I see why people think federal employees are lazy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Bureaucracy feeds on itself and creates its own extensive busywork. Administrative tasks begets more administrative tasks. Yes, government work is not productive. It's a slow, massive beast that operates on a very different timescale and answers to a very different master (or rather, no master). Most employees are in their jobs because it is easy. Busywork isn't the same as challenging.

I had a government job and left after two years. At my first private sector job I accomplished more in six months than most of my old gov't coworkers did in six years.

I will allow that the very cream of the crop, perhaps the top 5% of Fed employees, are genuinely accomplished people. But the rest are seeking to coast till retirement without working too hard.

What did you accomplish?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bureaucracy feeds on itself and creates its own extensive busywork. Administrative tasks begets more administrative tasks. Yes, government work is not productive. It's a slow, massive beast that operates on a very different timescale and answers to a very different master (or rather, no master). Most employees are in their jobs because it is easy. Busywork isn't the same as challenging.

I had a government job and left after two years. At my first private sector job I accomplished more in six months than most of my old gov't coworkers did in six years.

I will allow that the very cream of the crop, perhaps the top 5% of Fed employees, are genuinely accomplished people. But the rest are seeking to coast till retirement without working too hard.

What did you accomplish?

This has been my experience in 10 years of federal service

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bureaucracy feeds on itself and creates its own extensive busywork. Administrative tasks begets more administrative tasks. Yes, government work is not productive. It's a slow, massive beast that operates on a very different timescale and answers to a very different master (or rather, no master). Most employees are in their jobs because it is easy. Busywork isn't the same as challenging.

I had a government job and left after two years. At my first private sector job I accomplished more in six months than most of my old gov't coworkers did in six years.

I will allow that the very cream of the crop, perhaps the top 5% of Fed employees, are genuinely accomplished people. But the rest are seeking to coast till retirement without working too hard.

What did you accomplish?

This has been my experience in 10 years of federal service

Not mine in 20 years of federal service.

I'm writing this while taking a dinner break before getting back to trying to finish a project, one of about 10 I am working on at the same time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hire me? I worked at startups delivering 3 people’s workload.

Op here. You should apply through usajobs! We have no money for new hires!

So then why are you asking him to apply?

[Anonymous]

The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

That was probably true 30, maybe even 20 years ago. These days I get the impression the government bureaucracy is too unwieldy and too entrenched to its self importance that there's a risky form of cronyism and corruption emerging. The SCOTUS just smacked WPA down over Chevron because the agency had been creating its own laws. So perhaps there's progress in that direction. But people do have good reasons for having low confidence and trust in the government to act responsibly.

[Anonymous]

Here's the problem: I'm a fed. And I act very rationally. For the first 10 years of my career, I busted my butt. There was not a linear payoff. So guess which side of the line is prefer to be on. I cannot increase the payoff amount, so I reduce my output. 45yo fed who is coasting yo retirement in about 20 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Bureaucracy feeds on itself and creates its own extensive busywork. Administrative tasks begets more administrative tasks. Yes, government work is not productive. It's a slow, massive beast that operates on a very different timescale and answers to a very different master (or rather, no master). Most employees are in their jobs because it is easy. Busywork isn't the same as challenging.

I had a government job and left after two years. At my first private sector job I accomplished more in six months than most of my old gov't coworkers did in six years.

I will allow that the very cream of the crop, perhaps the top 5% of Fed employees, are genuinely accomplished people. But the rest are seeking to coast till retirement without working too hard.

What did you accomplish?

This has been my experience in 10 years of federal service

Not mine in 20 years of federal service.

I'm writing this while taking a dinner break before getting back to trying to finish a project, one of about 10 I am working on at the same time.

Same, 25 years of federal service. I just finished work a few minutes ago and I started at 7am.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I mean, there's a reason why the saying is "good enough for government work!"

Everything in my section is simply about getting the project/task completed, not doing an outstanding job. That pretty much has to be the mentality when a section that used to have 12 employees is down to 7 (5 right now while 1 is on maternity leave & 1 on FMLA). There's been a freeze on new hires since mid-2020.

That phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means. It meant during WW2 that products were good enough for government use and it was a higher bar.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

While I sort of agree, I can’t stand all the busy work. Like to have a credit card so that you can purchase supplies for your team it requires hours of work every month to reconcile. Or the internal control reviews. Or all the budget exercises. Or records. Some weeks it’s very hard for me to get any work done and I am a hard worker. It’s like someone messed up once with their credit card so they put all these checks and balances in place, hire an FTE to manage it and in the end it costs more

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hire me? I worked at startups delivering 3 people’s workload.

I’ve worked at startups and at in Federal.

Sure you wear many hats in startup world, but there is clearer priorities and triage. In gov everything is “important” and urgent, in fact especially time consuming administrative and reporting tasks.

Also, unless you are a founder at startup, you are an underpaid patsy. Get a job at a FAANG or gov

NP, you obviously have zero idea how well paid people at start ups are. My husband specifically seeks out start ups because of the comp and the IPO potential. Start Ups have to give our incredible packages to attract talent. Where he’s at now, not only is he paid a base of 320k, our health insurance is 100% employer paid, he gets alll fed holidays, plus one mental health day a month, plus 5 volunteer days a year, this is in addition to his “unlimited” PTO.

