Is anyone here a municipal employee? Talk about your job! (college, law)

[shadypinesma]

Hey. I am just curious if anyone here is a municipal employee. If so, tell us about your job! What do you like about it and what do you not? Also, how long did it take to get your job? I hear hiring can take up to a year.

[Diana_christen1]

I work for the DOE in the central offices and I started as a temp. There's tons of bureaucracy, but I have a good job with benefits, so I'm not complaining. I'm not sure if other offices do the same, but we hire a lot of temp to perm. I temped for about 4 months before I was eligible to become permanent.

[shadypinesma]

How did you find your job? Did you apply online?

[HomelessLoser]

Originally Posted by shadypinesma

Hey. I am just curious if anyone here is a municipal employee. If so, tell us about your job! What do you like about it and what do you not? Also, how long did it take to get your job? I hear hiring can take up to a year.

I've been a long-time municipal employee, both unionized and non, and the stereotypes are 99% true.

What I liked about it was that it was steady and you really can't get fired unless you murder someone (though I eventually quit after several years to try my hand at something else).

What I didn't like was how absolutely dumb-as-doorknobs many of my colleagues were. Okay, I'm no genius, but even I knew that the return address goes in the upper left-hand corner; an important piece of mail (official business) kept getting sent back until I finally -- after weeks of this -- went to the office responsible for sending it out and discovered that some secretary had the addresses totally backwards!!

Speakin' of secretaries, we had an **extremely** bodacious latina single mom (like I said, the stereotypes are true) who functioned as a telephone receptionist -- she had a B.A. from Lehman College in "Informational Sciences" but didn't know the first thing about Windows, including what the Start button does (I had occasion to see this again recently with two other city employees fumbling around their Windows desktop) -- but she couldn't speak literally five words of English.

And speaking of stereotypes...sucking up -- literally -- works...which is probably why you get a lot of extremely bodacious single moms working in government.

We had "interns" from some mentally handicapped organization who couldn't file alphabetically.

Anyway, as for how long, I got lucky -- I had my first city job in just a month. From there on, it was all "internal hiring" and probably a week or two.

BTW, as many might also suspect, a lot of those notices of upper-level jobs must also be posted (publicized) by law but the position's already effectively filled; they just need to document that "every effort" was made to find "the right candidate" but of course who else could be as good as someone who's already been dealing with the job in some respect? It's a curious tension: the need to be fair but also hire from within....

[deslove]

I work for the DA's office. It's whatever, kind just landed here but like Diana mentioned-it's a job w/ benefits. I applied, got called for an interview within a few months and hired the following month.

Good thing was that they kept calling me for all positions i qualified for (I had to miss my first opportunity because I was the one in charge for the week they called me at my old job and couldnt call out)

[NYCSSDD]

I found my job online, sent the resume, got call for interview a few months, then waited another 6 months to get the job.