[GlenTheMachine]

“ It reads like an indictment of the government employee personally”

As a government employee: it often is the employee personally. Not always, but surprisingly often. There is a type of mid-level bureaucrat who just can’t be bothered to make anyone else’s life easier, even if they can. It’s just easier not to, and over time that becomes its own form of malice. The tales I could tell you about security officers basically abusing their power in order to make their own lives as easy as possible, while making everyone else’s live almost impossible…

[jiggawatts]

Many large organisations put people into a position where there is zero personal upside to action, but some non-zero upside to inaction. Risk avoidance, less work, lower stress, no need to learn anything new, etc.

Government bureaucracies do this most often, but you also see it in thankless software maintenance where the people empowered to merge PRs simply… don’t. It’s easier to do nothing.

I also notice this behavior at large corporations when dealing with something small that they do, where even huge improvements won’t “move the needle” for the corporation as a whole so they just can’t be bothered. No bonus, no work!

As a random example: I found a one-line fix that improved the performance of a flagship enterprise software product by a factor of five and was told that nobody would lift a finger unless I could prove that this change would directly increase sales by at least $5 million!

[ykonstant]

I have often heard this story. To my ears, inexperienced in the tech industry, but experienced in others, it sounds absurd. If a modification improves performance even in the slightest perceptible way (of course it needs to be perceptible by the user), it is the job of the sales team to hype it up to the heavens.

To me, these stories sound like a ridiculous failure of the sales team or of the executive team to communicate the change to the sales team.

[jiggawatts]

The incentives don't align.

If this was a self-funded startup where performance directly translates to less of an impact on the hip pocket of the founder, then yes, absolutely, you'll traction with even the smallest improvement.

Similarly, I love watching CppCon talks by Andrei Alexandrescu where he describes a 1-2% improvement across a huge fleet of servers that probably got him a nice bonus and/or a promotion. That's because he directly reduced the costs to the corporation itself, making his manager look good, or his manager's manager, or whatever.

Nobody gives the slightest f%&# about their customer's experience. They really don't.

I say this with confidence because I just looked up Andrei's video on YouTube and the page froze for a solid 30 seconds while it loaded 200 bytes of text and a few thumbnails.

Google doesn't care in the slightest what my experience is.

Nobody does!

That's because in any larger organisation, only your superior's opinion matters. Customers are not superiors.

[austhrow743]

If you spend your time hyping performance instead of the things your prospects care about then you will get less sales.

[watwut]

But we do NOT want random government employs accepting data in random format by email they just decided that are safe and non-executable. It is not like the admin lady in the office got an extensive training about what can be done with pdf, xls, usb stick, txt and what not.

They just have no idea. From this woman point of view, pdf in email is as safe as usb stick in a an envelope.

[evanjrowley]

Agree that this is a very messy situation.

Most health information transferred online between patients and other entities goes through a portal rather than email to ensure PHI isn't transmitted over unencrypted SMTP or simply forwarded on to some insecure mail server. I.e. data loss prevention.

Wherever it goes, there are a various services that can be used to ensure the file is not malicious. Probably API integration with Palo Alto WildFire or ICAP protocol with Opswat would be the best choices. Neither would be affordable for small government offices.

[BloondAndDoom]

This has been my experience, it’s that “Not my problem” attitude

[observationist]

People given a tiny amount of power with no consequences for misusing it, inflicting their power on people for no better reason than that they can.

Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

I find the story unlikely, reading more like a vengeful malicious compliance fantasy than how humans behave. In real life, a nasty Karen like that, after being inconvenienced or having their time wasted, would go out of their way to ensure the offending citizen was punished. In this case, they'd find a technicality or process to ensure the blind author lost their benefits, or was greatly inconvenienced to whatever degree possible.

You get fuming, frothing at the mouth inchoate rage out of people like this when they're directly challenged. They seethe.

They'd find a technicality, wait until Friday at 4:59 pm, drop a letter in the post box that declines benefits because the ink on pages 33 and 138 smudged some critical detail, or some other completely made up nonsense. If the author wanted to get back to baseline, they'd have to go to heroic efforts, either pressuring the tinpot tyrant government bureaucrat in social media or through journalists, or by escalating through the government bureaucracy and appealing to higher powers.

This has "and then everyone clapped" vibes. Or maybe OP just got lucky with a novice government worker that hadn't fledged into their full Karen powers.

[metalliqaz]

> with no market feedback

It's amazing how many people seem to have learned their civics from conservative talk shows.

government employees work for elected officials, who hear often from angry "customers" and are constantly at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews"

[observationist]

Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.

When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.

[alibarber]

I thought the “performance reviews” they were alluding to were elections.

Which doesn’t really make sense as permanent civil servants don’t have any stake in those and can’t be summarily dismissed by the elected politicians in a lot of places I’m aware of, particular at local level.

[hunterpayne]

I have to fill out paperwork for the government on a regular basis. I can tell you from first hand experience, the government's main problems are completely their own fault. They are easily 25 years out of date in technology. They can't accept encrypted files, they can't accept credit cards, they can't seem to even do the most basic things that even my dentist's office with 2 total employees can seem to do.

Its so bad that I can't help but think its because the contracts to support government workers are handed out in questionable ways. While I don't think much of the people who work in government offices, I do think they could accept emails if their bosses wanted them to and their contractors provided the tech. They aren't any more or less capable than the dentist's office workers. They just have to work with terrible tech that was clearly chosen for the wrong reasons.

[gravypod]

> government employees work for elected officials

This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:

1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)

2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)

3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments

I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.

[metalliqaz]

Do you think the President isn't an elected official?

the fact that the public is stupid does not mean there is no feedback

[gravypod]

Sorry, my comment was not clearly phrased looking back. #1 is an example of an elected official who can hire/fire. #2/#3 are not. These are all from recent litigation (in the court room and within public discourse) during the Trump presidency.

[mlrtime]

LOL government employees and "at risk of losing their jobs following scheduled "performance reviews""

And you are criticizing half the country based on a ideology? These employees are at almost no risk of losing their jobs because someone calls their representative to complain, this is fantasy.

[sellmesoap]

>Government is parasitic, with no market feedback, so people that would normally get weeded out for being awful humans, for incompetence, for psychopathy of various flavors - they all end up with a long, well paid career and no consequences.

While I agree that the market feedback is a problem with gov jobs, I've worked corporate and small company jobs with all these negative tropes and the same result, you build a hierarchy and some weirdos find a way past (or are) HR and nestle in the folds. I think the best solution is working for smaller companies that have a high standard for employee behavior enforced by everyone, strong boundaries are key. When people are seasoned and emotionally aware you realize that working in the vicinity of people like that takes way more energy from everyone then it's worth to be tolerant or ignore the problem.

[cineticdaffodil]

You have the same phenomena in mega coorps. They would for a internal promotion point place the externalities cost of half an hour of work on all of mankind.

[observationist]

For sure - culture is a huge component. Government is unique in that incompetence and laziness and all the shitty behaviors that get people canned in the real world don't have an impact on money coming in. In some places, revenue increases steadily, completely decoupled from any sort of functional attachment to value.

So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

[geysersam]

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

[GlenTheMachine]

It's more complicated than that.

"The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.

And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.

In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.

What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.

So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.

In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.

[atoav]

I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.

There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.