Comment by pjc50
4 hours ago
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
4 hours ago
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
And as if there isn't a middle-way here to have short-term contractors _not_ from large consultancies.
Or rethinking approaches, and doing such work via OSS, and paying maintainers to keep code up to date, which France has been doing iirc.
It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
Consultancies don’t appear to be subject to market forces either, judging by their complete dearth of talent and expertise.
In other words, “rent seeking”.
The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls,
has the inbuilt assumption that 'market forces' are the only appropriate form of external control.
which is homeomorphic to "ideological mistrust of the public sector".
Market forces aren’t the only appropriate form of external control. That’s why we have pay scales for government workers legislated by Congress. But OP said that’s driven by ideological mistrust of the government too.
And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr
But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.
> As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow
> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good
actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.
Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.
The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.
> The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't.
Sure. Because the government only needs a finite amount of software, and once it's written its more efficient to drop the people who wrote it.
> a guaranteed job for life
so the person will have to deal with all of their shit if they wrote crappy stuff. Obviously not the incentives we want.
> and gold plated pension.
because who wants people to be able to actually retire? Isn't it better to keep them working as greeters at Walmart?
> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
I'm pretty sure they're "employed for life" because otherwise every new administration would replace as many people as possible.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
It is somewhat an exaggeration. The civil service and quangocracy can make redundancies if they really try.
And this mistrust is deliberately sewn by right-wing politicians and media figures who are directly funded by government contractors.
I worked in the federal government once. Unfortunately, it really is that bad. They took weeks-month just to provision me a laptop.
That happens at literally every company I contract with (that requires I use their equipment). At my current gig I couldn't start until they had a laptop for me, and then it took another month to access to the code. Every year they auto delete contractor credentials, unless the director in charge of your contract says no. One year he missed the email and I found myself without access to the code for days while I was reinstated. Only I wasn't completely reinstated, I had been deleted from one of their systems, so I couldn't log into some systems for multiple weeks, until I got a new PKIM card, since a new card was the only way to add credentials to the right system.
So please, it's never been accurate to say the government is mismanaged while corporations aren't. The same things happens in bureaucracies of similar size.
Just wandering in to this as a relative political bystander, but as I look at the polling out of the UK [0] I see that the party currently leading is some group called "REF" and I gather they did pretty well in the latest round of elections. I assume they're an old-established party who represent the deep contentment the British have with how the public service has been run.
I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...