Hey, great responses, so far! Fascinating stuff…
Surprisingly, my wife, who retired from a state regulatory agency a few years ago, is much more critical of state and federal employees/services than I am. I just figure that I’m associating the employee with a truly unpleasant process (e.g., getting a lien released on a vehicle title, jumping over some bar to licensing). She takes the interaction very personally and will even explain that she used to work for the state herself and knows what good service is. It can be embarrassing to be around her when she starts a rant.
I worked in Data Processing.
That was another problem with the State, way too many bosses for the amount of people.
In my dept there were two DP Asst, two temps, two techs (who were supervisors over us) and one Manager. That was when I started, the one tech left and the other tech beat up the manager. The manager (who was pretty much a waste of human protoplasm) was transferred to a department where he could work alone and not do too much damage. The tech who beat up the boss got the boss’s job.
The tech answered to another manager, who was over our department and one other department.
That manager reported to the next level up supervisor who was over a total of four departments.
The supervisor reported to the assistant director (the one who drank beer at his desk all day).
The asst director reported to the director.
Things did get shaken up a bit when we got a new governor who liked to make unannounced visits to the various state agencies.
I heard the governor walked in and the shit hit the fan.
A friend who still worked there called me up and told me I was missing all the fun. I’m sorry I missed it.
It was one crazy, screwed up place to work and from what I heard, most of the other state agencies were about the same.
Never mind
I think a lot of it comes from a place of jealousy. Government jobs have a reputation for being secure and cushy. Based on comments I’ve read online, a lot of people also seem to think that government jobs only hire minorities, veterans, and the disabled, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that fuels some of the jealousy as well.
Is jealous the right word? People can’t rightly be said to be jealous of leeches.
Are you basing this on any reality that you have observed? Or is this just more parroting of America-hating Right Wing drivel?
I am sorry you had such a terrible experience. I don’t know which country you had this experience in, but in the US that would be a pathological situation. I have literally never heard or certainly experienced any such situation in my work life. As for your father’s report-he really knew of cases where a federal employee brought illegal drugs to work and sold them to co-workers? More than once? Again, I don’t know which country you are talking about, but I can’t imagine anything like that happening in the US. And I worked in federal government spaces for 34 years. Perhaps others on the Dope will be able to report similar cases in the US, but I rather hope not.
I agree with Dinsdale. You have no idea what is involved. The supervisor doesn’t just write down a bunch of random comments and call it a plan of action. The supervisor has to come up with a specific unique set of steps for that individual which if followed will allow the individual to stay in their position. So the supervisor has to come up with ideas that are almost certainly outside his area of expertise which if followed will leave him with a disgruntled and unhappy employee to supervise far into the future. Oh, and then the supervisor has to come up with the resources to implement that plan.
Anyone who thinks it just involves filling out forms has no idea what the process involves.
And as for the leave, most of the high achieving federal employees I know are in the same boat. They take personal pride in their work. Losing leave is a major issue in the federal work force.
Your white sheet is showing.
I think there is the problem. “most of which I won’t really need to do anything extra”.
That has never been the case in the times I have seen the process work. There are a LOT of meetings with one’s supervisors, painful discussions with coworkers about why this person and not that person, rewrites because HR didn’t feel there was enough justification for some conclusion, resources to devote to the action plan. Firing someone is time consuming. Does it take all the supervisor’s time? No, but it takes a noticeable amount. And the amount of time it takes is definitely a factor. Simply because during that entire time, the office is negatively impacted. There is someone there who is unhappy and showing it. One unhappy person makes others unhappy with their job.
Might come from the Indus Valley.
That is probably very dependent on the organization. I work for a large agency , but I’m in a relatively small program. Small enough that I know who most of the problem children are statewide- so it’s not actually easier to get them promoted out of my office than it is to fire them. Nobody else will choose them - and if I promote an incompetent person within my own office, it only makes my problem worse.
Regarding how hard it is to fire someone- in my experience, it’s not difficult at all assuming that the managers and supervisors are doing their own jobs. Which IME , is a big assumption. The vast majority of those problem children I mentioned earlier have been problems since they were on probation immediately after being hired. It’s very easy in my job to fire someone who is on probation - it’s a lot harder to fire someone who has had poor performance or attendance for the past 20 years whose performance reviews (when they were even completed) said that their performance was “satisfactory”. Although I don’t think those supervisors and managers ignore the problems because they are lazy and inefficient- I think for the most part they are reluctant to “take someone’s job away” which is a different problem.
