Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.
Absolutely insane that this is what we've come to. It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want. We are regressing this country so rapidly that we are likely to become one of those shithole countries the president so loudly proclaimed Haiti, El Salvador and others were.
Getting into government to make it worse to show that government is bad has been a pillar of the Republican party since Reagan. They just used to pretend about it.
Why? Current action is no different than when Private Equity buys a company. The American public asked for the government to be ran like a business, and sadly, this is how big money men in the USA run businesses. Take control, fire everyone, leverage everything to their gain, bankrupt, then walk away.
This IS what people voted for. American business practices applied to the government.
> It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want.
I very much doubt this is what people want. But people aren't asked their opinion, and there's a difference between disagreeing and starting an insurrection to prevent a coup.
> It is mind blowing to me that this is what people want.
It is not what people want. The Trump administration’s popularity is already below 50%, and much lower among independents (around 30% depending on the poll).
Many people aren’t yet aware of what’s happening. A lot of the electorate is getting their news from filtered sources like Fox News or various far right media outlets. Joe Rogan has gone all in on praising Musk and Trump. People who get their information from Trump are being fed lies that are obvious to anyone not inside the bubble. They don’t know what’s happening because their heroes are telling them it’s all necessary and good.
When you start polling people on the actual actions taken, things being cancelled, and consequences the approval is very low.
Anecdotally, I have some extended family who were very pro-Trump. One of them recently discovered that her job was funded through a federal grant, and now it’s likely going to be cut even though she doesn’t work for the government directly. They also discovered that one of their family members is covered by Medicaid through an avenue that’s looking like it will be cut. They went through a stage of disbelief, but now they’re in a phase where they’re sure everything will be fine and Trump will get it fixed. It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
This what a huge chunk of HN wanted! HN was all aboard the Trump train for years and the mods admonished anyone being too critical of other users for it, it's when I wrote off most of the people here as morons.
I'm starting to think the "government is inefficient" folks have never actually worked in any corporate job. I've worked in two companies since I left the federal government 5-10 years ago, and both were significantly less efficient, and less effective than the federal agency I worked for. I'm sure that's not _always_ true, but it just seems like any large organization full of people is difficult to keep efficient.
Same experience. The "government = inefficient" propaganda has been repeated ad infinitum for decades so that now it feels like a law of nature to people. My experience is however that every large org is inefficient in its own unique way, no matter which sector.
That's my experience too.. When the public sector wastes something its an error. For a corp, its business as usual. As long as number-goes-up it doesnt matter to them what they are doing.
The problem is the people who quit because they cannot work are not those you want to lay off. Those who stay in those conditions? That's those who were not adding anything useful before.
Since you mention the FAA, I wonder what will happen if the NTSB's report on the Washington disaster doesn't match Trump's preconceived conclusions, e.g. by placing most of the blame on the (female) helicopter pilot. If he interferes there, that will be the final straw convincing me that the US is unfortunately no better than the "banana republics" it used to make fun of anymore...
I was under the impression these offices closed during the pandemic and the return to office order is bringing people back into those places. If that’s the case I don’t think this is some sort of planned disruption but rather poor planning. Incompetence vs malice right?
But they should've shown their assertions and proof thereof beforehand. It's been pointed out that they say organizations are wasteful, but those are vague weasel words; show some numbers, do a root cause analysis and fix what is broken.
But the goal is not to fix what isn't working, it never was - it's a diversion and an excuse to dismantle the federal government, checks and balances, and move to an unchecked oligarchy/autocracy. Taking the whole country with them, of course.
If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.
They could just be doing it to be petty and cruel to "government workers" in general. There doesn't always have to be a genius 5D-chess play. It's very possible the administration simply believes the federal workforce is full of their political opponents and just wants to grief them. A major component of the campaign and their base of support is rooted in cruelty to out-groups, so they're technically delivering a campaign promise to their base by just making people miserable.
