I figure nobody really knows a factual answer so this is going in MHO.
As you know, or learn for the first time, Elon Musk directed an email to be sent to all federal civilian employees asking them to reply with five bullet point describing what they accomplished last week. Further he said that if you do not reply, it will be interpreted as a resignation. Clusterfuck ensues.
But what if 2 million people actually responded? WTF would he or anyone else do with 2 million emails?
Trump stated that one reason they did it was to find out how many non-existent federal employees there were. No email response back, remove them from the payroll. It’s as simple as that.
Not to mention all the bogus emails generated when the address was posted on FB, assuming it was a valid address and lots of folks do it.
Who knows what he’ll do. I feel like the man is bat-crap crazy, tho that’s a diagnosis based on my opinion and not a clinical examination…
They’ll use AI (an LLM in particular) to read the emails and categorize them.
I’m not convinced he even had a plan figured out. His fans used to like to say he was playing 4D chess and we couldn’t possibly comprehend his moves and plans. I don’t think so. It’s more like he is running around hitting things with a hammer. Every now and again, things break in a way that he can take advantage of (or other people scurry around and fix the things he broke, and he takes the credit for that work).
That’s what Musk said on Monday, i.e. he’d let the AI figure out who should be let go. One problem is that there wasn’t any detail to the original request regarding how to format the five bullet points, or how much detail or context to include. Also, if they’re looking for redundant skills to eliminate, they’ll have to know exactly where each person is in an org chart, and whether there’s enough of a particular kind of work to justify two or more employees in the same team with basically the same skills.
In other words, what they’ve asked for is, by itself, pretty much useless for what they claim they will do with it.
I thought I read somewhere that they intend to look into the folk who did not respond. Which was my sole reason for responding (extremely vaguely and superficially.) To keep my name off some “list.”
That is likely to be my MO for my remaining 2+ years of my career. Keeping my head down and escaping notice, then slink out the door. Quite an ignominious way to end a 40 year career…
Just got an email today about planned RIFs, offering early retirement and bonuses for retiring. I think I could get $2500 for quitting. Not bad, but I’ll see if I can collect my salary for another couple of years.
If you did not already, please realize that, in addition to the tremendous loss of expertise and ability across the board, the tremendous drop in morale among the folk who just want to do their jobs is palpable. I know it is easy to say morale has always been bad. But when you are reduced to a skeleton staff, and receive daily messages insulting you and your organization, as well as increased micromanagement demanding that you do more and more.
Not looking for sympathy. Just suggesting there might be very real reasons should you perceive a reduction in the quality of service you receive WRT any federal programs.
I think it was a simple loyalty test, they only want workers who will do whatever they are told by Musk/Trump without regards to regulations, command structures or established procedures.
I’m not saying it will do a good job. Of course it’s a fig leaf to continue to purge who they want. It’s just plausible enough.
But the formatting of bullets, etc isn’t too big a deal for an decent LLM to handle.
Speaking as a long-time IT guy, I have to think that it’s mostly hot air, and there’s nothing useful that can actually be done with any of it. If it’s not, it’s staggeringly blinkered and incompetent.
First, in order to actually do something useful, he (Musk) would need a complete list of Federal employees and their email addresses. By complete, I mean everyone in each system at each agency. I sort of doubt the Federal IT infrastructure is so centralized that it’s all in one place, so you’ve more than likely got at best, departmental email systems. And in some cases I’ll bet it’s more decentralized than that.
So that takes time to gather all those lists, combine them, see who’s missing, etc… I’d guess on the order of weeks, if not months to gather and collate.
Then once you’ve got that list, it’s relatively trivial to set something up to receive those emails, log the addresses they come from, and check them against the list. That’s minutes at best to produce that list, and maybe a half-hour to make it look pretty. But then what do you do?
Presumably the idea is to see who doesn’t reply, and follow up. But the catch is that I’d also bet that there are a fair number of discontinued accounts and the like that should be removed, but who don’t represent dead weight on the Federal government. More importantly, there are also likely thousands of Federal employees who just don’t read email regularly as part of their jobs, because their jobs are remote, outside, or just not the sort that involve emails. People like say… undercover FBI people, Coast Guard/Navy ship crews, and so on. This Keystone Kops digital dragnet would catch these people, even though they’re not dead weight either.
If the idea is something hare-brained like using AI to parse the bullets for validity, then you’d also have to have some sort of corresponding HR job description for each of those people and some way to actually determine if what they did was valid. That’s the sort of project that takes years to design and engineer; if only because I’m guessing a majority of jobs’ descriptions don’t really correspond to what someone actually does, just like everywhere else in the world.
And speaking as a long-time…well whatever you want to call what I do…I would concur.
