@aeparts1 wrote:
I work for a small publicly traded company. $11 billion in revenue, around 20,000 "team members". Slowly growing every year.
6 months ago, out of nowhere, 500+ team members were terminated. There are constant terminations, from the lowest drone to district managers & above. Perform or you are gone. Welcome to the real world.
Once a year I have to do a detailed evaluation of my job & job performance. Justify my employment basically. This is reviewed by my manager, who does a similar evaluation on me. Then, every three months, I get another, slightly less detailed review. I also have to set 2 or 3 goals for the coming year, & describe in detail how I will accomplish them. This is reviewed every three months. Welcome to the real world.
I don't have much sympathy for those government workers who cry because they are asked to describe three things they accomplished at work in the past week. Welcome to the real world.
@aeparts1
FYI, in terms of employment protections, there is no comparison between private sector employees, on the one hand, and tenured USG employees, on the other.
The latter are protected by a dense thicket of laws, adopted by Congress back around 1970. You can review them here: https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title5&edition=prelim
I was hired by the USG in the late 1970s and was a beneficiary of these laws, with which I am generally familiar.
The reason tenured USG civil servants are protected by Congressionally-mandated laws is because once upon a time, these employees were actually valued by our elected leadership. Further evidence was the old defined-benefit retirement system, instituted in the 1920s (and discontinued in the mid-1980s) that millions of us received.
The reason that USG employees were valued was because these individuals at one time did work that was unique and specialized. (Obviously many still do, but computers and the proliferation of IT have changed the nature of much of the administrative work that was once routinely performed for the USG by human beings.)
US taxpayers might have spent tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single such person to obtain an ultra-sensitive security clearance, for example, or to be trained at a prestigious university or weapons research center (Los Alamos) to do very unusual agricultural, nuclear or other scientific research. Back in the old days, for exceptional performance, we would actually receive medals that were made of real silver.
As for evaluations: you will be interested to know that, with few exceptions (clandestine operatives and members of the SEALS and Army Rangers, for example), USG employees also are required to justify their existence (a) annually, like you, and (b) have consultations with their office management, also every three or six months, like you. They have to do the same sort of goal setting as you do.
I do not know what sort of goals you have to set for yourself, but there are some occupations in the USG where goals are extremely ambiguous -- indeed, impossible to measure because they do not lend themselves to metrics. (One of mine was to "work closely with policymakers and elected leadership to ensure the primacy of US foreign policy objectives.") This is why most tenured national security positions in the USG thus far have been exempt from the idiotic mass dismissals that the administration is now being ordered to reverse.
As for the Musk request for 3 or 5 bullet points: that was nothing more than gratuitous attempt at intimidation which was not only illegal (such requests can only come from within individual cabinet agencies, NOT from the Office of Personnel Management) but which ultimately was rejected by CIA, FBI, State Department, DHS and a few other cabinet agencies on the grounds that it posed a security risk. Eventually the request was discarded and Musk was told to cease and desist.
In sum, the real world that you know is, for the most part, quite different from the real world that USG employees inhabit. And there are good reasons that that is the case.
It is going to be extremely difficult for the administration to impose a private-sector structure on the federal workforce.
The reason is simple: the USG exists in large part to deliver services to the American people. If those services cease, members of Congress -- who ultimately are in charge of amending the laws that I referenced above -- stand a good chance of losing THEIR jobs. And we all know that THAT will never, ever be allowed to happen.
As for Elmo Musk... he is only now finding that out.
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