My Webmaster and I were discussing some of the differences between working in the private sector and the public sector. He works for Southern Tech University while I’ve worked mostly in the private sector. My father, on the other hand, worked in accounting for the Department of Defense, so I’m well aware of the differences in incentives between working for the government and working for a profit-making entity. He’s written a post on his experiences and I’m going to write a post on mine.

Before starting my current job at Soyokaze America, I did work with a temp agency whose only client was the State of Estacado. I only took one job there that lasted a couple of weeks, but in that time I happened to be privy to a whole lot of government waste.

The job involved moving the Child Protective Services (CPS) from one building to another building. The entire move was actually an example of said waste. According to Estacado State Law, the government cannot lease a building for more than two years uninterrupted. While they could invest in buying some property, instead what they do for a number of agencies is have them relocate every two years. This is a very expensive and time-consuming process that really doesn’t serve anyone.

I’m not sure there is enough money in the world that could adequately pay those that are taking the calls for the CPS. They listen to one horror story after another. Unlike social workers, they don’t even get the satisfaction of building a relationship with those calling for help. Instead they file a report and pass it on and likely never hear from them again. As it stands, these folks start at about $25k/yr. It’s good pay for a phone job, but it’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

So our job was to move the phone bank as well as the rest of the agency over to a similarly sized building a few blocks away. This involved moving a whole lot of computer equipment, which is where I came in. My job was to take the computers down, box them up, and then set them up at the new place. Easy enough. It was also to box up the stuff from the warehouse, which is where I really got the education experience.

They had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2006, all unopened. Sometimes in the private as well as the public sector this sort of thing happens and I would have been understanding of, except that they also had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2005, all unopened. They had half that many from 2004. Why would they keep buying software that they’re obviously not using? The answer, of course, was that it was in the budget and if they said they didn’t need it, they wouldn’t get it. It seemed to me that if they were worried about expending their budget that money would be better spent on the call-takers, but that fell into a different category and besides the money was clearly marked for that specific software package.

The other oddity involved inventory. I would be hard to fault the state for having so many extra sets of speakers. They come with the computers but rules and regulations prevent the employees from having them on their computers. Fair enough. The only problem with this is that if they get rid of the speakers within two years, the retail cost of the speakers is deducted from their budget even though they really couldn’t buy the computers without them. The idea behind this was to “cut down on waste”, which is a laudible goal but one they are only sporadically concerned with and only, it seems, in the least applicable circumstances.

They they waste warehouse space maintaining speaker inventory that they don’t need. Each box had a date on it. Anything before that date was to be disposed of and anything after that date had to be shipped to the new location, where it would wait for a while and then be disposed of.

You might ask yourself (I know I would be), “What does he mean by ‘disposed of’?”

There is a Goodwill not six blocks from the complex that they were moving out of that they could give it to. They could sell the stuff on eBay. They could raffle them to their employees for a job well done and put the money raised towards an office party or something. Actually, no, they can’t do any of that. Instead they post excess inventory for 90 days and then give it away to anyone that calls dibs. Most of the speakers ended up going to a company that turned around and made a profit selling them boxed and in mint condition. State money was spent helping them load up.

A lot of the other (non-boxed, non-mint) stuff was thrown out. There were monitors galore that were literally left at the curbside. They actually put a sign on it that said “Do not take” so that someone would assume that they were good and would steal them. I myself got away with five sets of 3-part speakers and three laptop satchels.

Good for me, not so good for the State of Estacado and its taxpayers.

BusinessWeek’s Vivek Wadhwa thinks that fears that we’re falling behind in the sciences are misplaced. First a snide observation, but I’ll follow it up with some actual thoughts:

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.” President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations,” he said.

You ever get the sense that for a lot of people (myself included, I must admit) it’s not so much about their being too few science/math majors but rather there being too many liberal arts majors? I half consider talk like this to be the public policy equivalent of “Quit your band, cut your hair, and get a real job!”

So, there isn’t a lack of interest in science and engineering in the U.S., or a deficiency in the supply of engineers. However, there may sometimes be short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country. The National Science Foundation data show that of the students who graduated from 1993 to 2001, 20% of the bachelor’s holders went on to complete master’s degrees in fields other than science and engineering and an additional 45% were working in other fields. Of those who completed master’s degrees, 7% continued their education and 31% were working in fields other than science and engineering.

