From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)
I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.
Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.
My current employer is even stricter.
In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.
>In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions.
Not defense, but my government contract works the same way. I'm on company number two, but I know people who have worked for 4 different companies, all while doing the same job on evolutions of the same contract. There are people who have done full careers working onsite for my agency without ever converting to be a civil servant.
> Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position.
This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at whatever social media tells them to.
On the other hand, I don't think most citizens care deeply about most white-collar crimes unless they're directly impacted. If you don't own stocks, why care if the stock market crashes? Heck, it might even be fun to watch all those richies with spare money to invest turn suicidal en masse.
There's a reason why "but his 34 felonies" never had any sticking power to anyone who hasn't been part of the resistance since 2017.
I don’t think it has anything to do with whether it was a white collar crime or not. If it was the other team that committed the crime there would be endless outrage from his supporters whether or not they understood the crime.
Look at the email server debacle, did the supporters understand what the crime was? Then Signalgate occurred and it’s crickets in the news now. Freedom of speech now means freedom to spread misinformation.
Haha, those yokels getting a laugh from all those richies losing money in the stock market, but jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds. And those coming tax cuts, who will be benefiting the most from those? Haha, the joke keeps getting funnier…
I understand what the email server thing was about. I also understand what the signal thing was about. I don't think it's possible to compare the two. One involved a device/software "helpfully" adding a phone number to group chat because it "helpfully" added the phone number to a contact that was not that contact's phone number.
The other one was a private email server, set up on purpose.
> jokes on them when they’re funding the joke with their retirement funds
Many of these people don't have meaningful retirement savings to lose. Or they're young enough that time in the market will expect to recover in 30 years.
I know someone who wanted to move from government contractor to government employee. He was already a veteran, had a degree, few years of experience as a contractor, etc. it took an entire year from “okay we can give you a job” to him starting.
More anecdote: a bunch of contractors were being fired (or whatever it should be called) because the project they were working on was a horrible shit show. I don't know what went wrong, but it was a lot of money that produced nothing and was publicly canceled.
A friend knew a hiring manager and was a quiet shoo-in for a job. HR dragged their feet for half a year and then, suddenly, moved at absolute light speed to get the job posting up, closed, and the shoo-in to be approved as much as possible.
It was because the contract was ending soon. Laid off workers (including contractors), veterans, and people with disabilities are given priority during the hiring process (which makes some kind of sense), but these contractors had such a stink associated with them that the HR people who presumably didn't want to work with the manager suddenly did, just to avoid hiring the contractors.
I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each.
The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.
A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.
>these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it
Lol, is this a joke? Any good dev can do software development.
Most people aren't willing to work for peanuts, don't want to stop using drugs for a clearance, or are ideologically opposed to building weapons used to kill children or propagate genocide.
Sounds like Raytheon employees are all good on those fronts, rather than being good at their jobs. After all, if they were so effective, why wouldn't they work somewhere without all those caveats?
Not all software work is generic CRUD work. Some work requires actual, domain level expertise that has been built up over decades. Admittedly, this work is few and far between and usually you wind up shoveling shit into a dumpster fire...
That makes sense. An FTE costs 2x as much as a contractor to the government and the latter can be fired. I’m glad it is this way. Even DOGE is temporary.
From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.)
I have an unsexy government job. I've seen the leader of a pretty well funded government org get mad at IT for asking for three new positions one year. The IT group was roughly 100 positions, and it was acknowledged that it was understaffed in some key areas. One group with an annual software license budget higher than their employee budget asked for and was denied a single new spot.
Instead, that org's IT asked for and received budget for contractors. Contractors definitely cost more and can absolutely produce lower quality work. Their knowledge is gone when their contract is done -- so, best case, it's a multi-year contract that's similar to just hiring the damn person, but it ends up being way more expensive.
My current employer is even stricter.
In a similar vein, I've some friends who worked at a hush hush defense facility. The vast majority of the people at the facility are hired through a contractor. The employees are unionized, have a pension, and when a new contractor wins the bid, they have to agree to keep the staff in their current positions. I'm sure that weirdness is due to a mix of pay scales, hush hush reasons, and probably other reasons that I'll never know.