Trump Makse It Easier to Fire Federal Workers

[UCFWayne]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-issues-orders-making-it-easier-to-fire-federal-workers-1527284794

this is a good job by trump. the fed needs to be able to fire bad employees.

 

[Bob the Citronaut]

ARMAGEDDON!!!

He didn't go far enough. WTF is "performance improvement period". If you suck at your job or don't care you should be fired immediately, not given a month more pay.

 

[Crazyhole]

This is the kind of thing that will keep his voters in 2020.

 

[UCFKnight85]

Have you seen War Dogs?

Most everyone involved in that award decision to AEY in the government still works for the government, and many of them have been promoted.

 

[NinjaKnight]

I agree with this decision 100%. It's crazy how leaches get into a cushy gov job and then suck for the rest of their lives.

Also FNB is still a 100% shit tier poster.

 

[fabknight]

It's been my experience that gov't workers are typically the "C" students...low "C" students at that.

 

[bqknight]

ARMAGEDDON!!!

He didn't go far enough. WTF is "performance improvement period". If you suck at your job or don't care you should be fired immediately, not given a month more pay.

You don't think someone should be given a warning and opportunity to improve themselves?

 

[bqknight]

It's been my experience that gov't workers are typically the "C" students...low "C" students at that.

Government workers is a pretty broad term there.

 

[fabknight]

Government workers is a pretty broad term there.

Yeah, it really is so let me box it some. I work for government contractors and a lot of government employees have never worked in industry (or weren't successful) and have not had the opportunity to acquire the common sense and critical thinking abilities that are required to actually understand what it takes to develop products or services. Most of them are bureaucrats that read some process or requirement without understanding the intent or logic behind it.

I will temper it my statement by saying that I've met a couple of really good, smart ones also.

 

[Bob the Citronaut]

You don't think someone should be given a warning and opportunity to improve themselves?

When did I say that? There are multiple warnings/write ups before they can even be put into the "performance improvement period". It is far from the first step.

 

[sk8knight]

Yeah, it really is so let me box it some. I work for government contractors and a lot of government employees have never worked in industry (or weren't successful) and have not had the opportunity to acquire the common sense and critical thinking abilities that are required to actually understand what it takes to develop products or services. Most of them are bureaucrats that read some process or requirement without understanding the intent or logic behind it.

I will temper it my statement by saying that I've met a couple of really good, smart ones also.

But they have a bunch of certification and training classes that say they are experts.

 

[fabknight]

But they have a bunch of certification and training classes that say they are experts.

Geez, I wish I could like this post 100X. The problem with the training classes is they only reinforce that the process is more important than the process intent or the product.

 

[bqknight]

When did I say that? There are multiple warnings/write ups before they can even be put into the "performance improvement period". It is far from the first step.

Fair enough.

 

[UCFBS]

But they have a bunch of certification and training classes that say they are experts.

Geez, I wish I could like this post 100X. The problem with the training classes is they only reinforce that the process is more important than the process intent or the product.

One Acronym: ITIL

'Nuff said

Engineering degree, 40+ IT certs, wore a tie every day ... I was their wet dream. And then I was the first guy to say you didn't need a college degree or any IT certs to hire the best people. The government didn't like that comment.

 

[fabknight]

One Acronym: ITIL

'Nuff said

Engineering degree, 40+ IT certs, wore a tie every day ... I was their wet dream. And then I was the first guy to say you didn't need a college degree or any IT certs to hire the best people. The government didn't like that comment.

ITIL?

 

[sk8knight]

ITIL?

Acronym for some company makes a shit ton of money selling process certifications and cons a whole industry that doesn’t need it into wasting money.

 

[fabknight]

Acronym for some company makes a shit ton of money selling process certifications and cons a whole industry that doesn’t need it into wasting money.

Like that 6-sigma crap?

 

[sk8knight]

Like that 6-sigma crap?

