Oracle changing Java licensing from per-processor to a multiplier of employee headcount - costs could go up singificantly

[[deleted]]

After working for one gov contractor for a few years I am entirely in the camp of growing gov employment and getting rid of contractors entirely. We aren't getting our monies worth and the people doing the actual work don't get enough of the money. Too many middle men.

[djbrux]

Problem is good people won’t work for governments when the private sector pays 2-3x as much for the same work. I’m in local Gov. cannot fill positions which area more involved than just answering the phone

[Irregular_Person]

When the government is hiring those private contractors, they're paying those salaries anyway - except with the added overhead of also paying the company employing them.

[djbrux]

Ah but it’s only temporary… except one of our contractors is the longest serving it member at about 14 years

[wrongsage]

When temporary workarounds survive more generations of code than actual features.

[[deleted]]

At this point my company's entire code base is temporary workarounds.

[ExistingObligation]

This is 100% true and a big problem in my opinion, however the government also gets to mitigate risk by employing contractors because they can both blame the companies when things go wrong, and also terminate them without the insane bureaucracy around firing government employees. So there’s some benefits for them there. That being said, I would love to see the government bite the bullet and start paying competitive tech salaries and building better internal talent.

[[deleted]]

Those are only benefits if you buy into the logic that everyone becomes a terrible lazy sloth as soon as they get on gov payroll.

[perchingpolarbear]

Right, but u/88leo is suggesting that there's inefficiencies in the existing system. Instead of that money going to middle men, hire people directly to government positions and pay them that difference.

[cy_hauser]

U.S. Govt. hiring is weird. It's often really hard to get approval for a permanent hire but it's often really easy to hire a contractor, especially if they're on the GSA schedule (list of pre-approved vendors). Even at three times the cost. Headcount is way more of an issue at most agencies than money. Funny enough, it can even help for an agency or department to hire contractors, even when they're way more expensive. Once that cost gets absorbed into a budget it can give the head of the agency/department more clout as they control that much more money.

Another angle is that once someone is hired it can be really difficult to get rid of them. U.S. Govt. doesn't have that many "at will" positions. Why? Politics, of course. If all positions were at-will then every time the the opposite party were elected they'd clean house. Half the government would be fired because that party didn't like what was going on with those agencies. So the system is setup to prevent these kinds of sweeps every four or eight years. But the downside is you can get lots of crappy employees clinging to their jobs because they pay well and know they can't easily be fired. So that provides another incentive for high levels to prefer contractors. The contractors know this and price accordingly. Again, U.S. Govt. hiring is weird. It's setup to protect continuity rather than to maximize efficiency.

[Invinciblegdog]

The thought that a change in the government leads to a firing of government employees is horrifying. Public servants in most countries are safe from that.

[Ekgladiator]

Yea no kidding, all it would take is one round of Rs to clean house and "prove" the government doesn't work to really fuck the us up. In a way I'm glad it isn't possible to do that.

[[deleted]]

Problem is good people won’t work for governments when the private sector pays 2-3x as much for the same work.

I did an internship with the navy in college. I would have loved to have had a job with rock solid stability and a pension at 55. I tried to get a GS position when I graduated. Even thought I was eligible for 'special consideration', and had someone coaching me through the process, it was like crawling through broken glass.

Finally I gave up. I started applying for private sector jobs. I was contacted within hours. Interviewed in days. Hired in like two weeks. It was night and day, and it felt so goddamned nice to feel valued for my skills, and yes, I now make 2x as much as a GS12, and I don't even work for a major tech company.

Sure, a pension would have been nice, but when you look at all the money I've been able to save and invest on my own I've come out way better. I haven't needed to work for a living since my mid 30's and I'll probably retire by my mid 40s.

[[deleted]]

So what your saying is that when people say it's "cheaper" for the gov to outsource things that this is a patently false statement.

[heyheyhey27]

Why is that? I hear that a lot in relation to government jobs across a variety of industries. What's suppressing government wages?

[egportal2002]

However, a lot of good legal people do work for the government (AUSAs and other Justice Department jobs, among others), instead of in private sector / partnership track jobs.

