Comment by insane_dreamer
2 days ago
Another very negative long-term effect of all of this is how is the government going to recruit talent in the future? How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you? Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-like purge tactics that are clearly designed that way to instill fear and loyalty.
I think that is part of the point. "As hire As. Bs hire Cs." A-tier folks want to work with the best, B-tier folks want to work with lackeys that will do their bidding. It's pretty clear there's no A-tier folks in charge at the moment.
This gets repeated a lot but in reality hiring is a skillset that good programmers sorely lack.
If you've ever worked on a government contract, you would know there are not and have never been A's on the government side.
This is not and has never been true as a blanket statement. Contractors perform to expectations just like in every other sector of the economy, so variation is high, just like in every other sector of the economy.
I’ve seen both high and low-performing teams in .com, .edu, and .gov and there’s nothing magic about any sector: you get what senior management sets the incentives to get. The NSA gets really good hackers because they don’t leave that to chance, just like how NASA or MIT hire really good scientists and engineers, and the places which just trust the big consulting companies usually get taken to the cleaners.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43094283
Yes, Elon hires Cs.
eyeroll
It is pretty well known Elon companies pay shit and churn through young engineers willing to work long hours for no overtime fueled by “passion”. It’s why he is pushing for more H1B1s. He wants desperate people worried about being deported if they lose their job.
When is FSD shipping again? Why is Tesla falling behind in the market they defined for a decade? When will Boring actually deliver on the hype? Why is X suing former customers trying to get the revenue they so desperately need to pay off debts best on wildly over-estimating the company’s worth?
He’s been able to buy some good companies but nobody has a magic trick for being good at everything and the man is stretched really thin between all of his CEO positions and spending hours per day on politics.
Has anybody more competent than Elon (which isn't a very high bar) survived contact with him in one of his firms? It is well know he doesn't tolerate any pushback and that e.g. SpaceX has a whole team dedicated to babysitting him away from operations.
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In government, yes, he's hiring Cs. I can speak to SpaceX--they're all As. But it's also the company he's most shielded from himself.
Elon qua SpaceX and possibly xAI and Neuralink is an A. Elon qua Boring Company, X and DOGE is very, very clearly a B player. (Idk what's going on with Tesla, he seems to be treating it more like a piggy bank to be raided to get to Mars (A) and indulge his impulses (B).)
That is the entire point. They want a government that nobody wants to work for so that regulations on cars, rocket launches, and securities will stop bothering their profits.
If not intentional, then a happy side effect.
The goal is to destroy the state apparatus from the inside, to be replaced by private industry.
Why have a functional government if instead you and your buddies can you benefit from contracting out?
We've needed reforms to civil service and the general schedule pay scale specifically for a long time now. One can hope that a future Congress could write a bill that resets government hiring and compensation practices in the wake of this administration, but perhaps that's a fantasy at this point.
it's cute you think congress is in control right now.
Cheap snarky comments like this have no place on HN.
First, DOGE proposes to reduce the size of the federal workforce, so the need to recruit talent may not be that great, second they might recruit from the pool of talent that supports all of this -- it might be a small pool, but if the workforce is small enough...
>to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry?
The C-suite never bring in hatchetmen? What world do you work in?
> Sure there are sometimes mass layoffs that are handled pretty badly in industry, but not these Gestapo-like purge tactics that are clearly designed that way to instill fear and loyalty.
Isn't the difference here that in the private sector you have to do all that loyalty shit from day one, not just whenever the board restructures and you want to keep your job?
> How many people, who have good prospects elsewhere, are going to work for a government agency -- usually a lower pay -- to put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry? Would you?
You could remove the "to put up with shit like this" part and the answer would still be "nobody". You have to remove the "who have good prospects elsewhere" part for it to make sense.
well, there are people with good prospects elsewhere who take gov positions out of civic duty and also because it is typically longer term and you're less likely to get laid off for no reason
I agree with everything you said, but it's also not impossible to be laid off by the govt for no reason so there may have been a false sense of security:
https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/nprrpt/annrpt/vp...
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This is basic dictatorshipping, I think US folks need to refresh skills so common in rest of the world.
You want obedient lackeys as #1 rule, it means reasonably little threat and no resistance to molding from above. Competences are sometimes even frowned upon. Look at how potus literally demands that others lick his boots to keep it polite.
This is how russians run their dictatorships for example, including those they exported elsewhere under their iron hand / military bases. Talking from first hand experience.
Of course that part of the system is very ineffective. Regardless of what you think about government and its bureaucracy, that fascist manchild aint gonna end up with success story here, he lacks (any genuine) emotional intelligence to understand underlying reasons. This isnt technical problem to solve where he sometimes excells.
This comment said nothing.
> put up with shit like this that doesn't even happen in industry
Musk did a trial run with it on Twitter.
And look how badly that worked out
I intentionally didn't weigh in because on one hand, its main functionality is still going strong, and it hasn't had major outages. On the other, its user base has changed, advertisers are avoiding it because of its users, and we don't know what real usage numbers look like.
He ended up in control and the woke employees are gone. Isn’t that a win to his perspective?
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