In my large company, thousands of email addresses are for groups, departments, auto-reply addresses and the like. In other words, not attached to specific individuals.
Just for reference, I’m in the senior middle-management tier for a large city government’s IT department, and have seen what a surprisingly large lift it is to just do things like roll out Windows 11 across a roughly 12,000 computer institution that spans a fairly large city in land area.
I can’t imagine that doing something like Musk is doing is actually feasible in such a short time on something two orders of magnitude larger in terms of personnel and dramatically more geographically separate.
Yeah, I’ve got a good buddy who works for the Federal government (DoD in fact), and another buddy of ours sent him a joke saying “Look out for DOGE!” with a meme of the Bobs from “Office Space” saying “What would you say… you do here?”
The guy who sent it, another buddy, and myself thought it was funny in a dark sort of way, all of us working in IT or other industries where the potential of random layoffs is always looming in the background. And two of us have actually been laid off a couple of times. So to us it was more black humor than anything else; almost a sort of commisseration of pointing out how absurd and godawful it is, and very much a sort of “laugh or cry” type thing.
Our Fed buddy did NOT take it well. He is truly freaked out and agitated about it.
Easy for me to say, but I doubt they would fine anyone for answering “wrong.”
If it were me,
- Worked hard
- Worked smart
- showed up on time
- impressed my coworkers
- fuck you.
Although many people are still fully bought into the self-perpetuated myth of Musk’s “genius”, the reality is that he is of very mean intelligence but possessed with an ability to get people to buy into his ‘visions’ even when they are completely moronic; witness all of the people here and elsewhere who justify his brilliance and proclaim his beneficence regarding concepts like the Hyperloop, his “Boring Company”, point-to-point suborbital transportation using ‘Starship’, near-term colonization on Mars, et cetera despite obvious and demonstrable hurdles with all of these notions. He has still never made good on a pledge to end famine, and he’s never rescued anyone or owned up to how his bad management style has ruined lives or how his shoddy cars have killed people.
He’s actually just the world’s oldest 13 year old edgelord who found a cheat code to an already broken system of speculative investment turning him into “The World’s Richest Man” (if you estimate real wealth in terms of ‘market cap’ of companies which investors are convinced are worth way more than they can ever produce in decades of profit). Elon has no plan, he’s not playing 4D chess, and he doesn’t understand how anything in government actually works; he’s just a stupid boy walking around a farmyard shooting everything he sees with a BB gun to see the reaction he gets. He’s a dumb motherfucker who is eventually going to walk up behind a donkey or shoot a bull in the eye and then we’ll all get to see what a barnyard rampage looks like.
Don’t accept anything that doesn’t come from your department or agency head and through the normal management channels. Elon’s “offer” of eight months of paid leave is nonsense that he doesn’t have any authority to execute on, nor will it be honored if the government goes on a shutdown as it appears poised to do in March. Get everything in writing from your boss or agency HR, and if you are in AFGE or another union get their take on it before agreeing to anything, because a bunch of what has been done so far is completely against established policies if not outright illegal, and ‘walking off the job’ because you agreed to a bunch of illegitimate nonsense may be considered abandonment or voluntary severance.
That is exactly what it is. This is what authoritarian regimes do; they establish compliance and try to screen out anybody who will stand up and oppose them. I’m pretty sure you could populate the response with five generic and vague statements and it would be just as effective as trying to genuinely explain your job and tasking in depth.
Stranger
I used to do occupational analysis and training analysis and design in the military and I can concur with this. There are subtleties and nuances just between different occupations and job types in which the same verb might have completely different meanings. Having a bunch of Elon’s subject matter non-experts go at this could be catastrophic.
It’s the sort of complex process that, ironically, DOGE would find and eliminate.
I don’t think he’s dumb, I think that he came from wealth, and then hasn’t ever suffered the consequences of failure or been checked in any serious fashion.
He’s acting like someone whose never actually had negative consequences hit home- he just does what he wants as if there aren’t consequences, because he’s never been held to account before.
This is no different- Trump says “Go do this.” and he’s doing it, as if he’s got all the legal and moral authority to do it, because he can’t imagine that he can’t do it, or that there will be any consequences if he does.
Unsurprisingly, it echoes the outlook, attitudes and life story of his boss, with much of the same effects.
