It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
They should start by disbanding all government employee unions for GSA workers and eliminating all seniority based promotion criteria.
Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
Presumably this also rules out any company or non-profit from negotiating a contract with the government, or suing the state.
both private companies and workers should not be allowed to band together to deny the government all contracts until they get the one they want.
In the same way that someone is allowed to not breath underwater.
A lot of people don't have the luxury of choosing.
Every sector of the economy is looking for more workers.
They don't have veto power over Congress, it's about allowing workers to dictate the terms they seem fair for themselves against the US government. If Congress and the executive branch can't agree with labor terms with workers at the table, that's bad.
Not having unionized federal workers is way way way worse.
One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
> One thing I am curious about, how do you feel about police unions?
Not everyone fits into two political buckets. I am extremely anti for the reasons above as well as additional reasons particular to police unions. I also favor big tax hikes, banning guns, and higher spending on housing subsidy, snap, etc.
I just also think governments should be capable, student outcomes are important, the interest of voters are greater than that of govt employees, etc.
That makes it easy for people to leave the government.
The question you should be asking is: are there enough people who are sufficiently competent to take on the government roles?
Case study where the workers had less power than expected: Reagan vs. air traffic controllers.
Case studies where the government had less power than expected: Every coup ever, UK's Winter of Discontent (even if the long-term result was electorate going for Thatcher who gutted the unions), Polish Solidarity Movement.
Having an executive with contempt for the law and the concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a perversion of democracy.
The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law. What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these actions?
e: christ, why am I downvoted for earnestly asking a question
I agree it’s unreasonable that you’re being downvoted. I disagree strongly with your position, but you’re expressing it in a completely appropriate manner.
higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.
Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.
It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.
1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.
2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.
Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.
I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly successful system, considering most of the time since its independence has been under a father or his son.
Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy.
People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant yet.
I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary increase for a long time.
Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got promoted which is basically everyone in every department has inflated grades. These promotion are also problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now more SCS1 than ever.
40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work are actually useful.
And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done. Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And if anything the power of a department is measured by how many staff it has.
But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this is not UK specific.
The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.
Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.
Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.
It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They’re more interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.
People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out).
You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.
If you do not increase quality of life to make up for lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less capable people. Note that quality of life also includes security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.
If your stance is that the healthcare system needs improvement, I’d agree. If your point is that the best doctors are the people who have money as their top priority, I’d disagree. I’d extend the latter to say, we may not get a better healthcare system by just paying people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.
Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?
There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of the scale.
>Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?
"A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform is the obvious way forward. From decreasing unnecessary requirements for new doctors (there must be a way to not have to completely sacrifice one's 20s and early 30s and still become a doctor), to tort reform that allows for sensible judgments, to increasing funding for residency and medical schools to allow for higher supply of doctors, etc.
Also, doctor pay (per hour or per patient) has been declining in real terms for many, many years now. Which is not bad in and of itself, but when you are simultaneously decreasing remuneration and quality of life at work, intelligent people will pick up on that signal to look elsewhere to sell their services.
A lot of US healthcare is performed by smart people from poorer countries who just want a chance for their kids to grow up in the USA. That the country relies on that arbitrage has always been ridiculous to me.
With all that said, it’s still a different argument than “pay = ability”. Put differently: the $ amount in TFA could be used to increase Congress member pay from $174k to $10MM each. Do you think that would result in better politicians?
Ignoring all the other non-salary pay they get, I'll buy that low pay can select for rich politicians because it means you can't rely on your Congressional salary to make ends meet. But it only selects for corrupt politicians if the main motivation is to make money. That is the presupposition that seems to frame your whole argument, and the one I have been pushing back on since the original comment. That sentiment undergirds the premise that pay is commensurate with ability. We can create systems that don't select for people with a primary motivation related to financial gain. $10MM salaries ain't it, though.
Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.
This just doesn't make sense in the context of what you've previously said. Based on your above post, you're saying low pay selects for corruption because they're in it for the money. But giving $10MM a year selects for people who are in it for the money, meaning you have the same problem. I fail to see how that selects for better people than are there currently if it gives the same incentives.
If you re-read my original comment, I advocate for a "reasonable" salary, but not one that selects for people who have money as their primary motivation. I think there's an argument that $174k/yr is not reasonable for Congress person. We could increase that (and there are proposals to do so*) while also having the guardrails in place that don't disproportionately select for people who care more about money than their constituents.
*I suspect there is more at play than just Congressional salary. E.g., the civil servant salary ceiling is pegged to Congressional pay, so there are second-order effects to consider.
Everyone has some motivation for money. So this introduces bias towards the corrupt at any level. That’s especially true for a pay level that really is not enough for the expenses the job requires.
You seem to be assuming that being in it for the money implies corruption. I don’t think that’s even remotely true. There are plenty of honest people who value high pay. As it currently stands, Congress attracts dishonest people who are in it for the money because there are plentiful opportunities to make money dishonestly in that job. It doesn’t attract honest people who are in it for the money, because the honest pay sucks. If you pay them really well then that second category will compete for positions. It won’t be corrupt people versus true believers, it’ll be corrupt people versus true believers and honest people who want a well paid job. This would be far better than what we have now.
No. There are plenty of other ways of selling your constituents out for money that aren't corruption. I am assuming that people who value money over most everything else will tend towards decisions that optimize money at the expense of other values. It is a self-evidential claim.
