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.

The worst part is that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this story, and it has better-written peers. All posts seem to pulse from the same vein, and I think that vein is named Chris Edwards*. These opinions clearly come through in his 2006 article on the “elite island of secure and highly paid workers, separated from the ocean of private-sector American workers who must compete in today’s dynamic economy.” His solution?

Of course, particular federal jobs may be underpaid and others overpaid. The average annual compensation of federal air traffic controllers is $170,000, which certainly seems excessive. One way to determine proper pay levels objectively would be to privatize services and let the market decide what they’re worth.

This idea has been put into practice over the past few decades by what I call the “government red-shift”, in which government bodies attempt to reduce costs by only paying for labor by project or task through government contractors. The concept is simple: even if the cost for a contractor is greater than the cost of a government employee over the same time, the government saves costs during the “off-season” by not having “unfireable” federal employees sitting around and collecting while waiting for work to happen. If you think about singular, large projects this makes a lot of sense:

1. Expertise – Why keep a generalist or a mid-level engineer on the books all-year when you could have the best and brightest for a 2 week spin?
2. Capacity on Demand – When you’re starting a new design, you’ll need 30 engineers. When you go into production, you may only need 1 to fill in missed items.
3. Care and Feeding – Contractors hopping from project to project don’t need pension dollars from any given spot, all costs are split between the customers.  The government should come out ahead as long as the contract stays short enough. Higher short-term cost = Lower Long-term cost

The cons are fairly straight-forward. In the case of expertise, by farming out all activities to those that are qualified now you become reliant on a service and a way of completing a task. In addition, you’re training all your in-house people to just make sure the “smart people” have the equipment they need and receive their checks every month. What gets farmed out? In reality, the “red-shift” pushes toward everything. In my industry, engineers and computer scientists in the private sector act like a brainy, bucking bronco, and the public sector folks just try to hold the reigns and make sure they don’t get trampled.

In the case of capacity on demand, the problem is witnessed when ‘off-season’ turns into ‘no-season’. High contractor costs don’t become the ebb and tide that they were envisioned to be, because continuity is EXTREMELY important. Ask any manager how the feel when a performing 3-year employee decides to head for greener pastures. It’s terrifying. Why? Because in fast-paced business, you likely have no idea the kind of services this person performs for you. We had a gentleman leave abruptly after serving for three years at our company, it took well over two months to get the amount of work that he did organized, divided up, and performed by three people.  What happens when your trusty contractor gets pulled away after two years of acting as the sole-fount of knowledge on a project or team? The whole point of “red-shift” is to make people like her swappable, so the system must be working!!

With number 3 we begin to see the system break down. If the contracts become common, in reality we’re just paying for the entire organizational overhead for an external body to care, feed, and nurture this non-government employee? The insidious part of it is that program budgets eat the cost of higher-paid contractors while the only metric for employment is tracked from government employee costs. As budgets become millions and billions of dollars, who cares about the inflation of contractor salary costs? Contractor companies now hold the keys to the trained workforce kingdom, and the government is trapped in a seller’s market. They’ll have no choice but to eliminate “off-season” just to stay afloat.

When it’s all said and done, I’m not against government labor cutbacks. I love them. I think the COLA freezes that happened in December of last year were more than appropriate, and I think in any time of economic crisis, it’s to be expected. We may even need to see those salaries be cut, 2-3% at a time during economic crisis. That’s NORMAL. But it’s important to understand the difference between government and private sector.

The private sector is, by nature, higher risk. That’s the point. No government employee will become a millionaire and be pulling in enough for that mansion in Southern California. People in government positions do get offers for 40% above their salaries, but they stay in because they love service and they want to be in a stable job, not a job with high gains and losses. Right now the private sector is a loss zone, but it’s going to come back. When it does, those salaries  can jump instantaneously while government workers will sit and wait for slow and steady COLA changes.

*I don’t mean to say that all ideas along this opinion comes from one man, but I think he’s a pretty good scapegoat. Look at that portrait, doesn’t he just exude that small-government glitter?

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.

The problem that I face most frequently isn’t the sharp corners or the break-neck speeds, it’s to get the body started in the same direction. A primary team, the integrators on-site to install the system, is firmly situated with a solid mission, for the most part, with both eyes on the finish-line. It’s a little looser than I was used to having, but you can ease into an established group and take cues from managers and clear decision-makers. Once you pick up the tone and the focus of the group then you can start a few strokes along with the group. Before you know it, you’re keeping up with the pack and generating some quality work. The finish line might keep moving 100m farther out, but you’re keeping pace and making progress.

In a larger organization, like mine, you often have secondary groups; fast-response teams are formed on directives from management of people with diverse skills or similar functional areas to work across normal organization. Predefined goals for these groups are often vague, but in the worst case you can still look to the 1-line e-mail that started the whole project. The absolute worst case are groups that self-organize to improve quality of life or “enhance productivity”, focusing on all kinds of issues without a clear directive. These groups, like PTAs, community development boards, and other groups are lucky to get their skates on the ice, much less run a race.

This kind of group is the one I am least prepared to deal with. I’ve often been a member of groups that start informally with a great solution in mind, but this idea of just having problems to solve is mind-blowing! (Un)Fortunately I’ve got a chance to work on this as I’m getting involved in just such a group. In this group you have some of the worst combinations: lack of financial or capital resources, long history of peaks and troughs in efficiency, little recognition, lack of power, volunteered or borrowed time from other recognized efforts, poor documentation/recollection of events and milestones, opinionated members, and cynicism/resentment from participating members. From this description it sounds like the only thing they’re missing is a coffin, but luckily that’s not the case. This group, like many groups that suffer similar handicaps, has a lot of talent and passion buried in each of it’s members. The key is to bring it out.

In cases like this there is a lot of push and pull at every single step. People will take a piece of the puzzle in which they’re interested and start skating as hard as they can in whatever direction seems best. Then another comes and does the same, and another, and another. All of these people think they are doing their best to contribute, but in reality they’re just creating confusion. Even if a solution comes out you have no metric for success, and no way to get motivated by progress being made. You’ve just got a rink full of crazy people.

As a team leader, you must see how important it is to seek purpose for yourself and for your group. Defining a clear purpose gives your team focus and drive. They’ll begin to give pause to even the smallest of their actions, and they’ll begin to seek out solutions and ideas that will get more impact on the objective.

Of course, this is all very different from group to group. Sometimes, you’ll find that defining a purpose and setting boundaries for your group is very simple, and other times it will be very hard. I made a comment, half-jokingly, to a colleague: “It would almost be easier if we were fighting against racism, because at least then maybe we’d know who we were.” Forgive me if I come off as insensitive, but I feel this is a very important, albeit blunt, point. When you’re fighting on battle lines with increasingly intangible opponents and problems it drastically magnifies the need for clear, concise and defined purpose. You don’t have battle flags or holy relics to look for in cube-land.

To continue, in this modern world you’ll be hard pressed to find a team that will walk to the Holy Land and back without a good reason they should go beat up some other guy who lives closer. And why not?! Life is too short to waste time on lost causes or crusades you don’t believe in. If someone calls my house and says “Please donate money, I want to do some stuff for people” I’ll hang up the phone. No one will take you seriously or help you in any significant way if you can’t give them a reason to support you with their resources.