In my line of work, I do a lot of work with companies trying to build them into functioning organizations. Even for relatively small companies (which almost every company is, compared to the Federal government) it’s a complex process of figuring out what work needs to get done and how many people are required to do it.
Now to play devil’s advocate, years ago I was hired as a manager of a small IT strategy team in a Fortune 500 company. I asked my team to send me a few bullets on what they were working on. Not to keep their job, but because our director had resigned and left the company right after he hired me and I needed to know what the team was doing.
Well, apparently that caused a big uproar as god forbid anyone show up to work to actually “do” something.
I can give all sorts of examples of people in large corporations who basically do jack shit all day or really have no idea what their actual job is.
So maybe in Musk’s mind, he can get a quick win in cost savings by firing 200,000 idiots who can’t be bothered to articulately answer a simple email asking “what would you say you do here?”
But in reality, I suspect what they have done in the timeframe they have done it is nothing more complex than run some simple SQL statements like SELECT * FROM payments WHERE description IN ( %woke keyword list%) AND country IN ( %list of ‘shithole’ countries full of colored people% ) AND payee NOT IN (% defense contractors, conservative think tanks, lobbyists, petroleum companies, hedge funds, Tesla % )
So what you have is basically a less than 1% savings vs the $6 trillion Federal budget focusing on the sort of spending that infuriates conservatives.
Sigh. I saw “Musk” and “five bullet(s)” in the title and my heart leapt for a moment…
Never mind.
That’s works pretty well in a small tech startup when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing and in fact nobody knows what the fuck you’re doing so you’re winging and and learning as you go.
For a government of a country with millions of federal workers and a $27 trillion economy, not so much.
Maybe. But is there a single central database of federal employee email addresses? How would they even figure out who didn’t respond? I have done contracting for several different federal civilian agencies and as near as I can tell they each administered their own employee email systems.
I am also a long-time IT guy, with more than half of my career spent on federal contracts for civilian agencies (NASA, FAA, CBP, DOEd) . I agree with all of this. They would also have to figure out which email addresses are accounts for federal employees, and which are contractors (I have had .gov email addresses).
You would love the book 100 Bullshit Jobs…And How to Get Them by Stanley Bing. Bing was a pen name used by Gil Schwartz who wrote a regular business/humor column in Fortune magazine.
What, Bing inquires, do a feng shui consultant, new media executive, wine steward, department store greeter, and Vice President of the United States have in common? What, too, are the actual duties performed by a McKinsey consultant? Other than sitting around making people nervous? Could that possibly be his core function? Likewise, what does an aromatherapist actually do, per se? Sniff things and rub them on people, for big fragrant bucks? Is that all?
The answer in all cases is “Yes”. They all have bullshit jobs.
In the first week of the Trump Administration, OPM set up a system that (purportedly) allows them to send emails to all Federal employees at once. This what they used to send the “5 bullet points email”.
I’ve read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
I’ve spent most of my career working as a management consultant. Not Mckinsey specifically (although I did work at a startup where half the executives were ex-Mckinsey). For all the “nothing” we do, I kind of feel like the whole reason consultants like us exist is because these big companies full of do-nothing employees need people smart enough to show up, learn the job in short order, and get something done (whatever that “something” actually is).
Funny enough, I had a meeting last week where I was supposed to pitch myself to a client. I reached out to one of the analysts on our team to get some background on what the project actually involved and the conversation went something like this…
Finally I just got frustrated and was like "okay, I’m meeting with our client in one hour to see about taking over running YOUR PROJECT and when she asks me ‘what do you know about this project?’ I’d like to give her an answer other than “it exists”. So please explain it to me as if I were a small child.
“Well there’s this bank…”
I said as if I were a small child. Not as if YOU were a child. Tell me what the fuck you’ve been doing to deliver whatever it is they want delivered in however many months.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. As a society we funnel so many people through the higher education system to get these overpaid bullshit jobs while penny pinching all the jobs that actually do or make stuff.
I think part of the lack of empathy about job loss is that people think of some low level clerk shuffling meaningless paperwork around. They think every government worker is the guy at DMV that annoys you. My brother designs and implements fielding of aviation equipment for aircraft carriers. He’s an engineer with decades of experience. He knows if he answers an email wrong he might be fired. Like you he’s in a good position being close to retirement age but he doesn’t want to leave yet. His job will still need to be done
I have been following this closely on federal worker forums. Apparently the email address hr@opm.gov wasn’t the actual “reply to” address.
The replies went to a variety of similar addresses, such as hr5@opm.gov, hr9@opm.gov. The assumption is that this was for the purposes of sorting by agencies although no one could discern the pattern. Understandable considering that the federal employees posting on public forums are hesitant to give too many details or even reveal the agency they work for.