There isn’t a problem with the capability of U.S. children. Even if there were a deficiency in math and science education, there are so many graduates today that there would be enough who are above average and fully qualified for the relatively small number of science and engineering jobs. Science and engineering graduates just don’t see enough opportunity in these professions to continue further study or to take employment.

This confirms my biases, so it absolutely must be true. Perhaps it’s because of the type of people I hang out with and maybe where I went to school, but I see a whole lot of mathematical, scientific, and engineering talent being underutilized. At the least, I see a whole lot more of that than I see companies unable to staff their payroll.

I think that part of the issue is big companies complaining that they don’t have the very specific skills that they need, rather than that their aren’t enough math people out there. The cause of this is not too many people majoring in Comparative Folk Dancing (though too many are) but rather the fluctuation in demand. My brother majored in aeronautical engineering despite being warned by everybody not to because there was such a surplus. By the time he graduated enough of his peers had listened that he was quite in demand… and a new generation of future engineers were being told to start majoring in aeronautical engineering… and round and round we go.

Some of this is unavoidable. Who knows what we’ll need five years from now? Things are always, always, always changing. But some of it is the expectation on the part of employers that they get their employees already trained and ready to start on the first day. For a variety of reasons (not all unreasonable) they don’t want to train. In some cases, they’d rather import talent from abroad that already knows exactly what they need to know.

I have many not-very-nice things to say about my former employer Bregna, but one of the things that they did that I really respected was that they were looking for good people (as they defined it, anyhow) rather than people that had all the right skills. It helped that they primarily used an obsolete programming language and that this was determined in part by necessity, but even so they had the right idea. They’re not requesting people have just the right experience with Fortran… they’re requesting that people have demonstrated that they have the ability to learn it.

As someone with a lot of experience in a lot of different areas but always falling short of the “__ years experience required in _______” threshold, this is an issue of importance to me. I’m biased, but I think that employees like me are great. I’m a utility infielder with the demonstrated ability to learn just about anything given the time. But alas, people like me (even ones that are smarter, more ambitious, and more reliable) are frequently overlooked.

I wish that undergraduate majors were a lot more broad than they are. In my mind, graduate school ought to be the area for specialization. This is something that I think the medical field does right. Clancy came out of medical school with a broad education and from that she chose her specialization (which turned out to be broad, too, but by her own choice).

trumwill: Over the weekend the company changed everything on the network. They sent out an email with our new network passwords.

quinkyle: Wait, they sent out *an* email?

quinkyle: with everyone’s password?

trumwill: Everyone’s password being the same, yes. They advised us to create a new one.

quinkyle: wow

trumwill: Which would be possible if we could, you know, log in to see the email. Which of course we couldn’t because our passwords didn’t work.

quinkyle: Oh yeah… there’s that on top of it

quinkyle: hahaha

quinkyle: Jaysus… and they pay your IT department?

trumwill: We figured it out because they used the same default password we get when we first start at the company.

trumwill: Let me tell you, 1234 is an impenetrable password.

quinkyle: Well, it is a big number. If you start at 1 and start going upwards, it would be your 1234th try. My wrist aches just thinking about it.

Ron Washington, my home city of Colosse’s most recent former mayor, was a police commissioner of Colosse and a handful of other cities before getting elected. When he was first elected in the late 90’s, I remember thinking it odd that he only had support of one of the city’s two police unions and that endorsement took a lot of behind-the-scenes work by a local state senator. The support that he did receive was tepid at best and they declined to support his re-election bid.

As it turned out, Washington was a startlingly poor mayor. When he was re-elected the only rationale his supporters could offer up was that he was too incompetent to be corrupt (which was true, though since he was term-limited out, a couple of his former aides are now in jail). I remember thinking at the time that you would think that cops would support a commissioner-candidate because his cop background would make him more likely to consider faults in the department (such as cop pay and resources) a priority. After became obvious what a bumbling fool Washington was, I figured that the union had some insight into the mayoral candidate that the rest of us lacked.

But I stumbled across something interesting the other day.

