Mt. Wachusett is a great place for an older Bostonian to learn to ski. If you have the stamina only for a couple of hours of skiing, why drive for 6 hours round-trip? Wachusett also has private lessons for $90/hour or $160 for two hours, about the limit of what my quads can handle.
Going to Wachusett also enables me to tell friends that “I skied the whole mountain… except for the two-thirds of the trails that were too steep and scary.”
My most recent instructor is a retired civil engineer who spent nearly his entire career at USDA. It turns out that USDA builds and maintains a lot of dams and irrigation systems. What would happen if the Trumpenfuhrer is able to make good on his campaign promise to shrink the government? “About half of the people at my agency did nothing. You could get rid of them and there would be no impact on the work,” he replied. “If you pointed this out you would be harassed and disciplined.”
[Separately, he gave a pithy education on the subject of Connecticut family law: “She got the house and I got a pair of skis.” (She out-earned him so there was no alimony.) “When we got married she said that she wanted to be independent and equal so she would do at least half of the driving. I don’t mind being a passenger so I said that was fine. Within two months I was doing all of the driving for any trip that we took together.”]
>About half of the people at my agency did nothing.
>You could get rid of them and there would
>be no impact on the work
This is consistent with my experience working at an independent state agency. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any general solutions which don’t open up huge new opportunities for patronage or corruption.
let’s not forget that when Ken Olsen was asked “how many people work at Digital”, he is said to have replied “about half of them”.
Have a friend who recently retired – early – from the USGS. He had similar comments about the productivity. In fact, earlier in his career he was interviewing for a manager/supervisor role and he was asked how to improve productivity. His answer was to fire about 1/2 of the people. Needless to say he did not get (nor it turns out did he want) the “promotion”.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a mid-level employee in large private-sector companies and government defense contractors and as a contractor in local, state, and federal government agencies.
The federal government was by far the most bloated and overpaid w/ inept and lazy workers; and, yes, about 50% of them could disappear and would not be missed. The problem is that it takes twice the number of staff because 50% are out on various types of leave or extended disabilities or other useless time wastes.
What is a reasonable expectation for percent of workers that are productive in an organization?
Yz: In a smaller aviation business the answer is “100 percent or we will go bankrupt.” Competition is fierce.
Separately, see The Trainee for what it looks like when someone breaks the rules regarding apparent productivity.
Try Berkshire East, about 45 mins more, west on Rt-2. My guess, a different brand of skier. Not so disappointed that real life is messy.
http://berkshireeast.com/
Thanks, Paul. Assuming no traffic, Berkshire East is 2 hours and 15 minutes from Boston, according to Google Maps. That’s nearly half of the scheduled JetBlue gate-to-gate time from Boston to Denver.
100% productivity sounds great, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect for a large organization such as government. I doubt most universities or even profitable large companies have zero unproductive workers. I don’t know about startups, probably the productivity there is higher, but government is not a startup.
I agree with your general point that government is bloated and inefficient, and I would like my tax dollars to be spent more efficiently. But as an immigrant from a rather dysfunctional country, I wonder if we should be happy/relieved that a full 50% of government employees are productive rather than lamenting that not all of them are.
Philg, you’re right. Never mind Berkshire East. You’re not the BE type.
Gunstock Mountain Resort up i-93 just north of Laconia is just about exactly 100 miles north of Boston, but still just about 2 hours each way. It was a lot quicker drive from the north shore back when I learned to ski there in the early ’80s.
Or try Mount Sunapee.
Colorado isn’t bad ;->)
Yes 50% in government contribute little, and it may be true that fewer people get carried in the private enterprise bureaucracies, but I doubt it. Certainly not in the ones I’ve seen. Three points. 1) No waste in actual labor, blue collar workers get sick of carrying a man real fast, and force him out. 2) if you set about to get rid of the 50% that freeload you will invariably end up cutting the people who aren’t freeloading. Freeloaders are generally exercising some kind of privilege they’ve acquired. 3) So much effort is misguided and just plain counterproductive in the first place, it would be wiser to focus on getting competent people at the top of the hierarchy. I mean who cares about *efficiency* when the *work* is the Iraq war?
I work for a federal agency, and I’m disheartened by the ease with which people here seem to accept a 50% freeloader estimate with the barest of anecdotal evidence. (Ken Olson’s quip doesn’t count as data.) Which, please, are the 50% of air traffic controllers that don’t do anything. I’d like to stay off of their airplanes.