Related to the confirmation bias and “serving the public” previously mentioned, there’s also the issue that the general public only encounters a small subset of government workers. They encounter the clerk at the motor vehicle office or the post office or the traffic agent who is writing them a parking ticket but most people don’t have any real interaction with firefighters or the people in the district attorney’s office or the people who decide which intersections need pedestrian ramps or those who design the bridges , etc.
We create insurmountable obstacles and expectations for the government, then whine when we don’t get what we want.
We want the hiring process to be fair, but then we don’t like the hoops people have to jump through to try to keep it fair.
We want the firing process to be fair, but then we don’t like the hoops people have to jump through to try to keep it fair.
We want everyone to be sunny and polite, but then we want to attack them at will.
We want everyone to spend a ton of time on our problems, but then we want them to be incredibly efficient and never have a backlog.
We want everything to be done meticulously, but we want it done yesterday.
We want everything to be done immediately, but we don’t want to pay for it.
Some of the people I’ve known in government (mostly federal, only significant exposure to two cabinet level departments) are great folks. I’d say the vast majority are people I am delighted to know. Kind, smart, dedicated folks who care passionately about the work they are doing.
Many of the same “wants” above apply to other services. We want our doctors to spend hours with us but we never want to wait. And then we want them to be free.
Yeah, all those military leeches defending the rights of people like you to call them that. You might want to try that to someone’s face, boyo.
Really insightful post, js.
My two worst work experiences were in the private sector and nonprofit sector, respectively, despite my having spent the bulk of my work-life working for the government.
In one case, I’d spent weeks writing a course on web-based marketing (in 1998), with tons of student notes so that folks who took the course would leave with a practical manual on everything I’d researched. This was an in-house course for IBM employees. Near the end of the project, the manager who’d commissioned the course had me remove all the student notes, because she needed other departments to pay her department for their employees who took the course, and she worried that with good student notes, they’d just take the materials back to their office and teach other employees. This despite the fact that IBM’s internal protocols made all internal documents freely available to all other departments.
Took me a good two days of work to go through all the materials and remove the student notes. Most dysfunctional thing I’ve ever had to do for work.
Second worst experience was for a nonprofit. One example: the board meeting where two board members were sound asleep. Second example: the massive fundraiser that netted about -50% of the costs of putting it on, at which a drunk board member called our Executive Director “insane, no, literally insane” and “a toxic personality” in front of a roomful of people he was trying to raise money from. Third example: the executive director demanded that I write an article telling our constituency (mostly poor working semi-unionized African Americans across the southest US) about the perils of Y2K; when I demurred, saying that those perils were vastly overblown, she insinuated that I was racist for not writing it. I quit, the newsletter came out with that article written by her–in February 2000.
So yeah, my own experiences make me skeptical that government workers are on average worse than private sector workers. Are there any metrics that indicate that government workers on average work less hard than private sector workers?
Public servants also have another enemy, their bosses.
You would never see the CEO of a major publicly quoted company deriding their staff, saying they are inefficient, lazy, expensive etc, after all it would reflect on them and their company, and you do not slag off your own staff and then expect to get the best out of them - except maybe if you are a sports team coach.
However, politicians are the ultimate employers of government workers, and yet you will see the same politicians deriding public servants all the time, you will see this especially in election campaigns where the same shit-whip politicians will offer ‘reform’ of public services, reduce taxes by making the lazy and inefficient public workers carry out their work harder for less money.
Over time this gets deep into the minds of the public, how would you feel if your own boss derided you as a worker? Now imagine what its like for public sector workers.
The public are generally what I would describe as ‘Sheeple’, they follow each others opinions and repeat the same old shit that spews for from the cesspits of the mouths of those politicians.
When did you hear of a politician generally having much of a good word for a public servant that was still alive? You only hear them compliment dead public servants, such as dead police officers, or dead soldiers etc.
When did you ever hear of a politician thanking public sector workers for being there and doing essential work or services well? Not often, if at all.
When did you see a comedian express any gratitude to a public sector worker - public sector workers are commented upon in ways that would be completely unacceptable if the comments were made about black people, or some other protected minority.
It is just a lazy meme from lazy self serving individuals seeking re-election, however those politicians also fail to realise, public sector works also have a vote, and in a tight contest they can make the difference.
It’s been my sad experience that the folks that squall the loudest about the government are those who constantly have their hands out for the services, subsidies, tax breaks, or the paycheck that the government provides.
Large hospital systems definitely do.
I recently found out that one of the systems in my area has a 29-year-old CEO. 
I wonder how long it will be before he gets caught with his hand in a proverbial cookie jar.