7 ms·

>some of the design, planning and early engineering is within the realm of what a professional civil servant could do. There's nuance to consulting costs. The

• twobitshifter 4y ago
  Consulting margins aren’t enormous either. When they pay consultants, they are paying the certified overhead costs + the hourly rate of the consultant and usually a limited percentage fee. A government employee really only saves you that fee which is 10-20%.
• asdff 4y ago
  LA metro is in a similar bind. They have to go with certain contractors because these contractors have hired all the talent that is qualified to build to LA metros own specifications for designs. They literally can't afford to understand their own specs.
  • pas 4y ago
    It's common in other countries to hire a separate professional firm (for each specialty) to supervise the work of the general contractor. Does LA do this?
    • twobitshifter 4y ago
      Yes they do.
• rhino369 4y ago
  It's not just a pay issue. Government is terrible at hiring good performers, weeding out bad performers, and motivating its workforce. Even if you hired a lead engineer for 400k, can't fire them if the end up being incompetent.
  • acdha 4y ago
    Government can easily get rid of bad employees. They have to be fair but it’s far from the impossibility popularly claimed. What tends to be the case is that the management creates a mess and then complains that they can’t sack some scapegoat. Following fairness rules would allow the employee to say that they were following policy or had their judgement overruled, so instead they’re left alone and labeled “unfireable!” It’s also important not to have too rosy an impression of a sector. Most of us here have seen private sector managers who were untouchable or managed to shift blame to others. They just didn’t have public oversight and usually don’t make the news.
    • TexanFeller 4y ago
      < Government can easily get rid of bad employees At one point my wife worked for the state and she had many friends that also did that I spoke to. My wife's job was intense, but a number of her friends would talk about the shows they spent 20hrs binge watching at work in the past week. I've been at privileged tech jobs that were somewhat relaxed, but nothing close to that. If someone is so useless that you don't notice when they're screwing off 50% of the time... Even if the government can fire pathetically low performers, they often don't!
      • acdha 4y ago
        There’s plenty of that in the private sector, too (thinking of multiple guys earning 6 figures because they were reliable golf buddies) but in every case the problem comes down to management. For example, were those people being asked to do more? Were they getting negative reviews?
        • TapWaterBandit 4y ago
          > but in every case the problem comes down to management. This is remarkably naive and misses the big point. If a private company wants to dilute its profit by keeping on a bunch of unproductive or outright parasitic employees, then it is entitled to do so. It is competing in the market and this behaviour will be punished overtime. There is no comparable incentive mechanism in government where they do not need to make a profit (they are funded off taxes which leads to far less end accountability to the people paying for the service) and in most instances it is explicitly illegal to start a business offering to do the same thing that governments do (as an example, I cant start up an alternative to the DMV to certify someone is fit to drive on the road). The lack of competition and lack of market pressures allow for much greater inefficiencies to exist in government enterprises compared to private ones. This isn't to say government will inevitably be bad but any assessment of the problems of government vs private sector action need to take into account the important differences between their structures.