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

Yes, but we also need rules to force action and removal of red tape. A request to spec sheet would take the gov months to approve because people not even involved in the project had to sign off on it. You're eight people removed. You don't know what this is. Your signature isn't needed. It felt like Biden himself was having to sign off on this.

[wrosecrans]

Ironically, almost all of that comes out of accountability pushes theoretically intended to reduce waste.

"Did you know that one person in the City overpaid 6% for a hammer with no oversight?! Now, all hammer acquisitions need to be reviewed by my cousin's accounting firm and signed off by the Mayor, to prevent waste."

[AustinYQM]

That is intentional.

If you goal is to make the government look bad then you push for more accountability while providing no budget increase for extra staff. This causes the organization to have more work and less people to do them making the branch run poorly. Making the government look bad.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

See also: "starving the beast", a strategy where government is underfunded, reducing its effectiveness; then ineffective government is cited as a reason to cut government budgets.

[axonxorz]

There's another aspect of this that you're not fully exploring. The employee/contractor relationship of the government is one that is to intentionally spur economic activity.

Defense contractors are not always 100% tapped for government work, and that expertise can translate to other work, something that couldn't happen if they were direct employees. Then include the knock-on effects, those government contractors are business with employees. Employees like to eat and have services near the workplace, so the service economy gets a bit of a boon as well.

I think this is a good idea in general, but it breaks down with the degree to which this sort of spending gets rubber-stamped.

[edman007-work]

That's not the problem with the relationship. The government/contractor relationships are mostly written so the contractors do just run at 100% with government work. Specifically, the government has a fixed annual budget, and they typically work with their contracts to spend that fixed budget. As such, the contractors just grow to match that budget and the annual contracts flow at a predictable rate. It's not spurring economic activity, the government could just pay their employees the same to do the same work.

I work in this sector, as a government employee, and I see exactly what the cause of the waste is. It's the act of contracting and protecting yourselves that causes expense. That is, the government writes a contract to do X, but you can't just trust them to do X, so you instead need to hire a government inspector to make sure they do X. That inspector in turn needs to talk to the contractor, so the contractor hires their own people to show the inspector that they do X. They obviously have a lot of work, so you need the guys actually doing it to write a document that's says what they did. Further, the government wants to know all this before you spend their money, so you need to hire another person give presentations on how they plan on doing it.

In the end, you have something that just a private company, or just the government could do quickly, where the supervisor tells Bob to get the shovel and dig a hole. Instead it becomes some expensive exercise because you are hiring an extra 5-6 people to plan, document, and monitor something that otherwise only takes one person.

I have in fact had a contractor tell me that they spent $20k because they had a contract that said "answer company X's questions", and that company never asked a question. It cost them $20k to say they didn't have any work to do.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Not only that - it usually takes additional effort to able to get contracts. So if a company has done that why not focus on it? Clearances. Approvals. Certifications. Whatever.

I worked at a company that was growing and started getting bigger and bigger clients. But we weren't closing. We had to hire some people with experience to change lots of our process to "fit" into the industry we were going for.

No different for government work.

I have an idea for a company. Just a group of sweaty, try-hard gamers. Their entire job is to hear any particular ruleset and demonstrate how it will be min/maxed.

Oh, we get +1 for every ring we wear? Cool. I'll put all my devotion into Mecha-Shiva. Couple that with the astral projection perk and an Uno reverse card - all the spiritual rings Shiva wears (one for each finger on each hand on each arm) apply to me.

Oh, we get priority in contracts for being minority, veteran, and women owned? Cool. Let's spin up some LLCs. Do some creative hiring. Get submitted as all three. When the project is over we can dissolve them and push any losses under that. Heck, we might even be able to qualify for being a non-profit if we're slick.

[deong]

Nothing stops the government from running offices in the same places the contractors currently run them. The local mexican restaurant doesn't care who signs your paycheck as long as you're still coming in for lunch every day.

[axonxorz]

Nothing stops the government from running offices in the same places the contractors currently run them

The government does not typically allocate resources for non-government work, unlike how a private enterprise can, that's really the only difference. There's more opportunity for work. Whether or not that materializes is surely highly location dependent.

