Engineers Avoiding Government Work

[selenite0]

The New York Times discovered that the nation's best engineers are avoiding government projects. Well, sure. I'd be doing commercial work if I had applicable skills. Alas, I've been in the government tarpit for so long I suspect I may never get out.

The article covers the reasons for avoiding government projects on the individual level but completely misses the top-level causes. Yes, projects take too long, waste lots of time, and fall behind the state of the art. But saying "bad management" just begs the question of why with so many successes in the past things keep getting worse (note that the article focuses on military projects, but the problems apply to all big government development efforts).

Most government projects--and all the big ones--aren't about building something. They're about giving Congressmen pork to bring home, giving the bureaucracy something to process, and keeping companies in business. The actual mission is merely a pretext. It has to be a good pretext to bring in votes from Congressmen not getting slices of the pork but it's still just a pretext. The bring-in-votes goal leads to pretexts that sound good rather than actually being useful for the people down in the mud (or wherever the users hang out).

Once funding is approved and the whole thing starts to slide downhill the top priority is ensuring that the butts of all managers associated with it are completely covered. So anyone who might complain gets to add their requirements to the list. Committees are formed to diffuse responsibility for the specs and architecture. Any delay or confusing rewrite is preferable to getting caught in a mistake. Bids get protested and redone until the lawyers can't come up with any more excuses to quibble. Finally a contract is awarded.

And then some poor, sorry SOB gets the responsibility for building the thing. The requirements are the wish list of everyone who could fit at the table. The budget is what Congress was willing to carve out of the other pork projects. The deployment schedule was set to the earliest possible date after the retirements of the proposal team leaders. The engineers who did the preliminary designs are all chasing other contracts. So with limited resources the new project manager has to create a team from scratch and teach them what they're supposed to make.

With all those constraints on him the PM's only real decision authority is over the order that the stakeholders will get fucked over. Congress goes to the end of that list, of course. Piss them off and the program's gone. The bureaucrats, users, and anyone else Congress will listen to go to second-to-last. First on the fuck-over list? Why, his engineering team trying to build the thing, of course. It's not like he can realistically pick anyone else.

Can this happen to commercial projects? Sure it has. If the back story of Windows Vista ever comes out it might look a lot like that with the appropriate names changed. But commercial projects always have one very sharp constraint--someone outside the company has to be willing to give money for this product as a user, advertiser, or whatever. If the customers stop buying the company goes bankrupt. If a government contractor produces a horrible product the troops get issued it anyway . . . or have to keep duct taping the old ones together even if that costs more than replacing them.

If the government completely redid its procurement system it would probably get better results. The engineers working on the projects would certainly be happier. McCain's battery prize proposal could be a step in that direction. But the current system is just going to keep accumulating more sludge in the arteries and smart young engineers will be staying the hell away.

Comments

[thegameiam.livejournal.com]

I've seen a bunch of government projects go the way you're describing, and that's depressing. As a ray of light, however, there are some which are actually functioning well - those tend to be driven by small numbers of people who are slipping through the cracks to do something about which they personally care greatly.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. But the key word is small. Once a project becomes big enough to support a parasite they all climb on and things go to hell.

From one very specific point of view on one very specific set of government entanglementss

[jenna-thorn.livejournal.com]

I can't say I disagree. One of the Libertarian candidates has stated thet the recent mouthing off mandate for action from the White House doesn't go far enough and 22 CFR needs to be swept from the books entirely and rebuilt from the ground up.

After I caught my breath from the peals of laughter, I forwarded it to all of my buddies in the industry with big emoticon smiley-faces.

There are government agencies, full agencies, with titles and responsible officials and names on letterhead. These agencies have now decades of history and precedent and are, in fact, twisted in them. Chunks of the regs and huge swathes of mindset are firmly planted in the Cold War Era and that's acknowledged as part of the problem by the gencies in question.

Sweeping the whole system clean and starting over with realistic goals and realistic targets and current trade offerings would absolutely undeniably fix the system.

It will also never happen.

Layers of beauraracy grow like barnacles or more like sediment, fossilizing the original intent so that any change to reflect the changes int he world around us get applied to the top layers only, while the whole is still rooted in an increasingly out of touch base that no longer applies.

Ah, I apologize. You are speaking specifically to engineers and of defense contract engineering and I've veered off topic, but oh, sometimes I get so frustrated.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

I'm not an engineer - but I did contract at the FDIC for just over two years, supporting their local network in Dallas.

Ye great gods and little fishies. I'll spare y'all the tedious stories - everyone has them. We did more wheel-spinning thanks to petty infighting, lame rules, inept employees and so forth than a taxpayer would want to believe.

I don't say I'd never work for the Fed again - but I was mighty glad to put it behind me and I'd sooner do almost anything else.

[wombattery.livejournal.com]

Is it safe to assume that everyone reading this has seen Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister? Sounds like the same dynamic at work.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it. But it makes sense for bureaucracies to have the same problems. It's human nature meeting incentives. I'll keep an eye out for it.

[wombattery.livejournal.com]

Satire about a well-meaning but spineless and egotistical politician vs. the empire-building career bureaucrats who are supposed to carry out his policies, providing a disturbingly accurate lesson in how things don't work in government (a throwaway line provided me with the best insight I've ever had into the difficulty of reform in a representative democracy: "No politician will ever vote against the system that put him in power."). Highest possible recommendation. About the only thing Maggie Thatcher and I have in common is that we agree that it's about the funniest TV show ever. However, since it's a particularly intelligent British sitcom of the 1980s, you're likely to have to make an effort to find it unless your local PBS station is in a particularly benevolent mood.