[peteey]

>some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do.

There's nuance to consulting costs. The government GS pay scale poorly accounts for specialized labor. It the government cannot pay to attract talent in a competitive fields, it must instead pay consultants.

[asdff]

LA metro is in a similar bind. They have to go with certain contractors because these contractors have hired all the talent that is qualified to build to LA metros own specifications for designs. They literally can't afford to understand their own specs.

[pas]

It's common in other countries to hire a separate professional firm (for each specialty) to supervise the work of the general contractor. Does LA do this?

[twobitshifter]

Yes they do.

[rhino369]

It's not just a pay issue. Government is terrible at hiring good performers, weeding out bad performers, and motivating its workforce.

Even if you hired a lead engineer for 400k, can't fire them if the end up being incompetent.

[acdha]

Government can easily get rid of bad employees. They have to be fair but it’s far from the impossibility popularly claimed.

What tends to be the case is that the management creates a mess and then complains that they can’t sack some scapegoat. Following fairness rules would allow the employee to say that they were following policy or had their judgement overruled, so instead they’re left alone and labeled “unfireable!”

It’s also important not to have too rosy an impression of a sector. Most of us here have seen private sector managers who were untouchable or managed to shift blame to others. They just didn’t have public oversight and usually don’t make the news.

[TexanFeller]

< Government can easily get rid of bad employees

At one point my wife worked for the state and she had many friends that also did that I spoke to. My wife's job was intense, but a number of her friends would talk about the shows they spent 20hrs binge watching at work in the past week. I've been at privileged tech jobs that were somewhat relaxed, but nothing close to that. If someone is so useless that you don't notice when they're screwing off 50% of the time... Even if the government can fire pathetically low performers, they often don't!

[acdha]

There’s plenty of that in the private sector, too (thinking of multiple guys earning 6 figures because they were reliable golf buddies) but in every case the problem comes down to management. For example, were those people being asked to do more? Were they getting negative reviews?

[TapWaterBandit]

> but in every case the problem comes down to management.

This is remarkably naive and misses the big point. If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.

There is no comparable incentive mechanism in government where they do not need to make a profit (they are funded off taxes which leads to far less end accountability to the people paying for the service) and in most instances it is explicitly illegal to start a business offering to do the same thing that governments do (as an example, I cant start up an alternative to the DMV to certify someone is fit to drive on the road).

The lack of competition and lack of market pressures allow for much greater inefficiencies to exist in government enterprises compared to private ones. This isn't to say government will inevitably be bad but any assessment of the problems of government vs private sector action need to take into account the important differences between their structures.

[acdha]

> If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime.

That's one option but it's far from the only one. Market pressure only works in markets where there's an efficient feedback mechanism for this kind of thing. That doesn't work very effectively if there are barriers to switch (many ISP customers) or the only choices are very comparable in price and quality (most of the other ISP customers). They might also work to increase the difficulty of switching or rely on their ability to get customers because nobody else can claim to offer all of the things certain buyers need (tons of enterprise software of the Oracle/SAP/etc. persuasion).

Most commonly, this is a problem but it'll stay below the threshold of being fatal. A company with a really profitable core business can tolerate staggering amounts of inefficiency everywhere else as long as it doesn't get core customers to leave (e.g. Google). Value generated isn't always equal, either — many organizations with some kind of seasonal component might have to tolerate periods of higher and lower utilization if it's not trivial to rehire because they need to staff for peak demand. You can hire workers in the summer and drop them in the fall if you run a hotdog stand but if you need specialized workers or have a lot of internal business process to train them on that doesn't work so well.

My point was simply that there's a big tendency to blame workers rather than the senior level managers whose policies those workers are following. In the case of governments, you don't have the same kind of market feedback as a commercial entity but you do have public oversight to a degree most companies do not and frequently things like caps on how much money can be paid to employees, etc. which would never fly in the private sector. In all cases, you can find examples which are good or bad (e.g. compare the government of Norway to Saudi Arabia, or Apple to Comcast) so rather than observing that your apples and oranges aren't the same it's usually more interesting to ask how you could get the ones from Denmark instead of the Belarusian equivalents.

[rhino369]

It's really not easy. They more or less have tenure. They can only be fired for cause and they have a right to due process. These are legal rights that normal at-will employees just don't have.

[acdha]

Non-unionized employees don't have, but yes, it's true that they require a fair process. In this thread we're talking about people who are performing badly enough to matter — that sounds like giving someone an unacceptable rating, telling them what they need to do better at, and firing them if they don't improve. The government managers I know who've done that hate the insinuation that it's impossible since that's basically saying they can't do their jobs.

[PaulHoule]

I dunno, I serve on a standards committee where one of the other volunteers works for the U.S. Govt, she's taught me a lot about a field I thought I was an expert in it.

[twobitshifter]

Consulting margins aren’t enormous either. When they pay consultants, they are paying the certified overhead costs + the hourly rate of the consultant and usually a limited percentage fee. A government employee really only saves you that fee which is 10-20%.