Quote:
Originally Posted by YOWetal
Don't hold back tell us how you really feel.
Highly specialized skills certainly aren't remunerated in the public sphere but then doesn't it make more sense to higher outside specialists for tasks that aren't needed regularly?
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I've been at essentially the same type of job, different employers, for about 20 years now. And the older generation of baby boomers largely have retired in that span of time.
At the beginning, I learned a lot from the public service employees in those positions, I would say I learned many things have have really helped me in my career.
Over time, the mentality/policy you've described has completely hollowed out the public service, both federally and municipally. To the point where every specialized task is farmed out, and you need 4 employees and two contractors to replace one good one who retired.
Two of the four employees will be off on stress leave or file a human rights complaint for being asked to perform tasks.
Two will be self-righteous go-getters who have 4 hours of coffee 'knowledge sharing' sessions per day, between truly productive 3 hours of work, or they work in the office from 7:30 - 1:00pm as their 'office day'. They also feel the need to work from 11pm-3am because they didn't work a full day, they do this at their home office which was created to pivot for covid, and send most of their emails at that time, and feel overworked because of it, even though it's still only truly 7 hours of production. But of course none of the production is tracked through any sort of quality time tracking either, so it doesn't really matter. For instance, someone I work closely with at PSPC uses the same time tracking online software that I use. I track every 15 minute increment to be billed to a project, and must reach 90% billing each week, with 10% spent on 'Administration' (usually time to do the timesheet, lol). He puts 100% of his time to administration every week, and the time tracking software is used to just track his vacation time. How can management ever tell if there's any efficiency to what he's doing? For me, if I book 100 hours to a proposal with 5 hours of work in it, I've lost 95 hours of profit. If this happens in government, its just a normal Tuesday and nobody knows about it anyways.
The two contractors are paid too much, and do all the production. I once knew a guy who made $40k quarterly, issuing an update report on a subject. He would travel to Ottawa for two days of meetings on the report (report was kinda long, but didn't much change each quarter). He consulted on many other things as well, all around the world (expert) but owned his own condo in Ottawa for his quarterly meeting. Did he need to be writing that report for the government? Perhaps. Is it crazy and am I jealous? Absolutely.