<Note, I’m still making modifications, but here’s my draft so far. I’ve got to get to work!>

Do you often find yourself in Twitter debates regarding the effectiveness of public sector labor over the private sector? This always seems to happen to me.

The question arose from a recent article in USA Today:

Wisconsin is one of 41 states where public employees earn higher average pay and benefits than private workers in the same state, a USA TODAY analysis finds. Still, the compensation of Wisconsin’s government workers ranks below the national average for non-federal public employees and has increased only slightly since 2000. …

… The analysis included full and part-time workers and did not adjust for specific jobs, age, education or experience. In an earlier job-to-job comparison, USA TODAY found that state and local government workers make about the same salary as those in the private sector but get more generous benefits. …

You readers out there are very lucky to have me on your team; that second paragraph was buried halfway through the article. It’s funny, because it shows the absurdity of the metric. When you talk about government employees, even at state levels, you’re dealing with people in typically more  higher-level or managerial positions and higher education rates. The fact, for example, that all teachers in Wisconsin require rigorous certification beyond their Bachelor’s degree. If you average all the McDonald’s employees and receptionists of the world against people who are charged with classrooms full of kids, managing bus fleets, writing/reviewing policy, and carrying a badge/gun you should begin to notice a trend on the requirements that are expected.

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When running the course of my undergrad, I thought I’d lock onto programming and do it for years and years. I knew I had the impulse to lead and direct, but I never imagined myself doing anything more than being a “programmer lead”. Heck, I wasn’t the only one. Most of my friends knew that I’d be slinging code for the better part of five years. I couldn’t imagine a world without intelli-sense or Eclipse, and solving problems without a compiler was simply impossible.

The first lecture of my master’s program was my first policy/engineering class, and my world was rocked. I was probably galvanized by the seething hatred that my peers seemed to have for this brand of security. Dismissing the pariah complex, I had an abnormal draw toward it, and the people that I began to associate with only pushed me further in that direction. When I chose my first full-time position it was pretty clear where I would lean. Now I’ve programmed less than 100 lines of code in the last 3 months, and 95 of those were from personal projects.

Work is filled with partial glimpses into projects large enough to crush a human, and everyone struggles just to make sure their documentation doesn’t accidentally expand their scope commitment into a new circle of requirements-hell. Most of the higher-level minds just try to negotiate the nether-space between clients and managers, hoping that satisfying one of them doesn’t piss the other one off. Quality engineers are overworked, and project managers mumble unintelligibly to themselves while walking the fine line between hyper-tension and deadline slippage. Great ideas are hatched in unreserved conference rooms and laughed off or, if particularly reasonable, are stabbed to death by managers and customers during powerpoint briefings. The only people who get great things done are the ones who play the field better than Kasparov.

And it’s all fascinating.

When I sat in my Software Engineering or management courses it always seemed like an interesting task to rally the troops and build a working software solution. In these courses we learned to identify talent and involve people with whatever skills they had in their arsenal. Successful and failed projects passed by; each one taught a lesson about coping with failure and harnessing success towards future efforts. Everything was a process to accomplish a common goal: teams were given a task, chose an approach and learned how to squeeze all the talent they could into a solid attempt at the solution. All of these trials seemed to be finely tuning muscles to be called on in any team situation and bring out the best solutions. Entering the workforce has quickly shown where I’ve developed strong muscles in some wrong areas, and I find myself aggressively pursuing a figure skating gold with legs trained for speed-skating.

The problem that I face most frequently (more…)