> 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, This is a subset - the one the media choose to highlight and that’s occupying your mindshare.
What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately veterans, while at the same time raising prices of everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation. EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's just me
Pay is a common one from the employee's side. From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.) I have an unsexy government job. I've seen…
> Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position. This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at wh…
On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse.
There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.
> tend to be relatively chill workwise This feels like something that needed past tense. Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill.
> Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill. Context? The comment was about city/state jobs, not federal.
That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do? It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't bee…
I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff. The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not t…
In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it.
If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle.
> The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies. People say things like this, but then have trouble explaining California, where the left has had a supermajority for almost as long.
And California is an incredibly successful economy and people dream of living there.
Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and crime? California is losing house seats at the present.
Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...
tbf, unlike the US government employees selected on the basis of being sufficiently immune to reality to assert that Trump won the 2020 election in their "fidelity to the Dear Leader" tests, those who think that endorsement of such views is "deplorable" might have a point...
I'm not paying close attention to all the noise, so forgive me if I am way off base. But aren't they effectively doing a values purge/refinement/reset? Similar to what Elon did with twitter and what few companies have managed to do to transform themselves? My point is (in an effort to maintain a most respectful interpretation) that I imagine the environment is becoming more hostile to people with certain values while…
> Similar to what Elon did with twitter Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success? While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success. In that regards, yes what is happening at th…
Well, years later the website is still operational and the company still seems functional after Musk cut 80+% of the staff, which to me is pretty mind blowing. I'd call that pretty successful. If I, as the end user, can't tell the difference between pre-80% and post-80% cut twitter then what value was that 80% bringing to the organization, exactly?
>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house. ... which means more work in-house. ... done by the same teams they just cut the size of. Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work…
Have you worked with body-shop consultants? I think I'd take my chances with an idealistic E-3.
I was on a 6-month project with some body shop consultants. We were a small, boutique consultancy that outsourced work to a much larger body shop. They barely did any work, and what little work they did was some of the worst quality stuff I've seen in my life. They told us they had completed "phase 1" of a project. It didn't work at all. And we still paid them.
Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different. One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.
Based on my personal experience and that of many others I know, that's about as wrong as one can get. A great many government workers are there to collect a paycheck and go home (just like many other people working for many other employers). Their commitment to 'the mission' hovers near zero. Just ask them. Where do people get these crazy ideas about government employees? There are some wonderful people in public ser…
Yeah, it's not binary. I personally know government tech workers, true civil servants, that care and are clearly there to serve. These are the type of people you want in government. Yes, the opposite cliche that goes home right at 5 after barely doing anything also exists. I briefly worked with an ex-government "product manager" type that was clueless AF. I'm not sure how they even held on to their former job.
Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
I know some solid gov (some ex-gov now) tech folks in DC. These are experienced, staff+ engineer types who want meaningful work. The pay isn't that low. Is it FAANG level? No. But they're still making solid six figure salaries.