Mike Moakley is Colosse’s current commissioner and the article I ran across was on the site of a police union of Sierra City, where Moakley was chief before moving to Colosse. It was pointing out Colosse’s rising crime and how Moakley’s top priorities are not particularly aimed at correcting this problem (upping grooming requirements, cutting down on high speed chases). I found it odd that the Sierra City cop union would take up web space denouncing a former chief and not so subtly saying his new employer should push him out the door.

That got me thinking that often the people that worked under you, regardless of how well you performed, may actually be the least likely to support you once you are no longer their boss. I would be reluctant to vote for many, probably most, of the company heads I’ve worked for. You get to know them a little too well and you’ve often suffered for their mismanagement. This is probably particularly true for something like a police chief, whose job is not to support the police officers but rather the mayor.

Logtar has a post on whether it is education or experience that matters more in the IT world and comes down somewhat on the side of experience. More people than not in the comment section agree.

Functionally, I have to agree with the consensus. The eighteen months of experience I racked up while in college proved almost as useful as my college degree. When I left Wildcat (my first post-collegiate job), my three years of experience was probably worth more than my degree when it came to getting a job. Even now, with five years of experience under my belt, I suspect that I would be better positioned had I spent the late nineties in the workforce rather than in college.

As far as whether or not that should be the case, I’m not so sure. When it comes to doing a particular job, such as network administration, experience does count more than education. In the broader scope of things, however, I find that my college degree has helped me as much as my work experience. Part of that is that I have become a “utility infielder” of sorts and am not very specialized. I have a couple of years of XML programming experience, a couple of years of SQL database experience, a couple years as a network admin, and a couple of years as a network technician. So my experience hasn’t carried over as well from one job to the next.

However, I find that having a college degree is ideal for working a more general position at a smallish or medium-size company. Small companies are always changing, as are job-responsibilities. It’s less about “doing a job” and more about “helping the company.” You don’t just have a series of responsibilities, you try to find new ways to contribute. It was college, much more than the work-world, that gave me the versitility to excel in these kinds of environments. And these are the environments that, despite my constant complaints about the chaos, I much prefer over the corporate alternative.

On the other hand, this versitility wouldn’t mean much of anything at a larger corporation until it was time to move into a more management position, by which time there is a good chance I would have forgotton most of what I learned by being in the narrows for several years.

When I was in middle school I was a pretty big guy. Big being a euphemism for fat. I also hadn’t figured out what to do with my hair yet. And I wore slacks instead of jeans. And I didn’t know the first thing about how to talk to girls. When I had a growth spurt in the 8th grade, started combing my hair back, and got comfortable in jeans, social acceptability followed. By the time I was in high school, no one knew what an unpleasant dork I had previously been.

That lead to some interesting experiences. When people who became my friends said nasty things about fat kids, they didn’t know that I used to be fat. When girls made unfavorable comments about nerds, they didn’t know how much of one I was. Every negative thing they said about who I used to be was noted, registered, and put in the back of my mind. The more of them there were, the less likely I was to get too close to them. Some of them wondered why I always kept my distance.

The biggest contingent on the OSI Team has been the Kimball Alumni Club. Kimball is one of the bigger employers in the Mocum area, handling customer service for cell phone companies. Deseret is a dream for phone support outsourcing. You have articulate young men and women with a solid education and a good command of the English language without a whole lot of job prospects. Phone support jobs here pay $2/hr less than they do in Colosse and are twice as difficult to get.

The first Kimball alum to get hired at Falstaff was Simon. Simon got the job the way most people did at that point: he knew someone else that worked here at the time. Once Kimball saw jobs that paid $9.50 an hour doing easier and more respectable work than answering phones (codemonkey beats phonemonkey on a resume), at every opening he would call one of his friends at Kimball. First was Del, whom I wish hadn’t been promoted out of the department because we could really use him. Second was Melvin, who is the best programmer OSI has ever seen. Then came Martin, whose ability to wade through docs. Take the best and most important full-time people the department has seen in the past year, and almost all of them came from Kimball.

I am an exception. But at some point I got incorporated into that group. Not sure when it was, but I think it was when we were conspiring to get rid of Golden Boy, or maybe it was when Melvin got moved into QA, making 2/3 of QA Kimball alums. I’m not only not sure when I became part of the group, but I’m not sure when we actually became a group.

