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by gremlinunderway
805 days ago
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Consultants are hired because hiring consultants is the first advice that consultants generate. Its a recursive loop of scamming government money on undeliverable projects. This whole boogeyman over "unfireable" government employees is nonsense created by people looking to sell private contracts. Most consultants when hired somehow themselves become unfireable and even more expensive for basic work that could be done by competent employees with a decent paycheque and union jobs. |
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That's more a problem of governments being unable/unwilling to properly scope projects - in construction for example, politicians love to low-ball estimates for their pet projects in order to have better chances at getting them passed. When you have competent government that is willing to work with and sell reasonable estimates, you get examples like the Luise-Kiesselbach-Tunnel in Munich, which got finished on time (IIRC, even a few months earlier than planned) and in budget [1]. In military projects, the "overestimations" and giant budgets are usually because money is diverted to clandestine, top secret projects that are not supposed to be known to the general public outside of a very few high ranking military and government officials. You gotta read between the lines here.
> Most consultants when hired somehow themselves become unfireable and even more expensive for basic work that could be done by competent employees with a decent paycheque and union jobs.
I've worked in the public, private and consultancy sector in Germany, so I can at least add some context from a German perspective.
Usually, government employment is unionized in one way or another and trades lower paychecks for long-term job security, in the case of the Germanic "Beamtentum" ("public servants") it's a literal lifetime agreement - the government will take care of you until you die.
However, that also has its downsides - in Germany, the difference for a simple programmer or IT admin in the public service to a colleague in the private sector can be as large as 4x. You simply won't get staffing for these positions outside of utter idealists and people looking to start a family. And you can't go outside the unionized agreements and pay market wages because that would result in "low level" staff getting paid more than the director of the entire agency in the worst case, and in the best case it would only blow apart the entire wage hierarchy. Additionally, the staffing cost for a project realized with consultants can be directly booked on the budget of the project, whereas assigning time/wage for government-hired employees is way more difficult.
Hence, the government is better off hiring specialists from consultancies and body shops... it allows the government to keep its existing wage structure, keeps permanent obligations from the books (similar to the capex vs opex debate), and to get actually validated experts instead of having to deal with validation itself.
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/luise-kiesselbach-tun...