Yes, there is a balance. My point is I don't wish for people where the balance is biased towards favoring money as a primary motivation for the above reason. I would much rather have someone willing to forgo excess money to help their constituents when they are in conflict.
Consider a sports analogy. There are baseball players who will put their team winning at jeopardy to pad their stats. They may refuse a sacrifice fly because it hurts their batting average. That doesn't mean they'll cheat (the equivalent of your corruption claim). But it does mean I don't want them on my team; I'd much prefer someone with winning as their primary motivation, not maximizing their personal stats.
With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.
With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.
As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.
This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.
Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.
I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.
Yes, to an extent.
Looking at the costs of housing, especially in a market like DC, the motivation isn't "making lots of money" per se, but rather "maybe I can actually make enough to afford the mortgage on an 800k crapshack" and the acknowledgment that gov roles aren't likely to cover that.
It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people.
This happens in the private sector as well, but tends to correct over time - hence big tech’s layoffs, especially of managers and nontechnical staff, after the excesses of 2021-2022.
I don’t think this is true of all state employees, but it seems to happen more with the educated professional class with more abstract work.
The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.
All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.
That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.
Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.
But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.
That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.
I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.
Think about the teachers who buy classroom supplies out of their own meager paycheck because they want them for the lesson, and 'cost-cutting' means they don't have enough resources in the school.
Think of all the people at the CDC, or at NOAH, or similar.
In any large organization, and the Fed Government is > 2m employees, so it counts, you can easily find example of people who are driven and people who coast.
And actually, people are sacked in the fed if they don't make their numbers, or they are quietly sidelined.
Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.
PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...
Arbitrarily breaking contracts usually trigger clauses where you have to pay damages/penalties for doing that, so Accenture most likely isn't loosing any money here. All government contracts tend to have clauses like these, at least where I'm form.
Assuming they are akin to grad students, these "fresh graduates" likely have more intersectional knowledge than long-time deep domain experts. I've worked in grant funding landscape, and one of the biggest challenges is that:
1. Experts have deep knowledge, but don't keep up outside their field, and yet have the most power in distributing funds that bet on future innovation and 2. Grad students have very little power to direct funds, but straddle more fields and are better positioned to see new intersections emerge.
Each have strengths. Being naive has advantages to the learner that the expert can extract from simply by having them around
So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
No, fresh 22 year olds with bachelor degrees.
> effective institutional ecologies
More so, they act as liability sponges. Leadership can blame them for any problems, poor decisions etc.
Nah
the secret sauce is "who you know"
it's a tale as old as time
This is generous. I have worked with these consultants. These aren't mom-and-pop startup consultancies. These guys charge extortionate rates and provide bottom-barrel talent. One agency, who will not be named, sweet talks you with product managers and then exports 90% of the technical labor overseas to the lowest bidder. You pay expert prices for this. Even their MBAs are tacit manipulators. I remember one project before we canned them - the PMs were constantly revising their "go to market strategy" conveniently around the time the contract would be up for negotiation.
> So I'd argue that keep an abundance of "fresh grads" isn't just cynical cost-cutting, but part of the secret sauce of why these big orgs generally operate as effective institutional ecologies
Realistically, new-grads are willing to work 14x7 and shower and sleep in the office. That's why.
These consultancies are a malignant cancer on business and the health of their employees.
I think that's the problem. They're not. I know some folks who went to consulting shops like this. They're invariably 2 types of people: people who got very high GPAs but cannot actually code a working program, and people who got pushed into the degree for various reasons but have zero passion. Note I'm not saying you need *passion* to be in this industry. But these people literally did not care if what they were doing was programming or washing dishes (beyond the pay delta and their parents (financier's) opinions).
And to some degree that's the point of these places. They take in the 40% of each CS class that can't fizzbuzz, put them through an internal bootcamp in their generic crud framework they fork every time they get a new customer, then unleash them on the world, either as "staff augmentation" or doing contract work.
I had a bunch of friends at uni who went into these roles, from a range of degrees.
They do not have that capacity, they know nothing about the real world, and they brought no insights.
And later in life, they will openly tell you that. That they knew nothing, we're a complete waste of everyone's time if involved in real work, but most often were being charged out at ridiculous figures to sit in a room and photocopy stuff that didn't need photocopying. Because that was chargeable.
Labour is very much on board with this (IR35 is a taboo).
1) Consultant is hired to solve a problem.
2) Consultant struggles to understand the nuances of the problem.
3) Consultant relies on government employees to hand-hold them through the solution, effectively subsidizing the consultant with free labor.
4) Consultant writes it up in a final report with their company logo on the title page and gets paid.
Maybe that's not necessarily bad if it eventually solves the problem, but it does seem pretty inefficient for the taxpayer.
Consultancies have never saved the government money.
US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects.
The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.
Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
Just increasing the salary band would do a lot to attract more talent, which is a good-not-perfect solution. Last time I checked going to work at a federal job would have cut my total compensation in half, but if it was just a 20% cut I would have looked deeper.
Also, the current pay-pool system is NOT effective bc MGT is NOT able and/or willing to fight for their employees who work to get a reasonable pay-bump and instead the game is always "can't pay my employees more than me or my MGT buddies".
The federal service culture insists on paying MGT positions more than technical higher-talent positions in over 80% of cases.
Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!