Since coming to Falstaff, Simon has quietly been building an empire.

One of the ongoing problems in the department is that everyone is enthusiastic about doing everything that isn’t their job. I was always aching to work on my database application; Melvin has Melvin’s App; Adam is always volunteering for stuff that will get him out of actual ANG programming. There is painstakingly little that is glamorous about what we do within the company. It looks good on a resume, but it generates little respect within the company. As such, there is a drive to become more than just an ANG Programmer or OSI Programmer. The good news is that a lot of people have found a lot of ways to contribute to the company. The bad news is that people sound offended when you tell them that while the project they’re proposing sounds great, our programming workload is only increasing. The problem is that as Falstaff starts hiring increasingly overqualified people for the department, everyone believes that they are worthy of more than they are presently tasked with doing.

And, for the most part, they are.

I’m not sure if anyone has a bigger claim to overqualification than Freddie Paste. Freddie graduated Cum Laude from the University of Tennessee with a degree in Computer Science. His first job turned out to be a drafting position, where he learned that skill as well. But despite the overqualification he brings to the position, only Simon is better at keeping his nose to the grindstone. The guy is a workhorse. His productivity is phenomenal and his accuracy is not bad. He was hired on to work on reports, so he works on reports. Works overtime when asked. Works through lunch when asked. Doesn’t get distracted when conversation strikes.

Freddie and I get along quite well. He was here for a couple months before I ever really talked to him, but once I did we were natural friends. We’re both southerners. We both have college degrees and are probably the two most overqualified people in the department. We both came to Deseret because of opportunities for our wives.

I’ve noticed in recent weeks, however, that it seems that the Kimball Alumni are unusually hostile towards Freddie. They were not particularly congratulatory when Freddie got Employee of the Month. The general consensus was that he got it because they were itching to give it to someone in our department and he was the pointleader. Freddie is never really invited to our outings, though I’m not sure if he would really go to begin with. Freddie, for his part, is not the most social person in the world.

It does make me wonder, however, the basis on which I got incorporated into their group and he did not. Was it because I got deference by Melvin and Martin because I was in QA grading their work? Did Simon and I get along because QA can be a lonely place to be? Because Paige liked me? Am I there by way of luck and if I wasn’t in their group would they think that I got the leadership position because I get along better with Willard than they do?

They’re nowhere near cruel to Freddie as my confidants in high school were about the fat kids and the nerds. But they are oddly indifferent and not nearly as friendly. It leads me to wonder about those that I am unfriendly to and how much of that is circumstancial.

It’s interesting to think about… and not particularly in a good way.

Charlie: What I don’t understand is how come I need to take classes in sociology to become a computer programmer?

Me: Everyone should take sociology.

Charlie: Why?

Me: Because the ability to compare cultures and acknowledge the cultural norms that we take for granted will make you a more worldwise person.

Charlie: But will it make me a better programmer?

Me: Considering that you’ll probably be working with a bunch of outsourcing Indians, probably so.

At the meeting on Thursday, two dreaded words came up. First was the “A” word. It was mentioned several times, usually with the word “voluntary” in front of it. Then, towards the end of the meeting, the dreaded “L” word was uttered.

The “A” word is “attrition.”

The “L” word is “layoffs.”

A freak thing happened a couple of weeks ago. We ran out of reqests. Whereas we were once behind by some 800 documents (a two week backlog, give or take), we busted through almost all of them. We in QA have some work, but OSI has none. And them running out means that we’re on borrowed time.

At first it was just a quirk. Everyone happened to be doing something else besides generating requests for a spell. But a couple weeks later, it became apparently systemic. When we found out that the Assistant Accounts Chief had left, we thought that might be it. But apparently he didn’t do much, anyway.

Requests are cyclical. When I was first hired, there was a lack of things to do. Then a process got changed and before we knew it we were knee-deep in (mostly) unnecessary requests. That’s apparently run its course and we’re sort of out in limbo.

