salient points made here about needing to get over the initial barrier to entry, and needing also some prerequisite commercial goal which obviates the current "Why would anyone want to go there?" kinds of questions. But yes, sort of like Space-X. But Space-X is really just trying to make cheaper rockets. While that's fine, I suppose, I don't think the revolution will be chemically-fueled. I'm hoping something like a space elevator or magic antigravity machines that will let all the other "innovators" iterate on the shoulders of those first giants, opening up space as a platform for the commoner. I'm thinking of some very elementary replication of previous industries, like the internet: Some very smart people build a platform (or infrastructure, or manufacturing process) which lets people build on top of it. Like Twitter and Facebook on the internet.

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