The Navy has been hemorrhaging actual engineers for decades now. Most of the real engineering work is done by contractors (hired to build something) and contractors (on site technical staff who don't actually answer to the Navy).
The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.
There's a problem involved when you don't have a subject matter expert.
consider: here on HN commenters will often deride decisions made "anyone in the field with half a brain should know...".
But if you don't have that requisite someone in the field with half a brain, and when someone who literally makes money from convincing you they are experts tries to sell you...anything, how can you possibly evaluate the truth of their claims?
I saw this in state govt when they would try to hire someone - without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer? This goes beyond the normal problems of interviewee evaluations - you can get people that can't do fizzbuzz and you'd not be able to tell. Being able to tell the difference between "experienced expert" and "halfway competent but way over their head" isn't even an option.
It's a hard thing for an organization to overcome - as far as I can tell, absent some trusted 3rd party evaluation system (which runs into incentive problems), it requires iterations of staffing and trial by fire to build even this ability to evaluate in house.
> without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer?
I work in .gov and have heard many variations of that problem. A really common non-solution is to hire a second contractor to oversee the first. In theory that’s not a completely horrible idea but there are relatively few contractors who are certified to do business with the federal government and they usually aren’t trying to make waves, not to mention how job hopping makes for a lot of personal incentives which aren’t aligned with the clients’. Since getting and breaking contracts is so hard — and the big guys will definitely play hardball if you do – it has to be a pretty epic disaster to have real consequences, and that’ll arrive after years of billing very well.
The answer should be having more staff positions at competitive rates so agencies have qualified staff for oversight or simply doing the work but that has been politically untenable for decades.
And this is one of the reasons why you see the revolving door between regulators and private companies. They are both competing for experts.
One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.
For highly-technical regulators, this is definitely true — I’ve wondered what the threshold would be where it’d be cheaper to pay substantially more but with a non-compete banning work with anyone in a related field. There’s a plausible argument that the country would be better off with, say, a really motivated SEC even if you paid their retirees 50% to sit on the beach after they left government service.
In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do the work of at least four lower-skill workers, they would also require two lower-skill workers' worth of salary, and you just can't be paying any one person that much money because that would be Government Waste.
In America, it's probably more accurate to blame government labor unions for the preference of more lower skilled workers to fewer higher skilled workers
Unions like to set salaries, because there are more mediocre performers who stand to gain compared to free-market wages than top performers who stand to lose. They don't exactly want a cap, but they greatly desire a floor, and accept it also serving as a cap as an acceptable tradeoff.
Whenever that first part isn't true for a union, then the market pressure is for the top performers to leave the union for free-market wages, until it is.
It was my impression, not supported by much, that unions do like to set a salary for a role rather than letting that be up to the company or negotiated between the company and the individual employee. (Unions featuring superstars, like the Screen Actors Guild, are an obvious exception.)
I think it's an interesting question how a government workers' union would be likely to feel about a hypothetical restructuring that lost 75% of existing jobs while doubling or tripling wages. I tend to suspect that if the union already existed and represented those low-skilled jobs, it would be adamantly against the restructuring.
Doubling wages while not cutting jobs would obviously be fine with the union, but what would the point of that be?
Rarely, but if the union official gets to chose between more people paying dues and fewer people paying dues, which are they going to pick?
We know that Unions don't oppose salary caps, but they oppose differentials in compensation based on job performance. Seems like that amounts to the same thing? Unless you're suggesting we just pay government workers more and see if we get any marginal productivity out of them.
I can follow your hypothetical right up to the point where the union official commits career suicide by trying to piss off every member single member of the union in a single stroke, and no further.
Firstly, that chat doesn't measure popularity, it measures "how justified were they".
Also, I think that a honest reading of that chart would be that there is the Vietnam War (with very low justification), WW2 (with high justification) and then two subgroups: WW1 & Civil War with moderate justification, and Korea, Gulf War 1 and Afghanistan with lower levels, but still significant levels of justification.
Popularity of conflicts du jour and opinion of the military as a valuable enterprise in general are different.
For instance, I joined and served in the military during the second Iraq war despite disapproving of the invasion.
This holds especially for career civil servants, as political winds shift and one may not always agree with the policies of the current government.
One does not serve because the nation is perfect, one serves to strengthen the nation and to have the opportunity to make it better for future generations.
I would, to the best extent possible, educate my children as to what military service actually entailed, and then I would let them make the decision based on their values and life goals.
I'm just suggesting that when the military is actively engaged in operations that many people dislike, that has an impact on the quantity and caliber of people that are interested in being part of it.
Well, the "real" (read: design) engineering work has always been done by contractors. I literally walked out of an interview for the Navy (NSWC Carderock) when I realized that. I went over to General Dynamics and got a job as a mechanical engineer designing nuclear submarines. NASA is the same way, the design work is done by subcontractors. The government agency conducts oversight. So we, the contractors, sent our plans to the Navy for review & approval. Their job was to ensure we didn't screw up and that our plans would meet the contract requirements.
In my experience NAVSEA (the actual Navy side) were all former senior engineers at the subcontractor. They were good engineers and could smell bullshit easily. But that kind of work is very different than the creative side. Some people like being the reviewer better, and the government benefits are generally better, but otherwise I never saw the appeal.
As a former Naval Surface Warfare Center engineer I can't really agree with your assessment. When I was there (2004 - 2010 ) there was a dedicated push to get more engineering talent in the doors. Most of the time it appeared the qualifications to get hired at a contractor was "had pulse" and they desperately needed someone to fix everything that was getting delivered completely non-functional. The deliveries for the 76, and 77 were in a similar state of disarray, and without a team of NSWC engineers onboard for years neither of those boats would have passed sea trials.
Add to that, the Fortune 500 list - for the first time ever, it is not dominated anymore by US Companies. At least that is what I've heard from RT news.
I believe some of this is the slow-burning unintended consequence that political leaders are responsible for.
We've been at "war" for decades burning military dollars on a "cause" that very few Americans believe in, care about, or even understand. You can only wave the flags and shout about patriotism for so long before people stop giving a shit. It obviously becomes very hard for an organization to attract talent when said talent doesn't care about or believe in what the organization is doing.
The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis (oh, sorry, "alt-right European Nationalists") and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft (cough, cough, bone spurs). And for... whatever the fuck it is we've been doing in the Middle East since 9/11, the military doesn't even have a draft to potentially snare some better people.
When you have an all-volunteer military in an endless war for no clear purpose, the end result is many people who have nothing better going for them. Should we really be surprised the military is a clusterfuck? If you were competent, why would you want to squander your talents helping the US kill random brown people for no good reason?
>The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis ... and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft ...
WWII also had a draft, as did WWI and the Civil War. More people (as a percentage) volunteered for Vietnam than did WWII. That surprised me when I heard it. Americans were pretty gung-ho about enlisting in Vietnam and didn't really sour on it until later in the war. It was during the communism scare, so people fully bought into the Domino Theory at the time. Russia went nuclear, North Korea invaded South, the Iron Curtain went up, Cuban Missle Crisis, McCarthy, Sputnik, and a lot of chest thumping made it a pretty scary time.
I think your general point is valid. It's better to enlist when the country isn't at war, and that hasn't been for what, going on 18 years now? Enlistees nor draftees typically don't decide what features a warship has though.
My grandfather voluntarily enlisted in the air force in WWII because he didn't want to get drafted as a front line soldier with a rifle. So voluntary enlistment doesn't always reflect agreement with the war, it can be a pragmatic decision.
The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.
The results should not surprise us.