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A lot of government agencies went into hiring freeze once the pandemic started. Then when the Boomer gov't workers found out how much they hated the pandemic-induced changes, plus saw their assets double in value in 2 years, they started retiring en masse. The hiring freeze kept up through 2022 at many; pandemic protocol died hard in a lot of gov't.
Finally they started hiring again. Combine that with things like the infrastructure bill and IRA, many agencies are in desperate need of people now.
That's how it feels in our team. Team of 5 managing about 2000 servers and growing at any given time. We're constantly patching for new patches or vulnerabilities reported by CISA. Plus hardware and software lifecycles on various components in the architecture. We haven't hired anyone in years but what we manage continues to grow.
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Originally Posted by albert648
It wouldn't make a lick of difference how many people are manning the phones if none of them do any work. You could hire 300 million people for those agencies and you still won't be able to get through to anyone.
All government bureaucracies at every level are horribly bloated. You could get rid of 50% of the headcount tomorrow and no one would notice. They would be just as inept as they were with double the headcount.
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Originally Posted by albert648
They can work "hard" all they want. Doesn't mean they're productive. No amount of headcount is going to fix a bloated process and red tape.
Virtually all business processes in government are like digging a ditch manually with a pick and shovel then someone else coming along and refilling the ditch with a pick and shovel.
Cut and/or automate the red tape and fire half the headcount. There is no reason any routine government process should take more than 3 business days from start to finish.
You sound like you've got an axe to grind and painting with quite a broad brush. A lot of us have been asked to do more with less.
Head counts in government aren't the problem. It's the gross overspending on pet projects.
My experience is that the actual gov't workers and operations are pretty efficient. It's the regulatory burden and laws governing them that are not.
E.g. where I work we jump through 20 hoops for accreditation. We have to hire people who specialize in accreditation and regulatory compliance. The lawmakers impose these laws and regulations, ironically, to make things more "efficient."
To me, the most interesting part of this chart is the Information negative hiring trend.
I resigned a job last year and took some months off, during which many of the major tech cos. laid off hundreds of thousands.
Now I've been looking around and tech hiring appears to be almost frozen, except for the most elite, senior positions. For an average software engineer, it's a terrible job market, comparable to right around January 2002 when the Dot Com crash + 9/11 had basically halted the tech industry for a while.
For elite software people, like the ones who do high volume trading, and high volume (millions per minute) transactions such as Netflix and Facebook, there are jobs, very well paying jobs. For a Java or database programmer, the jobs have dried up. Every job opening attracts hundreds if not thousands of instant applications.
In fact I'm retraining now, taking a course on cyber security toward an industry certification, in hopes of moving into a field that has more demand. I may have to be on call nights and weekends but at least it will be employment.
But, if I wanted to work in the food industry, restaurant or grocery stores, every place in the state seems to be begging for people. A.I. hasn't replaced counter help, yet.
The reason it's risen so much lately is because governments have been trying to get employment back to where they were prior to Covid. Probably the bulk of this is school teachers.
They'll sooner cause a depression and push everyone into abject poverty than get out of the way.
Seems like it's working. Government spending seems to "raise all ships." Much better than seeing it all go to a company like YRC (Yellow trucking) who got a $700 million covid loan that they will now sign over to the American public through bankruptcy.
Have you EVER tried to get through to the IRS, make a SS appt.?
I made mine easy enough online. I thought it would be a problem since I had to arrange a meeting out of town where my wife was being hospitalized. The first thing the agent said was 'Do you want the good or bad news first?' The bad was I should have enrolled 6 months earlier. The good was he handed me my first SS check - for $23K! Frikin' Feds!
Seems like it's working. Government spending seems to "raise all ships." Much better than seeing it all go to a company like YRC (Yellow trucking) who got a $700 million covid loan that they will now sign over to the American public through bankruptcy.
Government spending is like spitting on a campfire. Not going to make much difference in the long run. Also, unlike the free markets, government doesn't pick the real winners and losers. They just give to their friends, likely donors, racial equity causes, unions, etc.
To really lift all boats, you have to go to supply side thinking and reduce the overall costs of running a business: taxes, regulatory burden, real estate, labor, raw materials, transportation, etc. Government needs to get out of the way, and then the magic of the free market will lift all boats.
We've been distorting the job markets for so long that we're used to it. But there was a time when jobs had a lot more value.
Anyway, to the topic at hand... clearly there's too much government hiring. I'd like to see the government cut way back and step out of the way, and ESPECIALLY stop with the climate stuff that is destroying our economy while probably doing zero to actually change the climate. Just my opinions.
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