Haha, yeah, pretty much the whole industry of IT certifications, conventions, and consulting firms. And yes, I have my share of them too.

 

[UCFBS]

ITIL?

Acronym for some company makes a shit ton of money selling process certifications and cons a whole industry that doesn’t need it into wasting money.

Like that 6-sigma crap?

Haha, yeah, pretty much the whole industry of IT certifications, conventions, and consulting firms. And yes, I have my share of them too.

ITIL was developed in coordination with and pushed by the UK government. That alone makes me balk.

But Wikipedia has a far better list of criticisms.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Criticism
  "Some researchers group ITIL with lean, Six Sigma and Agile software development operations management."

I'd say putting ITIL in the same phrase as Agile is even an insult to Agile, possibly Six Sigma as well. ITIL literally lacks implements entirely. Don't get me started.

Spoiler

In my experience, ITIL is really a way for non-IT people to control the process, which real stakeholders (like actual, government management) then pawns off to yet more contractors. I.e., not even technology professionals, but yet other professionals to manage those technology professionals. Which then goes back to this whole non-sense of adding yet more government contractors from private industry, instead of having competent, government staff -- technology and management.

A very 'short-lived,' early Obama administration 'Tech Czar' had the audacity of suggesting the US federal government offer direct, FTE, government jobs to contractors, instead of paying private contracting and technology companies, saving the tax payer a great amount of money. He was ousted rather quickly by special interest by, of and in NoVA (Northern Virginia) corporations, also the richest county in the entire US. I think he survived even less time than the mid-'00s Microsoft CTO who openly admitted no version of Windows was ever designed for the Internet, but I could be wrong.

BTW, I'm with @fabknight, you can have some really sharp government managers who can get down-in-the-tech as well.

Spoiler

I cannot talk about some other places, but at Commerce-Census, the assistant director at the Computer Services Division (CSvD)** is one of the sharpest and most tactful government employees I've ever worked with. When the 2010 Decennial went sideways, even though we weren't even sub-contracted to the prime (SAIC, after Harris botched it), and worked in CSvD operations**, she finally unleashed us on the environment, after purposely holding us back until she got concessions.

That's when we argued, and won the argument, to rip out everything SAIC had done in 9 months, and rebuilt it in a 3-day weekend. We had to work off-hours at times, and fast, in addition to our regular duties. I remember reverse engineering hundreds of systems, analyzing them to reverse engineer into a RHEL Kickstart file, over just a single, long evening, since I was the fastest and most detailed (especially with remote automation and regular expressions to parse things), to rebuild the entire grid.

We also brought in a real Oracle expert, not from Oracle (my longtime colleague from Red Hat that Oracle regularly ripped off, and put their name on), among other things, and had them computing 40x faster within a couple of weeks. That's why the US media went from saying the Commerce Department was saying the 2010 Decennial was going to be late (fall), to it being on-time. In the end, our small Red Hat team got a mention on NPR about 'saving the Census.'

It wouldn't have happened without a key government official, and her knowing how to time it right, and under what circumstances. The thing about being a small vendor among huge, household name companies and major contracting firms is that they are always looking to throw us under-the-bus. If you have a great leader who has the tact and control, they will do what is right for the taxpayer, and look out for you.

**Census CSvD -- ECON, GEO, et al. -- is the everything from the quarterly economic reports to Congress that are also announced on the news, to the randomized, non-PII geodetic information fed to Google that actually makes the US taxpayer money, among the business, home and other 'surveys' and 'reports' too (less periodic). They are the more periodic functions of the Commerce-Census, and the mainstay of year-in-year-out operations.

Have you seen War Dogs?
Most everyone involved in that award decision to AEY in the government still works for the government, and many of them have been promoted.

I almost submitted one for myself years ago,

Spoiler

especially when I partnered with a company that not only had a Cage Code and FSO, but was certified for cleared for personnel that had even been through a full SSBI. I still regret now going down that route, especially during the Obama administration when the money was just there for the taking. Sigh ... I'm a really poor Libertarian-Capitalist .. or too good of one, if you mean from the taxpayer perspective.