Not sure if they even think they need to prove their assertions, after all Musk (same as his "boss"/BFF) has made the most outlandish claims without a shred of evidence (the "radical-left Marxist vipers" at USAID). To me it looks more like they are already 100% convinced that any work done by federal employees is completely worthless, so they can indiscriminately fire anyone they wish without doing any harm. Same for the attrition tactics - they tell people to return to the office and at the same time end leases for offices etc.
I'm not seeing that in either the deportation/removal rates, nor the encounters rate. Which time period 2021-2024 should I be looking at to see this? I'm looking only at annual rates, not month by month.
> “The only thing a return to the office has given me is an hour of traffic while driving and a loss in efficiency,” said the worker, who requested anonymity for fear of job reprisals.
RTO in a nutshell.
As someone who chose my living location based on where my family wants to live first and jobs second, this sudden turn to RTO mandates is infinitely depressing. Most of my work involves talking to people in different offices, states and countries anyway, so RTO means doing the e-mail and video call work but from a different location that requires battling traffic both ways. It’s insane that this is being done in the name of “efficiency”
Return To Office policy: middle-management language that assumes “office” is a neutral position, we’re somehow “returning to”. This term has been carefully crafted by corporate strategists to sound as palatable as possible.
Mandatory Commute policy: centers the outcome for workers - spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office just so we can be on video calls all day.
> spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office
Reminds me of a NYC startup I was at (while hired living on the west coast).
CEO was really big on in-person (well except for all the LATAM devs I had to manage...) so they required me to fly out frequently, and my boss was incredulous I would book the 6 hour flight during week days because it "ate into work time". Like WTF is sitting on JetBlue flights on weekends for me but "work time"... I'm on salary anyways
It's insane that anyone actually believes that it's being done for efficiency.
It's not, and never was.
It's being done a) to drive people to quit, so they don't have to lay them off, and b) to restore the power dynamic to the status quo ante, where your manager could just look over at your cubicle and see you in your seat, and know that whether or not you were working, you were still there to bow to them. (And many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat, and are desperate to avoid having to admit that.)
At my former job the (then) CEO said outright that forced WFH mandated in 2020 actually brought some minuscule improvement in general process efficiency.
> many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat
This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.
In addition to your points about managers (upper and middle) being bad at their jobs, the c-suite must consider that sometimes tax breaks for the company hinge on physically bringing workers to a specific place: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
Don't want to be the cynical guy, but having talked to just such a ceo who gets-off by being hired to fire people. RTO is literally a badge, or at least an excuse to exercise authority. Often yes, to get rid of free loaders, but more specifically to shove it in the face of a lot of engineers that they are subservient. This guy actually would put it that they saw a gig as, and I'm recalling, a place to 'eat shit', until he moved on.
Quite a different perspective than what I'd think most devs here would see their field as, something they love.
There's also alot of pent-up indignation about how executives see engineering in general. They. Don't. Understand. It.
and so they marginalize it.
Its not at all surprising behavior , that of executives, from what you'd expect to come from a group more likely that most to be represented by those doing nothing more than winning a personality contest.
I think a lot of executives see engineers as uppity, well-paid factory workers, and absolutely hate that the gap between their own pay and engineering's pay is so small. In order to maintain their world view that they are better, higher-class people, they need to be making 10X-100X what their median worker makes and they need their median worker to be afraid for their jobs and subservient to them. Current software engineering comp. (and until recently, the ease of engineers to job hop) contradicts this world view. The last thing they want is to be seen as [ugh] PEERS to regular workers. That won't do at all. Workers need to be taken down a notch and shown their place on the totem pole.
Wild that oil & gas subsidies, Medicare negotiating more drugs and foreign military base reductions are off the table. But god forbid we see another hurricane coming.
I don't care what side you fall down on, the only reason someone would rollback Medicare negotiating drug prices is so that they can make more money on their big pharma stocks.
I can't believe a bunch of grown adults voted for this shit.