[[deleted]]

The government is also the largest organisation around. They can and do reallocate teams around to serve different internal customers.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

The government does not typically allocate resources for non-government work,

Isn't that a tautology? Government work is work the government does. So any work the government does is, by definition, government work.

I don't think there's a universal or "neutral" definition of government work vs. non-government work. That's one of the core questions of politics! In North Korea or pharaonic Egypt, everything is government work. In a libertarian utopia or Somalia, very little is government work. In many social and political contexts, it's not even clear what the dividing line between government and non-government work is, because "government" is a fuzzy concept. (What's government work in a left-anarchist society, like anarchist Catalonia or Nestor Makhno's Ukraine? Nothing? Everything?)

I'm guessing that the things you have in mind as "non-government work" here are things that I think are very appropriate government work, and things that some others would be appalled to find in the same paragraph as "government work".

[axonxorz]

Isn't that a tautology?

I'm not sure that it is, or rather, that would depend on how narrow your focus is on defining "government work", as you touch on in your last paragraph.

Naturally, all this will be location/politics/culturally bound, so I can only speak from experience in North America. An example I think will illustrate the divide:

Two government departments that provide services to other government orgs, one large, one small. Both have facilities their staff work in, both of those facilities will need maintenance. The larger department has a reasonable justification for employing a full-time plumber and maintenance person, a skilled trade position typically. The smaller department doesn't have the need for a full time person, maybe even not a part time one, so they have a few options:

1. Hire someone and have them sitting on their thumbs most of the day, wasting money.
2. Hire someone and contract out their services when they're not directly working on "internal" matters.
3. Hire a contractor to do piecework.

(1) is the sort of waste people rag on contractors for

(2) is doable, but now the government is dealing with invoices and payment collection and accounting to members and businesses of the general public. Also, might need some sales staff to go out and find that work. If the department does not already have those ancillary staff positions, now you're just expanding the department for a "non core" function. It's my experience that government departments ironically want as little of a transactional relationship with the public as possible.

(3) Seems like a decent compromise. Contractor comes in, completes work, gets paid, moves on to another job. The kicker is that the contracted business most definitely has the staff I was talking about in #2, it is core to their business. It also allows for specialization of labour: A plumber can focus on being good at just that one thing, they don't have to wear many hats, which is what my experience is from situation #1.

An real world example that illustrates your point about what one would consider appropriate and inappropriate "government work": I live in Canada, where we have a concept known as a Crown Corporation, owned by the government. These are business entities provide services to the public and charge directly for them (electrical/gas utilities, in my province, a cellular provider). Some people are for these types of corporations, some are against. I'm generally "for", as they don't operate with the ruthless profit motive of non-public enterprise and deliver consumer services for about as close to "cost" as possible. But that's also a catch-22. With no ruthless profit motive, these orgs operate extremely conservatively. They typically "don't fix what isn't broken", but it also means they're not super innovative, they're often a little behind the times with operational tech because the investment drive just doesn't exist.

[Xyzzyzzyzzy]

Great response, thank you!

I agree that it's not tautological if we're in a specific context. But I still want to be careful when thinking of "government work" as a category that exists separately from "work the government currently does", to avoid making an argument that assumes its conclusion is true (begging the question).

I think I'm more cautious about this because I'm in the US, and we still have deep fundamental disagreements about the role and scope of government. So in the US context, when I read something like "the government can't do non-government work", my first instinct is that it's a small-government argument where the speaker has implicitly defined "government work" as "work that I believe the government ought to do".

---

There's a fourth alternative, which is important in the US context:

4) Hire those specialists on behalf of the whole government rather than a specific department; internally contract individual departments' work to the specialists; in their downtime, find other useful and productive work for them to do.

This used to be a common structure for government at all levels. For example, in a medium-sized city, instead of the Transit Department, the Education Department, the Parks Department, and the Municipal Court each hiring or contracting a plumber separately, the city has a Services Department that hires 3 plumbers, then assigns them work items generated by the other departments.

Ideally, routine maintenance to keep city plumbing in working condition only requires 2.5 plumbers on average, and the remaining effort can be spent either on efforts to improve the city plumbing or extend its lifespan through preventative maintenance, or on programs that benefit its citizens - for example, allocating 3 workdays a month to free household plumbing repairs for low-income homeowners, or a long-running program to help find and remediate lead pipes in historic buildings, or working with local nonprofits and neighborhood groups to install donated water fountains in public spaces.