(I know no one said that loafers are spread evenly across every governmental function. I’m just being grouchy.)
So I went looking for some data. It turns out that Salary.com has an annual “Wasting Time at Work” survey. (The data is self-reported, so, caveat emptor. But it’s something.) In 2013, 25% of Government workers reported wasting some time during the day, and that was the highest of any industry sector. Fair enough. Energy & Utilities was 22% and Agriculture & Ranch workers self-reported 20%. Yet in the next year, the finance and banking industry had the highest fraction followed by arts, media and entertainment, then engineering, design and construction. Government was fourth. Health-care workers reported no time wasting. (This data is probably correlated completely with access to the internet during working hours, and the sample is seems very likely skewed toward desk jobs in large organizations, but I didn’t see data on the site to indicate that one way or another.)
I can’t defend government workers with this data; it’s pretty bad for everybody. But this data does not justify singling out government workers as particularly bad.
My experience, which is at NASA, isn’t consistent with a 50% freeloader figure. I acknowledge that I can’t speak for the government as a whole, only the tiny portion I’ve worked in. Previously, I worked for a large, slowly-declining multinational (Xerox), and the competence of the people and their work ethic were roughly similar to those I know at NASA. That is to say, individually, they were almost always competent and often bright, innovative and hard-working. Yet, somehow, the results of the organization as a whole were less than the sum of its parts.
Admitting my opinions are subjective like everyone’s, I estimate the deadwood at both organizations at 20%, and by that, I mean perfectly nice people who are unprepared or ill-suited for the jobs they hold. The number of people I’ve met who are actively trying to take advantage of the system are too few for me to give a percentage (but not zero). Being below average is not a crime. Half of us have to be. Virtually everyone I’ve known at both jobs has been trying hard.
For me, ZZAZZ’s comment “it would be wiser to focus on getting competent people at the top of the hierarchy …” hits this issue on the head.
[Beyond this point, I’m going to give examples from personal experience that I think illustrate ZZAZZ’s point. Sorry for the length.]
Early in my time at NASA, I worked in the same research field that I had in grad school (A.I.). The subfield was a mixture of diagnostic algorithms and qualitative reasoning. My productivity was similar to what it had been before. I published, went to conferences and exchanged papers with all of the same people. There were some success stories, but as a subfield, we didn’t have a large impact. I was in a research organization, and we were doing what was expected of us and performing at a level similar to our colleagues in academic institutions. The problem was the questions we’d set for ourselves to answer.
About half-way through my time, I got the opportunity to work on a small mission. That mission demonstrated that water ice exists on the moon for the cost of one F-18 E/F plus 10% and took 4 years from initial funding to the publication of the results in Science. (Water on the moon is interesting scientifically and as a possible resource for use by future human missions. People had thought the moon was completely dry, though evidence had been building that it wasn’t since ’98.)
I think it’s unlikely those who complain “half of the people do nothing” would ever place themselves in the low productivity group, when common sense says that some of them must be. In my case, I would put myself in a low productivity group during the first period and a high productivity group during the second. In both instances, I was the same person with the same training and qualifications and I was surrounded by colleagues with similar qualifications. I think the second period was more productive because our goal was more interesting.
(You might disagree that the federal government should fund basic research like this, but until the NASA authorization legislation is changed, that’s what NASA has been asked by Congress to do.)
I think NASA is an interesting case for illustrating ZZAZZ’s point. It is a federal agency, and it definitely has problems. Many of those are also problems attributed to government more broadly, but I don’t think they stem from a large fraction of the workforce being incompetent or lazy.
For example, if you compare NASA’s productivity during the Apollo and Constellation (2005-2009) programs, obviously productivity during the 60’s was better.
Why? I think there were several reasons.
1. How do you build a lean organization within an existing, large one structured for a different purpose?
In the 60’s, the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo sequence was executed by a small core group that grew into a very large organization in a way dictated by the needs of the engineering problem being solved. The lines of authority and responsibility were always clear.
Constellation started as a small group centered on an incoming administrator, but it had the disadvantage of being surrounded by a very large organization, much of which did relevant work and was filled with skilled engineers who had decades of relevant experience. There were more qualified people available than were needed to do the work, and all of them wanted to be involved in the biggest opportunity in human spaceflight in many years.
It was extremely difficult to say ‘no’ to good people, and there was almost always a way to make the case for a few more. The various parts of NASA fought to divide up the work and to get their people involved, assuming, rightly, that future budget distributions would be driven by the precedents set.