I feel like a lot of that isn’t necessarily that the jobs themselves are BS, but rather that the communication and/or implementation of the job is ineffective or poorly done. Case in point- my job. It’s one that’s relatively new in the IT world, and on paper what I’m supposed to be doing sounds like a fantastically useful thing if done well. The description sounds entirely BSey though.
The problem though, is that they (higher dept. management) sort of repurposed a bunch of managers who had adjacent and much more responsible jobs into this particular job title, and then failed to communicate what the new job title does and doesn’t do to anyone in particular, least of all the people who got re-titled. All they knew is that their staffs no longer belonged to them, but didn’t really know what they were and weren’t responsible for.
I got promoted into the role after my predecessor got fed up and quit, because he couldn’t get his head around no longer being directly responsible for operational stuff and having a lot of influence without much actual authority. I’ve subsequently spent the last four years trying to straighten everyone else out as to what I do and don’t do in my role, with partial success. My co-workers meanwhile are all pulling in different directions based on what they perceive the job to be, and our boss has a tendency to pile on responsibilities that are adjacent and convenient, but not really part of the job, which muddles the waters even more.
I could totally see management consultants or our local equivalent of DOGE clowns coming in and deciding we have bullshit jobs, when in fact the jobs are very useful, but not well defined or communicated to anyone. As confused as I felt I was, I was shocked when at a recent conference/workshop for my job title, I found that I actually have a very solid handle on what the job is supposed to be and how I should be doing it.
Just talked w/ my boss after she got off a regional call. In short, the message was “if you are eligible and it is feasible for you to retire, go!” 
There is going to be blood in the water - firings, consolidation of offices/regions. It is going to be stressful and unpleasant - and NO ONE knows for sure what to expect. If you retire now, you might be saving someone else’s job.
I have a very good relationship with my boss. I told her I always produced #s and will continue to do so. I can do more, but to be clear, the quality will be lower.
As of now, I plan on keeping my head down and sticking it out for another 3 yrs. But anytime it gets intolerable, I’m gone. Right now I live close to our office, so going in is not a huge impediment. But if they close our office and expect me to do a lengthy daily commute - been there, done that. I’m gone.
As I’ve said, I’m not expecting any sympathy from anyone. But a couple of things I’ve been noticing:
I’ve always been “mentally agile.” During my work days, I juggle a lot of balls trying to keep things moving. That and exceptional organization and efficiency have been my superpowers. Makes a job many consider quite difficult not all that difficult for me. But as of the past week or 2, I’ve just been feeling stupid. Not as quick. I’m assuming it is the constant assault of insults and uncertainty. Gotta get over that.
Second thing, my job is not a “happy” one. I tend not to be an overly happy guy and the people I deal with are - pretty much by definition, unhappy. Reasonable, as most of them are in shitty circumstances. This situation is not improving my mood/ making me feel like saying something IRT perceived stresses. I have to be extra alert that I do not express what I may be feeling when tech issues arise (which happens WAY too often), or someone screws up/lies to me/wastes my time (also happens ALL THE TIME).
We’ll see how bad it gets how quickly. Meanwhile, I think I’ll research what difference there may be for me if I get RIFed rather than retire…
I assume like any other company in America: use it against you if they want to fire you and ignore it if they want to keep you.
It’s not, but he wants people to believe that it is, and he certainly has Trump eating out of his hand. For a guy who is supposed to be a genius he has an incredibly simplistic approach. I’m suspecting this is all a smokescreen for the real goal, which is to backfill federal positions with people willing to give Trump the Nazi salute.
I’ve been on a few calls with Musk (long before he bought Twitter and turned into a Nazi fanboi making fascist arm signs) and I have no problem describing him as “dumb”, certainly in the sense of believing that he is way smarter and more knowledgable than he really is, and willing to argue anybody into exhaustion regardless of their actual expertise. He’s a lot like Elizabeth Holmes in believing that a ‘vision’ is what makes one smart and the details are something to be handled by little people who he employs even though his visions are often both unworkable and stolen from other sources (in Elon’s case, mostly from Golden Age of Science Fiction illustrations). He’s also really good at getting people to buy into his visions and convincing them that he is a ‘genius’ even as he is saying things that any actual expert would recognize as inaccurately parroting of jargon. In other words, he’s a magnificent bullshitter but if you could get him to sit still long enough to try to explain how his SpaceX rockets or Tesla cars work you’d get a random spew of factoids and anecdotes but he couldn’t actually perform even a simple rocket performance analysis using the rocket equation or lay out a top level system diagram of how a Tesla works to save his life.