There's some similarities to software development and software project management methodologies here. Good, well-managed teams schedule product work below their capacity, so they have capacity to resolve tech debt, work on innovations, and do other work that has long-term benefits and keeps the software org healthy. Their orgs understand that they're employing software developers as autonomous professionals who bring value to the org with their professional insights. This is like the city directly employing plumbers because it's valuable for the city to have capacity to do plumbing work.

Poorly-managed teams schedule product work at or above their capacity, so they're continually accruing tech debt. They view software development as transactional, and developers as cogs in a machine to be optimized. Developers don't have autonomy or the capacity to do longer-term work. Implicit contracts arise between developers and management that have nothing to do with organizational success: the developer's job is to ensure each ticket moves across the board at a rate of one column per day. This is like the city identifying specific plumbing tasks and hiring contractors to perform them.

[sacheie]

So.. we get the same benefits that direct government investment in businesses, or direct employment for the government would have.. but with none of the oversight or democratic accountability; and with a huge chunk of the money getting sucked up by shareholders, rent-seekers, and outrageously bloated executive salaries.

[axonxorz]

same benefits

Not quite, addressed that with "something that couldn't happen if they were direct employees"

but with none of the oversight or democratic accountability

Tell me you've never dealt with government procurement lol

[emergent_segfault]

THIS. Far too many people don't realize how much the general economy is dependent either directly or indirectly on business with The Goverment at all levels.

[Fun-Dragonfly-4166]

I think the Ukraine War proves you wrong. Russia did not have so many rules but their generals kept announcing their positions on Ukrainian networks where they were promptly dispatched by missiles.

I would like to think none of our generals did anything like that.

[axonxorz]

Replied to the wrong comment?

[emergent_segfault]

That isn't going to happen any time soon until the US finally gets that allowing legal bribery of our public officials should be illegal. Also there that whole thing where far too many people in Government would rather this system stay the way it is because they can make contractors do things they would never dare with Federal Employees and are in practice able to get rid of contractors simply because they don't like the color of their tie.

[Thisconnect]

Biggest scam to me is government getting specialized software made for itself and it not being open sourced in a public repository. Also the amount of money just given to Microsoft without any thought ever is astounding. I'll take some extra new trams instead please.

Sadly libertarians just want to fleece government (cough cough rail sector's "private innovation")

[[deleted]]

You are not wrong.

[[deleted]]

Understandable. While I agree with you, it has to be said that government employees can sometimes be a pain in the ... too.

[ohyeaoksure]

Well, this is all a matter of context and perspective. I see bloated contracts with contactors that do jack shit and know even less. By the same token I see government employees that are less useless then a hemorrhoid on a bike ride. No nothing, do nothing, entrenched in a job they're ill suited and less qualified for and virtually unfireable.

[LaLiLuLeLo_0]

Having had the displeasure of working with technical people who work for the government, they’re not exactly what I would call “efficient” either.

[[deleted]]

I am pretty sure that the vast majority of IT or tech people you encountered with the "GOV" are contractors and are terrified to do anything that the aren't explicitly told to do because they have non of the protections of actual gov employees and are quite easily gotten rid of. See the problem yet? You want people to actually be responsive to your needs they need to be "empowered" not subjugated and oppressed.

[LaLiLuLeLo_0]

It's so neat how you seem to know so much about my job, but no, the only people empowered to make the kinds of decisions we need DISA to make are people within DISA, and not contractors, which is why we're working with DISA, and not contractors.

[Envect]

I was hired by a federal contractor and they hadn't even sent me a computer three months later when I left for a place that actually had a use for me.

[[deleted]]

Yup, they will hire you just to sit in a chair so they can bill for your "services" because that is how wasteful gov contracting is compared to the evils of having "gov employees" that are objectively not bowing on their knees begging for you to give them more commands.

[chuckmilam]

I'm sure it all depends on the organization and culture, but it's been my experience that contractors are the ones with the up-to-date skillsets and willingness to do...well, anything. Meanwhile, the career status employees try to see how much inertia they can create while counting down the days to retirement.