It does extend to other departments. I’ve worked alongside entire teams of longtime federal employees who would spend 10 minutes cleaning up and changing out of work gear, drive 5 minutes to the building with a cafeteria, take a 15 minute union mandated break, then spend 5 minutes driving back to a work site, 10 minutes getting back into their gear and readying tools, only to work for 20 more minutes to finish the job at hand. Then get cleaned up, change, put tools away, and drive back to the building just about in time for lunch.
Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable.
There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment.
That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.
If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen in private sector tech companies, even after all the layoffs, I've got some bad news for you.
Whenever I see people ragging on governments as though they're automatically inefficient, I laugh because the implication that "private sector is always more efficient" is laughably stupid and ill-informed. People will take their liberties wherever they can get them.
The big difference is that the private sector is burning their own money. If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later. Whomever was involved in this will naturally wise up next time.
On the other hand, when public sector burns through money that money isn’t theirs. It was mostly taken away by force through taxes from private citizens. So even of they burn through any money with inefficiency, corruption, bad decision making or anything, they can demand the same or usually more of the same money next year. And next year. All the while that bureaucracy is growing and private sector is shrinking.
>If a private company burns their own or their investors money thats on them and they’ll probably go bankrupt sooner or later.
Sure, but sooner or later is quite likely to be at least a few decades from now, since this is mostly a large organization sort of thing and large companies don't tend to vanish overnight.
That might be true, although some companies pretty much vanish overnight be it small or large (eg Nokia).
If a private company is burning money slow or fast it doesn't really matter. It's their money, it's not my money.
But when I see spectacularly bad/expensive (usually both) projects financed with taxpayer's money, I definitely do want some scrutiny and responsibility. Unfortunately we don't get any of that because it's not in their interest to do so.
That stuff can happen but I've mostly worked at companies where it wasn't like that at all, not even close. And the one exception was a recently privatized ex-government org.
Overall nearly a thousand dollars in salary being wasted in a single morning because the idea of not taking a break at exactly 10:30am instead of finishing the job and taking a break at 11:00am instead is inconceivable.
There is absolutely zero incentive for efficiency and motivated individuals will actually burn out from being in a culture where trying to improve anything or making your colleagues look bad by being too productive creates a toxic work environment.
That’s not to mention the absurd “use it or lose it” budgeting system, whereby if you need to replace a million dollar piece of equipment every 5 years, you need to piss away over a million dollars every year to ensure you’ll have the budget when it’s actually required.