A fun benefit is help for your dependent high school and college students with their writing. They have a service that are professional editors and English teachers where you can turn a paper in and they will send you back corrections and suggestions. My son had help writing 3 college essays, which went through about a half dozen revisions and he got into NYU Stern for finance with below the average SATs and GPA and no hook. I have no doubt the essay sealed the deal.

Start ups pay very well if you have the stomach for risk.

$320k for DC is good, if he’s in an individual contributor role. For Bay Area it’s low and for executive or director level is low. He would make more at FAANG.

Unlimited leave is a scam FYI

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

While I sort of agree, I can’t stand all the busy work. Like to have a credit card so that you can purchase supplies for your team it requires hours of work every month to reconcile. Or the internal control reviews. Or all the budget exercises. Or records. Some weeks it’s very hard for me to get any work done and I am a hard worker. It’s like someone messed up once with their credit card so they put all these checks and balances in place, hire an FTE to manage it and in the end it costs more

+1 to both points. There won’t be congressional hearings and front page news stories about exempt employees filling out their time cards wrong, but someone did it in my agency and now we have this awful software we have to use to mark everything down.

If a business takes a risk and something goes wrong the business loses money (and maybe gets bailed out if things are bad enough). If the feds take a risk and something goes wrong they will hear about it endlessly by peope making political points.

Also the very fact that we have a civil service managed by political appointees means things will never be as efficient as they could be. Imagine if the top layer of management at a big business never stayed more than a couple years.

[Anonymous]

I agree with OP and I know why, because it happened to me! Part of it is the ballooning requirements for "accountability" that PP mentioned, and the fact that we don't have admin or records management staff anymore, it's now "everyone's job" to learn every procedure, determine what is a federal record and its retention schedule, etc. It's a lot of documentation to do for every step of your *real* job.

The other part is that we don't fund the government to DO stuff anymore, we fund it to get people in the private sector to do stuff at a higher cost. I am in an SME position leading a research position. The guy in my job in the 80s and 90s did a ton of the research himself. Standards have changed, research is more complex and publication standards are higher today, and we do more of it; it's just not possible for one persin to do 20 multi-year research projects no matter how productive they are. But instead of being a PI with a research staff, the only "research" I get to do is to survey literature and gather initial data ro scope out contracts and grants to universities to do the work for us instead, because our funding is restricted and most of it can't be used for staffing Of course it looks like I do nothing! I know I have to launch 10 projects in fiscal year 24, and am already working on preliminary research for scoping, but my name won't be on any of them in the end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

While I sort of agree, I can’t stand all the busy work. Like to have a credit card so that you can purchase supplies for your team it requires hours of work every month to reconcile. Or the internal control reviews. Or all the budget exercises. Or records. Some weeks it’s very hard for me to get any work done and I am a hard worker. It’s like someone messed up once with their credit card so they put all these checks and balances in place, hire an FTE to manage it and in the end it costs more

It’s true. Too much money is spent on making sure $4 isn’t spent on better pens. I get that the $4 adds up over all agencies and that there are rules for big things that trickle to small ones, but it is super annoying.

People think Feds are lazy because they don’t know what we do and we can’t easily be fired. There are lazy people who brag about it. Contractors also often make comments that they do all the work because they often do. In many places they do “the work” and we spend all our time getting them “the money” and they don’t know what that means. They aren’t privy to conversations that are inherently governmental. So, they assume we must do nothing. Then they tell everyone. But, really, it’s the difficulty in firing people that gives that reputation. Or the people who never change jobs so they become super efficient and don’t have to do much. I’ve worked with great people who just stayed so long they were able to quickly analyze data that it would take other people days to figure out. They sleep half the day but their output is equivalent to their grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The government is supposed to move slowly. It’s supposed to have lots of checks and balances and not act suddenly. People complain about this but they don’t realize that dynamic and chaotic changes in government are a disaster in many countries. You really don’t want a gigantic ship to make sudden turns. That’s what the private sector is for. And why we shouldn’t bail them out.

While I sort of agree, I can’t stand all the busy work. Like to have a credit card so that you can purchase supplies for your team it requires hours of work every month to reconcile. Or the internal control reviews. Or all the budget exercises. Or records. Some weeks it’s very hard for me to get any work done and I am a hard worker. It’s like someone messed up once with their credit card so they put all these checks and balances in place, hire an FTE to manage it and in the end it costs more

It’s true. Too much money is spent on making sure $4 isn’t spent on better pens. I get that the $4 adds up over all agencies and that there are rules for big things that trickle to small ones, but it is super annoying.

People think Feds are lazy because they don’t know what we do and we can’t easily be fired. There are lazy people who brag about it. Contractors also often make comments that they do all the work because they often do. In many places they do “the work” and we spend all our time getting them “the money” and they don’t know what that means. They aren’t privy to conversations that are inherently governmental. So, they assume we must do nothing. Then they tell everyone. But, really, it’s the difficulty in firing people that gives that reputation. Or the people who never change jobs so they become super efficient and don’t have to do much. I’ve worked with great people who just stayed so long they were able to quickly analyze data that it would take other people days to figure out. They sleep half the day but their output is equivalent to their grade.

NP and I can see the bolded. Govt is so big that in some agencies the jobs are so siloed/specialized that they don't have a ton of variety of work and you can really build processes that enable you to do your job very quickly. I know in my place we have a lot of turnover so it takes the new people a long time to learn the job but people that have been doing it for years can do it much faster than they can.