2. Engineering judgement at the top
Ultimately a poor engineering choice was made in the initial design study that set Constellation on its path. The small team around the administrator had started with the plausible conjecture that shuttle components could be reconfigured to make a crewed rocket (Ares), driven initially by proposals from ATK, the manufacturer of the solid rocket boosters. These components would have existing manufacturing lines, decades of flight heritage and therefore have a total life cycle cost less than alternatives. I was on the periphery of this effort, having been in Washington during the study period, working on a previous effort (Vision for Space Exploration), and I had a friend who was on the small team. Most of us thought at the time that reusing shuttle components in the proposed way was a good idea.
Ares, the first of two rockets, was planned to have a solid first stage. Everyone had seen what one of these looked like when it blew up, but we understood how that had happened, modifications had been made, and that failure mode required specific circumstances that could be avoided. Plus the crew was going to be on top of the rocket with an escape tower, rather than right beside the booster in a vehicle whose only abort scenarios involved untested, whole vehicle maneuvers.
Escape towers were well-understood, but what hadn’t been fully thought through was the whole escape scenario, and this happened a couple of years later. The primary problem was recognizing an incipient failure early enough. A first stage failure would fill the sky with burning solid rocket fuel which would make it hard for an escaping capsule and its parachutes to survive.
In 2009 an Air Force study publicly announced that this survival probability was 0% if the fault occurred in the first minute of flight. This was known by NASA engineers before I left the program in 2006. (I don’t know why it wasn’t well-known before 2009. We were never told not to say anything. We were just trying to solve the problem.)
To escape this cloud of burning fuel, the capsule would have to leave the rocket 5-6 seconds before the explosion. Shorter lead times required higher accelerations, and eventually the accelerations would be fatal. The problem was that we had multiple examples of solid rocket test stand failures where we couldn’t see any warning signs in the data more than .5 seconds before an explosion.
There were other problems (high launch vibrations, an over-heavy capsule), and Constellation was canceled for what were ultimately budgetary reasons as engineering delays associated with these problems increased costs. But this problem killed this design, in my opinion.
To connect this back to organizational structure vs individual work ethic, my role was lead of the team responsible for the algorithms for the automated crew abort decision. I reported to the person who led the team that wrote the software for the rocket. On paper, my background was appropriate. I had years of diagnostic algorithms experience. I’d done failure mode and effects analyses for flight systems, had reviewed many mishap investigations and had helped work on software tools for exchanging information during those investigations to make them more effective. And I knew how to fix copiers.
What I didn’t have was any experience flying and testing solid rockets. None of us did. Those who did have that experience were either still working on the shuttle program or were at ATK in Utah and to whom we were talking via two tin cans connected by a thick paper contract. We didn’t have the relevant experience to tell our bosses, early, that this particular problem wasn’t going to get solved and that the approach was suitable for cargo, because the overall odds of failure were low but not low enough for crew. What we did instead was apply the tools we knew, detailed physical modeling, pattern recognition and machine learning, to the problem of picking signals out of the data early enough to save the crew. The problem was *not* that we didn’t work hard. The problem was that we were patching a flaw rather than changing the design at a fundamental level to remove the flaw.
3. Mismatched skills
Over the 25 years of the shuttle program, human spaceflight within NASA had become dominated by the mission operations people, because they had a great deal of practical experience flying vehicles. Those who had experience designing and testing new rockets had aged out. So Constellation was dominated by operations people. Again, they were bright and hardworking for the most part, but while their years of experience were exactly right for some problems, it gave them false confidence about others.
That’s a quick summary of Constellation. The estimated cost until cancellation was $12 billion. Much of that was for a new capsule that still exists and that NASA has plans for (Orion). Responsibility for the failure lies primarily with the Administrator who drove the original design and the subsequent program (Mike Griffin). Many think it could eventually have succeeded. I don’t think so, without changes significant enough to call it a different program. But it didn’t fail due to incompetence or lack of effort by those carrying it out, even Griffin. He was and is an excellent engineer. But he was wrong in this case.
I’ve rambled long enough, so I won’t compare NASA’s productivity to SpaceX’s.
My point is that, in my opinion, bashing the workers in large, under-performing organizations is usually not accurate, betrays a simplistic understanding of the organization involved, its goals and particularly the environment it operates within, and is often unhelpful in improving things.