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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

>we do waste a ton of money on consultants

I bet the median skill of a Deloitte consultant is higher than that of the average government office worker.

The trend for decades has been shrinking the public workforce and replacing them with contractors, because Republicans have said that the private sector is more efficient. So the average government office worker is not a tech, they are a contract officer. The government does not have these skills internally at the level necessary, if they want this work done they have to contract it out. And if these contracts get cancelled that money will get spent with another contractor, and given how this administration has been acting it will a contractor that bends the knee and not one that the president has publicly voiced animosity for.

Yes but do you really believe Deloitte isn’t showering them with bribes and bending the knee to keep these contracts?

It’s not about who bends and who doesn’t. They all will. Even Tim Cook who famously wears his politics on his sleeve has completely bent the knee to Trump.

Money talks.

Yes, the president has made it clear through his actions that $1m will make him reconsider who's an enemy and who's a friend and any corporation that hasn't made a donation yet is probably calculating what the ROI would be and how big a donation to make.

Wait are you telling me that Dana White was put on the board for Meta as a favor and not his incredible social media acumen?

The size of the federal workforce has been remarkably stable for decades[1]. It hasn't dipped below 2.7 million since 1967 ad only recently cracked 3 million again.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

And in 1970 the US population was 203 million compared to 340 million now.

The comment above wasn't about per capita reductions.

Usually, they recruit government office workers into this? They acquire domain knowledge in endless drudgery, then get a pay upgrade and get rehired as consultant? The whole machinery becomes a whole level more inefficient.

Van der Leyen was famous for squandering german defense budget to mc kinsey and co - who poached heads from the german rearmament office. National Defense related industries should be in general forbidden to hire consultants.

no, in the US consultants are mostly just a backdoor for governments to hire actually competent people at payscales that are illegal for the government to use and with competitive interview processes that are also illegal for the government to use.

Why? That seems completely wrong, based on my experience with both of these groups.

You are absolutely right. As someone who has worked in government, the replies to you seem hopelessly optimistic about the average government worker.. it seems like many really cannot comprehend? the gulf in capability.

No chance. The median consultant is a fresh graduate. The median government office worker actually knows something.

I have met plenty of fresh graduates who know more and are much more productive than older people.

I have met many new consultants. Most were less productive than experienced people.

There are exceptions but few.

Generally I have been found "experience" to be highly overrated and companies that lean harder on it to be typically legacy/declining/european companies.

When I worked as a consultant, the majority of the work was done by younger/less tenured/lower-level people.

The skill balance (actual, tangible IT/software skill) was heavily in favor of the "younger" (as above).

Most of the managers/those in supervisory roles were busy "showing impact" and "aligning cross-functional teams".

unlike the other reply, this is a an accurate description of consulting dynamics.

Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different. One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.

Both are there to collect a check. One can get fired for doing nothing and the other cant.

I'd counter that the cost to the American taxpayer is far less when you avoid the consultant upcharge, all else being equal.

Perhaps, but that is an entirely independent claim from the idea that government employees are passionate self sacrificers

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 service, but it's not some Wonkaland of saints who toil just to help others and do the right thing.

Personally, I get this from my interactions with the reviewers at the FDA. Absolutely buried in work, always make the best effort to improve your submission, etc.

fda reviewers are extremely out of distribution relative to almost every government worker except those at, say, the Fed. i would caution against trying to generalize that because it is mostly people taking a short term stint out of their profssional/academic career.

sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking

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.

I would take that bet. First, government office workers have a higher bar to entry. While I've heard criticism of them being myopic, it was rarely that they were lacking intelligence.

Deloitte consultants have a much wider variance. They too are capped on how much they can be paid, but they do not get the benefits of government service (e.g. pensions.) They are shuffled from subcontractor to subcontractor and the project managers are more obsessed with extracting more money from the department than finishing the project. The incentives are so misaligned as to be comical.

As someone who has worked in the federal government, alongside other federal workers and deloitte consultants, you would lose this bet undoubtedly.

"higher bar to entry" -> true civil service style testing for jobs is basically illegal in the feds and they have to give massive preferences to various interest groups.

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