Most of the people I talk to seem to have one thing they are holding on to as the thing they'll get out of their vote. Like "he's going to eliminate the income taxes I pay on my social security" etc
The thing is almost never true, and even if he were is a horrible self centered justification.
Just so everyone is aware, Vought is the man behind the moron (the Donny). He is the architect of Project 2025.
His goal is to traumatize the civil service to bring about a re-christianization of America, which he believes can only be done by expanding the power of the executive branch.
We are living through the machinations of a religious fanatic.
> (...) returned to ethernet cords in piles around the floor, random wires sticking out of walls, and motion-sensor lights that weren’t working correctly
I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there? Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it? Where did the ethernet cords appear from? Someone stole TVs from the walls?
The federal government is generally pretty efficient. They probably sold off surplus equipment. They definitely have been consolidating office space. It could be that the remaining leases were cheaper to keep than buy out, or that selling the buildings didn’t make sense.
Regardless, there’s no reason for them to hire facilities people to maintain vacant space. Leaving furniture in those places would attract vermin, ruin the furniture, etc.
> The federal government is generally pretty efficient.
Then either Musk and Trump are lying about needing to focus on government efficiency, or some of the brightest and most brilliant minds that the American people willingly voted for are wrong.
> I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there?
It's hard to think, I know. But don't worry, I'll give you some ideas.
> Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it?
There might have been some animals who came along and decided that the TVs were very important. Maybe there was a hurricane or a tornado which decided to fuck this place in particular, but only by taking the desks and TVs.
Or, maybe the workers who used the office weren't the last people in the office.
> Where did the ethernet cords appear from?
They were always there. Some people actually know how to have a reliable, secure, and fast data connection. Protip: it's not wifi. Usually when the TV or computer is installed, all of the extra wire is hidden in the wall. But after the TV or computer has been removed, the extra wire length is often left on the ground ready to be tested or installed with the next device.
It's just very annoying (read: time-expensive for little profit) to pull the wires all the way out of the walls to be taken, and even more expensive to re/install in a new location (it's significantly cheaper to just install new wiring instead).
> Someone stole TVs from the walls?
It's possible, but not likely. Those TVs were most likely g(r)ifted to the managers and/or executives. You know, the same people who actually own the building. That's not the same as stolen. Also, the missing TV can now be written off of taxes as a loss for the business. Everyone likes double-dipping, right?
It's been a few years. In that time, leases will have ended, and not been renewed. Refurbs and buildouts of new space will have been abandoned. Outdated and surplus equipment will have been decommissioned and scrapped or sold off or sent to other sites where it was required. I'm sure there are some offices that are just like how they were, but also some offices which _no longer exist_, and it's unlikely their replacements will have been fitted out if it wasn't expected that they would be imminently used.
So, this thing called Covid hit. It was a pandemic, and because it was infectious, a large push to work remotely was made (both in private and public businesses).
When employers realized that work was being done despite not being in the office, they started to shutter their offices (ya know, to save money).
I can't believe I have to explain to another adult why offices after Covid don't look the same.
What an insulting and willfully obtuse answer, that does not address any of these perfectly reasonable questions. When you leave your house on vacation, do you rip the cords out of the outlets and pile them on the floor, and dismount all the TVs?
Some people just live under a rock; or they have never been impacted by god awful management decisions.
Sometimes I wonder what that life looks like? Maybe just sipping champagne at beach side (or on the couch) all day in ignorance. Watch whatever reality trash is on streaming services. All while the world burns around them.
Maybe if we'd stuck it out with Hoover... "given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation." (campaign trail, 1928) He only got four of those years.
Yeah, we’d be much much better off if the Great Depression was still happening, and Hitler got to slaughter our ancestors. I’m guessing the congress critters are pretty nostalgic for stuff like polio, tuberculosis, measles and the bubonic plague.
Also, screw breathable air and drinkable water, even more than the internet and microwave. Above all else, ballpoint pens and velcro need to just stop.
