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At least the Civil Service requires an exam. And there are tiers of seniority inside the Fed gov with deterministic pay according to tier.
Would that not be a far, far cry from the realities of the modern-day working world (aside from the actuarial universe)?
Not really.
Most civil service exams are a joke. I sat several. It's basically the informal set of check-boxes that HR will run on your resume turned into a form you fill out plus some very easy questions. The larger barriers are whether it will ever open to non-veterans outside the civil service, and when you are eventually called whether you still need the job (which you likely won't, I got a few callbacks literally years after sending in an examination).
Larger private companies often do the exact same thing as the feds with regard to assigning salary to a tier and then people to a tier. Standardization makes HR's life easier. Where the feds and private companies diverge is that private companies emphasize job performance more in tiering people while the feds prioritize butt-in-seat-time more. Which is not a win for the feds as far as meritocracy is concerned.
Well the corporate world is 0% meritocratic, so anything beyond that is a godsend. Knowing somebody on the inside is literally the only thing that matters, there's just no getting around it.
Location is also very important. Staying in a rural or small town or some other economically depressed area is going to limit your potential. Had I not left small town PA, I would have been stuck in the $10-15 an hour trap for the rest of my working days. I have friends back home with good educations from prestigious schools stuck making $10 an hour because they won't leave.
posite of the case - the closer you get to politics and the further from a practical need to keep the lights on the less meritocratic both hiring and contracting decisions get.
Most government jobs are a long, long way from partisan politics in the doing of the job itself. Partisan politics has nothing to do with how Jane Smith, GS-5 working in an office at Creech AFB, NV, is doing her job. Nor will it make any different in whether Jane Smith gets promoted.
Larger private companies often do the exact same thing as the feds with regard to assigning salary to a tier and then people to a tier. Standardization makes HR's life easier. Where the feds and private companies diverge is that private companies emphasize job performance more in tiering people while the feds prioritize butt-in-seat-time more. Which is not a win for the feds as far as meritocracy is concerned.
I would say, from what I see, that private companies emphasize job description more in tiering people than job performance. Companies decide what kind of job skill they want in a position (and that decision may or may not be based on actual facts--it might be wholly a hunch), and then hire or promote the person who appears to have that skill at that moment.
That's not exactly a meritocracy, although it does look a lot like one.
Location is also very important. Staying in a rural or small town or some other economically depressed area is going to limit your potential. Had I not left small town PA, I would have been stuck in the $10-15 an hour trap for the rest of my working days. I have friends back home with good educations from prestigious schools stuck making $10 an hour because they won't leave.
Are you from NEPA by chance? That is a very depressed area.
Starbucks has a low employee turnover rate for the food industry, but overall industry rates for turnover are high. Offering incentives that are appealing to its employees—70 percent of which are either college students or hoping to receive a college degree
You put in the investment first, then you make the money.
Do you really believe that prodigious production of usable goods and services is constrained by money?
Ditto, for equitable trade?
I guess you haven't heard of barter.
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