How Government Works

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. Congress said someone may steal from it at night, so they created a night watchman position (GS-4) and hired a person for the job.

Then Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning position and hired two people: one person to write the instructions (GS-12) and one person to do time studies (GS-11).

Then Congress said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Q.C. position and hired two people, one GS-9 to do the studies and one GS-11 to write the reports.

Then Congress said, "How are these people going to get paid?" So they created the following positions, a timekeeper (GS-09) and a payroll officer (GS-11) and hired two people.

Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?"

So they created an administrative position and hired three people: an Admin. Officer (GM-13), an Assistant Admin. Officer (GS-13) and a Legal Secretary (GS-08).

Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall cost," so they laid off the night watchman.

Yep. This is just about how Congress thinks.

My Career Sucks

I have never been a big fan of work. I have never understood people who can’t wait to get to work every morning. I don’t live to work. I work in order to have a life outside of work. Sure there have been periods in my career where I really enjoyed the work I had to do. But I never loved it enough to make it the focus of my life. No matter how enjoyable the job was, I found leaving for home at the end of the day even more enjoyable. Despite my dislike for most of my jobs I have always endeavored to do them the best I could. I show up, I do whatever it takes to get the job done. I work as long or in whatever capacity it takes to get the job done. I have tried to be pleasant, and friendly to work with. I have always tried to not make too many waves or to keep the waves I do make from capsizing the boat. I can only think of a couple instances as a kid where my bosses were not pleased with my work. Some of my bosses have not liked my attitude, but they never had cause to complain about my results. Even though my personal satisfaction with my career has never been that strong, I have always tried to perform to the best of my abilities. After all, that is what I was being paid to do.

My current situation at work has reached a new low for me. I was let go from my programmer job about 6 weeks ago. This doesn't mean that I am unemployed. I still get a paycheck I just don't have any work to do right now. Because of the way our work structure is organized these days this happens quite often. Most engineers, like myself, work for a specific technical program. But organizationally I belong to a different management structure. So when a program manager decides that he doesn't need my skills anymore he simply sends me back to my management branch to deal with. When this happens my management chain immediately jumps into action and starts nagging me about what I’m doing to find a new project to work for. My managers don't do anything to help me find a new program to work for. They don’t see that as their job. Their job is to harass and intimidate me until I find a new program to work for. They do this because until I do find a program to work for I am paid out of their overhead budget. Managers don't like this very much. They don't appreciate us working stiffs encroaching on their territory and spending their overhead money.

In the past when this has happened I have usually be able to land another program to work for in just a couple days. This time however I am having trouble finding work. The most frustrating part of this is according to the friends I have who are trying to help me find work there seems to be a lot of work out there that needs to be done. However I have not been able to get most of the managers who are in charge of that work to talk to me. I have noticed that the procedure for dealing with people looking for work these days is to ignore them. I send out e-mails and make phone calls and I get no response. It is reaching the point where I would love a manager to call me back or send me an e-mail telling me to "Drop Dead!" That would be a great improvement over no response at all. The most frustrating of the people ignoring me is my own branch and division heads. My branch head was warned two weeks before my last job ended that I would be looking for a new job. He ignored it until I actually called him to find out what overhead charge number I should start using. His response was to "encourage" me to find a job quickly and to send him a resume that he could circulate. So I sent him a second copy of my resume in case the first one I had sent him two weeks earlier wasn't sufficient. This situation prepared me so when he asked me for a resume again, three days later I wasn’t too surprised and I just sent him a third copy.

I guess his apathy to my situation shouldn't surprise me, I have sent two copies of my resume to my division head asking him for some leads on work. He hasn't managed to find the time in his busy schedule to respond to me either.

Then two weeks ago when I had been on "down time" for 4 weeks my Branch Head started getting desperate. In order to get me off his overhead he started lining up little jobs for me. So now instead of spending my time sending out e-mails and leaving phone messages that get ignored while looking for some long term work I spend my time doing little jobs that won't last and only accomplish two things. They keep me from charging my time to overhead and they keep me from spending time looking for other work.

So in order to stay away from overhead money I’m now in a situation that has me really pissed off. A little over a year ago the missile program I had spent most of my career working for let me go because they suffered some budget cuts. I understand that sometimes programs have to do this but in this case the program manager and his assistant, both men who I had considered friends of mine, passed on the duty of firing me to my branch head. I would have accepted my removal from that program without any hard feelings if either of them would have been man enough to just call me up and tell me in person. But sending my Branch Head to tell me to stop work on their program immediately with no advance warning and no opportunity to finish the projects I was working on left me feeling very betrayed.