What is really galling about his running of “DOGE” is not just that he doesn’t have a fucking clue as to what he is doing or how to actually evaluate efficiency of government agencies and services (which is clearly not his goal) but how absolutely callous and jovial he is about cutting peoples’ livelihoods (not just the federal employees he is trying to fire but all of the contractors and researchers dependent upon grants from NIH, NSF, NOAA, et cetera) and eliminating basic services that people have depended upon without any kind of independent review or even a chance for the performers to justify the necessity of their work. It is an absolutely narcissistic, “I know better than anyone what is good for you,” kind of belief system that despite people wondering when Elon ‘changed’ is how he has behaved for his entire adult life. He doesn’t even have Trump’s motivation of needing to revenge himself upon a public and government that previously rejected him; Elon has never really suffered any loss or consequence even though he takes every opportunity to paint himself as a ‘victim’ of regulatory agencies and their workers doing their jobs to protect the public interest, and he is just openly glorifying himself with his amusement about the outrage that nobody can stop him. He’s literally the spoilt child running through a party screaming and smashing everything and his parents shrugging with a, “Well, what can you do?” expressions and the rest of the adults silently observing in horror.
Stranger
As I heard someone say on the radio, cruelty seems to be the point.
Why can’t they be content with winning, and screwing the other folk over? Why the need to add insult to injury?
Classic quote, from 2022:
So Musk’s stupidity has been an open secret for years.
He still had some fans on this board who would reflexively defend him against criticism. It’s noteworthy how quiet they have become lately.
Their silence has been deafening.
Stranger
I imagine in Elons mind because he is the wealthiest, and therefore smartest, man who ever lived, he’s just super overjoyed for the opportunity to put his genius to work making the Federal government run as efficiently as Twitter / X runs now!
It’s an ideology completely based on being a “stupid asshole”. I don’t agree with all liberal policies, but at least they seem to come from a base of “let’s try to help people”. Theirs is a narcissistic philosophy that basically money and might makes right and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is just a woke snowflake.
As other’s have pointed out, this administration and their followers are like a spoiled dull-witted hyperactive child who is given free reign after years of being forced to behave in polite society.
He’s certainly not the genius all the fanboys think he is. But you have to give him credit for meeting all the goals that the Tesla board set for him, with massive incentives for things that I believe they never though he could achieve. I think that is where most of his wealth came from.
He’s not a complete moron, like Trump. But people have this funny way to correlate wealth with brains. And it just doesn’t work like that.
So I’ll hijack my own thread. Musk slashed the Twitter staff. Why is Twitter still even operational? I won’t say it was a genius move, but it seems to have worked to cut costs without degrading service. What am I missing?
Twitter is functioning because it was already a mature service with generally reliable functionality (even if some of it was reportedly kind of hacked together). That being said, they’ve had many notable outages. Most of the staff that were fired were either “backend” staff doing things like policy development and enforcement, review, and future development, which seems have to mostly stopped as it has transformed into a platform for “free speech” (if that speech doesn’t upset Elon and especially if it is racist and/or outrageous).
Twitter/X has been hemorrhaging money despite the cuts because advertisers have fled the platform, and investors and the banks that loaned them money have become increasingly nervous about ever getting their money back, as well they should because nobody else is going to overpay US$44B for this platform and there is no plan to make anything like that amount of money through advertising or any other hypothetical revenue stream after Elon’s plans to make people pay for verification or access pretty much collapsed in on themselves. Elon’s “genius move”? Telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself”. Now that’s genius!
Stranger
Oh, I expect multiple parts of the government to be so crippled that our oligarch rulers will proclaim “See! Government doesn’t work! We need to privatize all these functions, run them like a business (and let us reap massive profits for even crappier service).”
I’m seeing this less a loyalty test than simple harassment and stress to cull the ranks. Akin to “voluntary deportation”. Make the job so stressful with stupid shit things things outside your control that many just leave.
That’s the way it is perceived from inside my little corner.
In a crazy way, the folk who are least stressed seem to be the least competent. The ones who don’t really seem to care enough to do their jobs well. Whereas the folk in responsible positions, and those who actually care somewhat about doing a decent job, are really stressed by the continuous onslaught of clearly intended insults.