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My hell as a 911 operator

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Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#141

Post by wonderzombie »

milhous wrote: post #46
greghinch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices. Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which ess…

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Most government employees are unemployable in the…

> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services.

Cronyism and incompetence may or may not be inversely correlated with success, but the market does not select against those traits, specifically.

To abuse a metaphor: as a business, you don't have to outrun the bear. You don't even have to outrun the other guys. And businesses are, in the end, run by collections of irrational-in-aggregate human beings.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#142

Post by moocowduckquack »

milhous wrote: post #46
greghinch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices. Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which ess…

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services. Most government employees are unemployable in the…

"Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace"

This statement is so blatantly false that I have a hard time believing that you are engaged in honest discussion when you state it.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#143

Post by bmelton »

jowiar wrote: post #117

I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo. There are Github repositories: h…

While I'm not attempting to come off contrarian, I should say that trading potshots at government workers for potshots at government contractors seems short-sighted and highly hypocritical.

Having worked in both, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses. Where you would fault contractors though, I would generally fault the contracts themselves, or the faults of the contract overseers. Government contracting is adversarial, and where contractors have made major gaffes, in most of those cases you'd find that it was the government itself to blame. There's a reason it takes several hundred thousand dollars to be the lowest bid for standing up a standard Wordpress website, and I promise you, it isn't because the contractors don't know Wordpress.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#144

Post by josh2600 »

gregd wrote: post #99
josh2600 wrote: post #87

Ok, I have something to add here for the following reasons: * I build big call centers for a living * I'm a really big Telecom Nerd You might be wondering why something as important as 911 is not automated or accessible via any other mechanism; why is it that the most critical service in the country runs on a system that hasn't materially changed since 1984? For one, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is ex…

You mention Sprint as leading the charge and they've got issues of their own. I can't find an article at the moment, but Sprint is a provider of PTT/cell phone services to a local Portland, OR area police force and that police department is being forced to look for another vendor because Sprint has proven to be really, really unreliable.

Sprint as two networks right now. One is the legacy iDen network they acquired in the Nextel deal, the other is their Sprint/Clearwire 4G WiMAX/LTE monstrosity.

The iDen network is basically analog, so transactions like presence and push to talk are binary and the state is always transmittable. The same cannot be said of IP. This is a problem we've spent a lot of time working on and I can guarantee none of the Big Telcos have a solution yet. So the answer is, the iDen network's PTT is basically analog and easy to manage whereas the LTE network is IP but difficult to manage. They want people off of iDen because running two networks is a massive waste of money.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#145

Post by znowi »

Our call volume is too high for this system.

Starting pay for a 911 operator is about $26,000

Yea, obviously not as high a priority as stock exchange market where milliseconds matter!

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#146

Post by quanticle »

jowiar wrote: post #117

I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo. There are Github repositories: h…

How is this a shot at government employees? If anything, this is a tale of how government employees are bearing up under pressure that would have caused any of us to quit in under a week. The government employees didn't design the craptacular computer system that's causing these problems. That was designed by Intergraph, a private company.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#147

Post by gknoy »

loopdoend wrote: post #72
barnabask wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an example of that kind of situation happening for a fire department in Tennassee: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/04/122193/county-f...

That policy is about as backwards and fucked up as the idea of privatizing a 911 service. Those "firefighters" should be ashamed. As a counterpoint, I refer you to all the other counties in the US where receiving this vital service isn't contingent on your bills being paid. I can see these people losing their home to a fire because they failed to acquire home insurance, but I can't see how moral people would stand by…

I'm not so sure. It makes some sense: Here is a service we are happy to provide, in a sense a form of insurance. The point of it is that the community pitches in, to cover the catastrophic case that we hope no one has. If you decide not to pay into such a cooperative scheme, you're abusing the trust of all of your neighbors if you expect them to save your home anyway. This is part of the reason we often use taxes to cover the cost of things like this.

On the other hand, in this case they had already deployed, and it would have been nicer if there had been SOME price that they had thought of as the "fee" for service to non-subscribers. 5k, 10k, etc: better than losing the house. Once you advertise something like that, though, people will stop subscribing, and decide to gamble that they won't have a catastrophe. The price has to either be high enough to discourage that, or high enough that the fire department can cover its operating costs by servicing X fires per year.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#148

Post by moocowduckquack »

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #139
jowiar wrote: post #117

I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo. There are Github repositories: h…

yeah, sure just have more forms for folks taking 911 calls -- I call it the Government efficiency!

Is funny to watch people decry state enterprise as being always doomed and wasteful, on the internet.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#149

Post by jowiar »

bmelton wrote: post #143
jowiar wrote: post #117

I am tired of HN (and the rest of the country) taking shots at government employees. They're talented. They work hard. They take pride in their work. They do a damn good job. If you look at any good technology product that's come out of government, it's almost always been a creation of federal employees: CFPB. Data.gov. Healthcare.gov. Some neat things coming out of the OPM. Accumulo. There are Github repositories: h…

While I'm not attempting to come off contrarian, I should say that trading potshots at government workers for potshots at government contractors seems short-sighted and highly hypocritical. Having worked in both, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses. Where you would fault contractors though, I would generally fault the contracts themselves, or the faults of the contract overseers. Government contra…

Based on my experience, agreed entirely. I've worked with stellar people at multiple large and small government contractors. The structure of the contract just doesn't lead to a mentality of "let's make something great", but rather "lets get these boxes checked".

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#150

Post by cdcarter »

snitko wrote: post #37

Now imagine for a moment 911 line was a private company. People subscribe to it, pay a monthly fee, call it, wait to get through and don't receive help in time. What do you think people would do then? Stop paying and likely file a lawsuit. Good luck doing this with a government.

Remember, most of the time the 911 caller is not the person needing the service.
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