It was noted by Willard weeks ago, though there were assurances that there was enough work to be done to keep everyone employed for years. It’s still true, but increasingly irrelevent. He’d been saying with confidence that there would be no layoffs, but he was a bit dour all week last week. Then the news at the meeting. And a chart:

Necessary QA: 2
Existing QA: 2

Necessary OSI: 4
Existing OSI: 10.5*
Known Attrition: 3.5
Expendible: 3

*Note: two people are known to be leaving soon. three are going from full-time to part-time once school starts again.

Now, Willard was 100% correct that there is enough work to keep everybody there for quite a while. But right now there is a lull and there will be for the forseeable future. So one of the following three things is likely to happen:

1. They realize that resources are being wasted and will reconfigure things so that more requests are sent through RLC.
2. They realize that resources are being wasted and rather than reconfigure things so that their employees will keep their jobs, they’ll just start laying people off and pick up more people when the requests inevitably start getting generated again.
3. They’re going to take advantage of the opportunity to let go of some dead weight. My partner Simon and I have been comparing notes with Willard for a few weeks now. It would be a good managerial decision to go ahead and let go of a couple people. From a personal standpoint, though, the weak performers are the ones with the most to lose. Wife, kids, and mortgage.

My preference runs 1,3,2. We’ll see how that goes.

It may not ultimately be my problem. The good news is that there is an opening in the IT department. Willard fully expects to lose someone from OSI. Of the group, I’m not sure of any that are more qualified than I am. I have over two years of network administration experience under my belt and a college degree. No one else there can boast either. Unfortunately, Willard won’t have my back this time. Last time he wanted me to move along in part cause he didn’t want to lose Mindy. This time I’m the one he doesn’t want to lose. And I lost the other promotion to Mindy due to seniority, and if they go by seniority this time around I will lose out to Simon. I’d be okay with that, though. Simon is about to take on two step-kids and a mortgage. He needs the money more than I do.

Part of me is a little irritated with the opening. I’d finally resigned myself to my current position as other opportunities dried up. Now I have something to hope for again. That’s not always such a good thing.

I had a discussion at work with Simon (my partner), Willard (my boss), and Jarvis (Willard’s deputy, but no longer over me). It went something like this:

Me: Willard, we’d like the cover sheet to list the previous five people to touch the packet.

Willard: Why?

Me: Because it will save me from having to click back and forth every time I need to see who the document goes back to.

Jarvis: You should have to click back anyway for document tracking.

Me: Except that I don’t do things that way, I do them this other way.

Jarvis: But if you did them my way, you wouldn’t need the list of people that last touched the document.

Me: But my way is faster.

Jarvis: I don’t see why, it shouldn’t be faster.

Me: But it is.

Jarvis: But it shouldn’t be.

Me: But it is.

Jarvis: Regardless, we want to get rid of the cover sheets anyway.

Me: Why?

Jarvis: You theoretically shouldn’t need them.

Me: But they’re helpful because of the way that I do them. So much so that I will make them by hand if you take the button off the menu.

Jarvis: But it wouldn’t make a difference if you did things the way I would do them.

Me: But I don’t.

Jarvis: But you should.

—

This is the short version of the conversation. The long version took 90 minutes, had harsher language, and required mutual apologies roughly thirty minutes later. And an admission that we spent 90 minutes debating a procedure that would only shave or add seconds to completion times.

From time to time I have to stretch my clothes to three weeks before I can do laundry again. This is one of those times. Whenever that’s the case, it requires more planning on my part than usual. I have to decide, among other things, which of my undesirable slacks I want to wear and what I want to wear with them so that I can feel pretty, witty, and bright.

But the thought occured to me as I was picking out clothes that it’s Wild West Week at work. On WWW, we get to wear jeans. This made stretching to a third week insanely easy. Except that I wasn’t sure. I mean, I was pretty sure that Wild West Week was the first week in August, but maybe I was wrong and it was the second.

I ended up taking a change of clothes just in case I was wrong. I’d spent so long trying to figure it out that I was running late to work. That meant that if I had it wrong, I’d have to change on work time. That made me worry a bit more.

When I finally got to work, I saw a couple of Account Managers walking in wearing jeans. “Thank god!” I said.

When I got inside, the first words out of a coworker’s mouth was “Thank goodness! I couldn’t remember if it was this week or next.”