As a scientist in the federal government, I felt this deeply. There is so much cognitive dissonance in mission-driven government work. To meet the go energy of Congress and political appointees, you have to get good at identifying loopholes, alternatives, and workarounds, which defeats the purpose of having policies at all. There is also a tendency to decide by consensus, so any objection will stop progress. This is increasingly coming in the form of violating values, i.e. program set up to address value issue X may have a negative impact on value Y. I want those concerns to be voiced. We need to consider whether they can be mitigated and the scale of risk. But we must have leaders willing to make the call of whether a tradeoff is worth it. In my experience, those leaders are few and far between.
I actually think if you compare to somewhere like Google or Facebook they have even *more* hiring process than government groups. The process is just all aimed at hiring skilled people and firing underperformers.
Every software engineer will get interviewed by phone once or twice, probably five or so in person interviews. The interviewers go through interview training and must pass practice interviews. Your interview feedback is reviewed by director level folks for quality. The feedback from interviewers is tracked and if any interviewer is too easy or too hard they get reviewed. The whole process is calibrated to go for something like a 5% accept rate. Acceptable and unacceptable interview questions are tracked.
And then firing people has its own huge process. Managers who fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by directors, directors whose organizations fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by vps. As a manager you get reviewed a couple times a year to defend why you haven’t fired your lowest performers.
So there really is tons of process. Then you look at the government process, and there is also an enormous amount of process, but how much of it is designed to hire people who are good at the job?
A lot of outsiders don't realize how inaccurate credentials are in computer programming... there are people with years of experience at fortune 500 companies who are unable to perform basic skills, and there are 17 year olds with no resume who can perform on day 1. Skill level is just extremely variable. If you don't do skill assessments for hiring you'll end up with completely incompetent employees.
The most amazing thing to me in some recent interviews is the distinction between people who on paper have qualifications, and then as soon as you start asking them to look at an example problem, they try to BS their way through it; versus the people who maybe their degree isn't in the relevant area, but they're open about their knowlege gaps.
Like, dude, I _just told you_, I'm modeling this on an interesting case _that I solved_ recently. I'm trying to see if you have a basic grasp of the tools involved, how do you think you're gonna slip past me with a wall of nonsense? If you don't understand it, you're gonna be a lot better off admitting your ignorance and at least asking smart questions, than pretending you already know. Ignorance we can fix! Stupidity, not so much.
Appreciate the sentiments, but I think the solution requires sharp action Congress and career bureaucrats are unwilling to consider, much less take.
Set a firm expiration date on every law. If something is needed, Congress has to write a new law. Once that law is passed, new regulations can be written to tie to that new law.
Was there a huge increase in gun violence when the first “assault weapons” ban expired?
Would there have been major problems had the original “Bush Tax Cuts” just expired?
I haven’t looked recently, but there used to be all sorts of maneuvering to skirt around the hard income limits related to the AMT….
And Congress has passed a budget in regular order how many times since 2000?
I have a lot more confidence in, well, just about anything than the Federal Government.
A light bulb just came on. Chances are that bulb is neither an old incandescent bulb, or a CFL, as governments tried to push w/ the ARRA in 2009.
Thanks for posting this, Jen. I deeply appreciate your continued focus on the root causes of the bureaucratic challenges in our government that impede our progress.
As a scientist in the federal government, I felt this deeply. There is so much cognitive dissonance in mission-driven government work. To meet the go energy of Congress and political appointees, you have to get good at identifying loopholes, alternatives, and workarounds, which defeats the purpose of having policies at all. There is also a tendency to decide by consensus, so any objection will stop progress. This is increasingly coming in the form of violating values, i.e. program set up to address value issue X may have a negative impact on value Y. I want those concerns to be voiced. We need to consider whether they can be mitigated and the scale of risk. But we must have leaders willing to make the call of whether a tradeoff is worth it. In my experience, those leaders are few and far between.
I actually think if you compare to somewhere like Google or Facebook they have even *more* hiring process than government groups. The process is just all aimed at hiring skilled people and firing underperformers.
Every software engineer will get interviewed by phone once or twice, probably five or so in person interviews. The interviewers go through interview training and must pass practice interviews. Your interview feedback is reviewed by director level folks for quality. The feedback from interviewers is tracked and if any interviewer is too easy or too hard they get reviewed. The whole process is calibrated to go for something like a 5% accept rate. Acceptable and unacceptable interview questions are tracked.
And then firing people has its own huge process. Managers who fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by directors, directors whose organizations fire at a suspiciously low rate are reviewed by vps. As a manager you get reviewed a couple times a year to defend why you haven’t fired your lowest performers.
So there really is tons of process. Then you look at the government process, and there is also an enormous amount of process, but how much of it is designed to hire people who are good at the job?
Completely agree, and yes, it's the nature of the process. See: https://pahlkadot.medium.com/what-on-earth-is-sme-qa-and-why-should-you-care-about-it-66383167387c
SME-QA seems a lot better than the alternatives.
A lot of outsiders don't realize how inaccurate credentials are in computer programming... there are people with years of experience at fortune 500 companies who are unable to perform basic skills, and there are 17 year olds with no resume who can perform on day 1. Skill level is just extremely variable. If you don't do skill assessments for hiring you'll end up with completely incompetent employees.
The most amazing thing to me in some recent interviews is the distinction between people who on paper have qualifications, and then as soon as you start asking them to look at an example problem, they try to BS their way through it; versus the people who maybe their degree isn't in the relevant area, but they're open about their knowlege gaps.
Like, dude, I _just told you_, I'm modeling this on an interesting case _that I solved_ recently. I'm trying to see if you have a basic grasp of the tools involved, how do you think you're gonna slip past me with a wall of nonsense? If you don't understand it, you're gonna be a lot better off admitting your ignorance and at least asking smart questions, than pretending you already know. Ignorance we can fix! Stupidity, not so much.
Appreciate the sentiments, but I think the solution requires sharp action Congress and career bureaucrats are unwilling to consider, much less take.
Set a firm expiration date on every law. If something is needed, Congress has to write a new law. Once that law is passed, new regulations can be written to tie to that new law.
Was there a huge increase in gun violence when the first “assault weapons” ban expired?
Would there have been major problems had the original “Bush Tax Cuts” just expired?
I haven’t looked recently, but there used to be all sorts of maneuvering to skirt around the hard income limits related to the AMT….
And Congress has passed a budget in regular order how many times since 2000?
I have a lot more confidence in, well, just about anything than the Federal Government.
A light bulb just came on. Chances are that bulb is neither an old incandescent bulb, or a CFL, as governments tried to push w/ the ARRA in 2009.
Thanks for posting this, Jen. I deeply appreciate your continued focus on the root causes of the bureaucratic challenges in our government that impede our progress.