Excuse me. It’s rush hour. I need to go yell at a busy bridge until the thing just falls the fuck over.
Readit News
Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.
It used to be that the US government had pride in its own professionalism. The US is now acting like the countries it loves to destabilize.
This IS what people voted for. American business practices applied to the government.
I very much doubt this is what people want. But people aren't asked their opinion, and there's a difference between disagreeing and starting an insurrection to prevent a coup.
It is not what people want. The Trump administration’s popularity is already below 50%, and much lower among independents (around 30% depending on the poll).
Many people aren’t yet aware of what’s happening. A lot of the electorate is getting their news from filtered sources like Fox News or various far right media outlets. Joe Rogan has gone all in on praising Musk and Trump. People who get their information from Trump are being fed lies that are obvious to anyone not inside the bubble. They don’t know what’s happening because their heroes are telling them it’s all necessary and good.
When you start polling people on the actual actions taken, things being cancelled, and consequences the approval is very low.
Anecdotally, I have some extended family who were very pro-Trump. One of them recently discovered that her job was funded through a federal grant, and now it’s likely going to be cut even though she doesn’t work for the government directly. They also discovered that one of their family members is covered by Medicaid through an avenue that’s looking like it will be cut. They went through a stage of disbelief, but now they’re in a phase where they’re sure everything will be fine and Trump will get it fixed. It’s only a matter of time until they realize that they were the intended targets of the cuts, not accidental damage.
Deleted Comment
The algebra looks like this:
Privatize FAA = x + y
Where x is any discovery or event related to the FAA, and where y is any red meat justification (dei|immigration|trans).
There are many such equations:
Strategic bitcoin reserve = x + y.
Long two years, just going to leave this here. They will always find x and y to complete their equations:
https://www.cato.org/commentary/privatize-faa
Probably a lot longer than two at this rate :/.
But the goal is not to fix what isn't working, it never was - it's a diversion and an excuse to dismantle the federal government, checks and balances, and move to an unchecked oligarchy/autocracy. Taking the whole country with them, of course.
Basically all will either pretend believing or refuse believing above the mental level of this old infant elected as president, so almost everyone.
A 9/11 scale attack would make it pretty easy for supporters of both parties to turn their sights on whoever they think attacked us.
If the point was to make the government less efficient to justify political platforms, why have private companies been doing the same thing for the last 3 years when there's no political upside for them?
I'm not saying the RTO policy is good. I'm very skeptical of it myself. But this explanation doesn't seem to hold water - especially when better explanations are out there.
They could be using it to thin out their staff without layoffs. They could be propping up real estate values. They could be dealing with sunk costs on office space and looking to justify them. They could be accomidating poor managers who cannoy evaluate employee productivity without seeing butts in seats every day.
Not to mention some people really actually do work less efficiently from home. I can't say exactly what proportion or what the overall productivity impact is. It's probably very hard to measure. But it isn't hard to imagine leaders (in both the public and private sectors) genuinely believing the RTO movement will improve overall productivity.
It also isn't hard to imagine large organizations doing a poor job when implementing their RTO effort. I saw similar issues with the RTO effort in my private company. The same issues also happened with the WFH effort during the pandemic. Mismanagement is commonplace in large organizations.
Dead Comment
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RTO in a nutshell.
As someone who chose my living location based on where my family wants to live first and jobs second, this sudden turn to RTO mandates is infinitely depressing. Most of my work involves talking to people in different offices, states and countries anyway, so RTO means doing the e-mail and video call work but from a different location that requires battling traffic both ways. It’s insane that this is being done in the name of “efficiency”
I saw this a while ago on Mastodon and it's on point (https://toot.yosh.is/@yosh/114027906524929311):
---
In today’s “terminology matters”:
Return To Office policy: middle-management language that assumes “office” is a neutral position, we’re somehow “returning to”. This term has been carefully crafted by corporate strategists to sound as palatable as possible.
Mandatory Commute policy: centers the outcome for workers - spending hours each day on an unpaid commute to and from the office just so we can be on video calls all day.