 

[sk8knight]

ITIL was developed in coordination with and pushed by the UK government. That alone makes me balk.

But Wikipedia has a far better list of criticisms.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL#Criticism
  "Some researchers group ITIL with lean, Six Sigma and Agile software development operations management."

I'd say putting ITIL in the same phrase as Agile is even an insult to Agile, possibly Six Sigma as well. ITIL literally lacks implements entirely. Don't get me started.

In my experience, ITIL is really a way for non-IT people to control the process, which real stakeholders (like actual, government management) then pawns off to yet more contractors. I.e., not even technology professionals, but yet other professionals to manage those technology professionals. Which then goes back to this whole non-sense of adding yet more government contractors from private industry, instead of having competent, government staff -- technology and management.

A very 'short-lived,' early Obama administration 'Tech Czar' had the audacity of suggesting the US federal government offer direct, FTE, government jobs to contractors, instead of paying private contracting and technology companies, saving the tax payer a great amount of money. He was ousted rather quickly by special interest by, of and in NoVA (Northern Virginia) corporations, also the richest county in the entire US. I think he survived even less time than the mid-'00s Microsoft CTO who openly admitted no version of Windows was ever designed for the Internet, but I could be wrong.

Hey now, I’m damn near an Agile evangelist at this point in my career. But let’s be real that the whole training and certification industry built around it has gotten a bit ridiculous.

Also, the trend of government starting to build more and more as direct competition to industry is a concerning one. Government should not be in the development business.

 

[UCFBS]

Hey now, I’m damn near an Agile evangelist at this point in my career. But let’s be real that the whole training and certification industry built around it has gotten a bit ridiculous.

That's why I said ITIL is an insult to Agile.

Imagine it 10x worse, people who know terms but don't know any applications or implementations. ITIL is way too freak'n abstract. And that's by design. It's so HP, IBM and others can come in and sell you a lifecycle solution that is absolutely overkill ... completely with HPE, IBM PS and other contractors to run it for you, the government. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.

Spoiler

One of the biggest issues of being with Red Hat is that we sold a low 5 figure management solution, with virtually no client access licenses (CALs). HP and IBM hated it being around, because they were selling 6-7 to figure solutions, based on CALs, and it did nothing more for RHEL at all, let alone it was really designed to just 'pull' from it.

Many times I had to turn to them and say, "Guys, it's $15K, it's chump change, and everything -- from CVEs to OVAL definitions to the software updates -- comes down, and you can then pull from it." It's wasn't the product, it was the 'value' of it at 1/10-1/50th the price, depending on CALs.

And to make matters often worse, it was I -- the Red Hat guy -- who had to code in Python, Perl or even shell for their "solutions" APIs (no way was I going to do PowerShell, sorry, not in my Red Hat SoE!), because they weren't coders. Talk about the blind leading the blind!

If you ask most Linux and Open Source, they'll talk about Red Hat being 'expensive.' But when you have to manage compliance and configuration management for thousands of servers, the Red Hat Tooling is dirty cheap compared to anything out of any major tech company. Heck, HP, IBM, etc... usually just buys some open source tooling.

Red Hat does too, but only Red Hat open sources the code for everyone to use, with or without the Red Hat product name and trademarks, their choice, and related support and sustainment.

Also, the trend of government starting to build more and more as direct competition to industry is a concerning one. Government should not be in the development business.

ITIL is a perfect example of that gone wrong. It also should not be an incubator for required solutions that are costly, but mandated by the government. The UK excels at this, and the US is heading there too.

 

[rediceknight]

Department of interior and department of education all need to go! It’s full of useless libtards!

The deadbeat federal workers are like the no-see-ms which also cause problems and wasted tax dollars. Big and small, get 'em all. MAGA