We don’t just have to accept hostile framing.
---
Reminds me of a NYC startup I was at (while hired living on the west coast). CEO was really big on in-person (well except for all the LATAM devs I had to manage...) so they required me to fly out frequently, and my boss was incredulous I would book the 6 hour flight during week days because it "ate into work time". Like WTF is sitting on JetBlue flights on weekends for me but "work time"... I'm on salary anyways
It's not, and never was.
It's being done a) to drive people to quit, so they don't have to lay them off, and b) to restore the power dynamic to the status quo ante, where your manager could just look over at your cubicle and see you in your seat, and know that whether or not you were working, you were still there to bow to them. (And many of them genuinely have zero metric for gauging "how much is Aurornis working?" besides measuring the amount of time a butt is in a seat, and are desperate to avoid having to admit that.)
This is a legitimate problem though. Obviously making people do all their work from a centralized office location is a horribly inefficient solution, but it is a solution, and if there really is widespread slacking happening it might still be more efficient than doing nothing.
I don't care what side you fall down on, the only reason someone would rollback Medicare negotiating drug prices is so that they can make more money on their big pharma stocks.
I can't believe a bunch of grown adults voted for this shit.
The thing is almost never true, and even if he were is a horrible self centered justification.
Just so everyone is aware, Vought is the man behind the moron (the Donny). He is the architect of Project 2025.
His goal is to traumatize the civil service to bring about a re-christianization of America, which he believes can only be done by expanding the power of the executive branch.
We are living through the machinations of a religious fanatic.
I don't understand that part, maybe I'm missing something - what happened there? Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it? Where did the ethernet cords appear from? Someone stole TVs from the walls?
Regardless, there’s no reason for them to hire facilities people to maintain vacant space. Leaving furniture in those places would attract vermin, ruin the furniture, etc.
Then either Musk and Trump are lying about needing to focus on government efficiency, or some of the brightest and most brilliant minds that the American people willingly voted for are wrong.
It's hard to think, I know. But don't worry, I'll give you some ideas.
> Why would the abandoned workplace not look exactly the same as they left it?
There might have been some animals who came along and decided that the TVs were very important. Maybe there was a hurricane or a tornado which decided to fuck this place in particular, but only by taking the desks and TVs.
Or, maybe the workers who used the office weren't the last people in the office.
> Where did the ethernet cords appear from?
They were always there. Some people actually know how to have a reliable, secure, and fast data connection. Protip: it's not wifi. Usually when the TV or computer is installed, all of the extra wire is hidden in the wall. But after the TV or computer has been removed, the extra wire length is often left on the ground ready to be tested or installed with the next device.
It's just very annoying (read: time-expensive for little profit) to pull the wires all the way out of the walls to be taken, and even more expensive to re/install in a new location (it's significantly cheaper to just install new wiring instead).
> Someone stole TVs from the walls?
It's possible, but not likely. Those TVs were most likely g(r)ifted to the managers and/or executives. You know, the same people who actually own the building. That's not the same as stolen. Also, the missing TV can now be written off of taxes as a loss for the business. Everyone likes double-dipping, right?
When employers realized that work was being done despite not being in the office, they started to shutter their offices (ya know, to save money).
I can't believe I have to explain to another adult why offices after Covid don't look the same.
Sometimes I wonder what that life looks like? Maybe just sipping champagne at beach side (or on the couch) all day in ignorance. Watch whatever reality trash is on streaming services. All while the world burns around them.
Certainly since Reagan things have been slowly going downhill but up until then..
What does “good” look like? Perfection?
What metrics would you use to assess the quality of life you think best?
Also, screw breathable air and drinkable water, even more than the internet and microwave. Above all else, ballpoint pens and velcro need to just stop.
Excuse me. It’s rush hour. I need to go yell at a busy bridge until the thing just falls the fuck over.
This has been the playbook for all of my life at least. Probably longer than that.
America is cooked.