Quickly, I found a programmers position with another project. This project turned out to be very frustrating to work for. They had a massive software project that interfaced several programs written in C, C++ and FORTRAN and operating across several networked computers. I was assigned several tasks and put to work with absolutely no training what so ever. Then after 15 months of working totally in the dark I was let go from this program because they needed to hire someone who knew ADA, which I don’t. In order to make room in the organization and the budget they had to get rid of an existing employee. I was the logical choice. I was the new guy and I knew less about the program than anyone else.

So I'm suddenly on downtime again. My branch head lined up some temporary work for me back on the missile program I was fired from over a year ago. They have some urgent tests that need to be run and they need another engineer to help with it. So I'm back working for them for a while. The ironic part is that since this isn't a long term commitment of employment, management considers me to still be on downtime. So while I'm being harassed daily by my managers about finding work, I'm putting in 12 to 13 hour long days helping to get a program that fired me after I worked for them for 19 years back on schedule so that once the tests are done they can fire me again.

Personally I think this entire situation sucks. But until I find a long term commitment for work, I’m stuck. My kids have gotten used to having a roof over their heads and food to eat. So I have to keep working.

To make matters worse the few job opportunities that I am hearing about are looking for Mechanical Engineers. I quit being a mechanical engineer about 15 years ago when the base management started telling all us mechanical engineers that they didn’t need us anymore. We were just not a part of their long term strategic plans. So I got myself some training, earned myself a master’s degree in Computer Science. While earning my degree I took jobs as computer support and network design and installations. Once I got my degree I went to work as a simulations analyst for the missile program that I had previously been a mechanical engineer, program manager and computer support.

Now most of the computer science related jobs are being contracted out. The only jobs for government employees that I’m hearing about are for mechanical engineers. Trouble is no one really wants a mechanical engineer whose skills and knowledge are 15 years out of date.

Now I know a lot of people who think I should stop complaining and just be glad that I have a job. But I don't think I am asking for much when I say I would like a job doing something useful. I would like something interesting to do but I can live with useful. An added plus would be a little consistancy and some long term prospects for employment. I have less than nine years to retirement and having something useful to do would make them go by much quicker.

Another Weekend Gone

Another weekend is coming to a close. It was a pretty good weekend. But it could have been better. It could have been longer.

Actually this weekend was a four day weekend for us. Friday was a normal flex Friday at work so we got that day off, then Monday was a holiday. There is never a bad four day weekend. But now that this one is coming to a close I could use a day or two to recover from my weekend. This was the one weekend each year that the whole family hates. It was time to take down our Christmas decorations. Right now we have almost all our decorations down and packed. The garage is full of plastic boxes. Normally we would have spent this afternoon shoving them all into the attic. But we decided to change or storage situation this year. Since the attic has been getting full we decided to clean out the shed and store a lot of the Christmas boxes there. But since the weather has been cold all weekend I didn't get the shed completely emptied out. So the boxes will have to stay in the garage for a few more days.

This weekend was pretty much four days of undecorating, volleyball practice and frustrating attempts to keep my computer working. My oldest daughter had volleyball practice three of the four days this weekend. On Sunday she got a double dose. We went to open volleyball in the early afternoon where we just played and had fun with some of her friends. Then we went to her regular practice that evening. I had fun at the practice. I have volunteered to help out in whatever way needed. Usually they only let me sweep the floor and shag some balls during drills. Sunday night I got to toss balls for drills for quite a while, then scrimmage with a couple other players for most of the rest of the practice. The scrimmaging was fun, working with the drills was more like coaching and I've been missing that the last couple months.

I have been having some computer problems with my laptop. About two weeks ago my Microsoft Word program has decided to stop working. I have been struggling with it for several days now and not getting very far. The program starts normally but once I start typing the program locks up somewhere between the first and tenth characters that I type. Everything just freezes. I can click on the close button or on the button in the toolbar in an attempt to close the program at which I get a messagebox that tells me the program is unresponsive and I select the option to close the program. Sometimes it closes after several minutes of doing nothing. Sometimes it never closes. I have tried everything I can think of and nothing seems to work. I have defragged the hard drive, repaired the Word installation, reinstalled Word, etc. For the most part nothing works. For about three hours on Saturday everything was working just fine. I was able to use Word to create a handout for a beginner volleyball camp. But then suddenly Word just stopped working again.

So until I can get it straightened out, I'm stuck using Thunderbird as a word processor.

So tomorrow its back to work again. I'm not looking forward to that. I only have one more week at this job. I was told last week that I had until this next Friday to finish the project I'm working on then I was being let go. So I have four days to finish my project, prepare a final report, present a briefing on difficulties encountered with the project, and find myself somewhere else to work on the base. Oh, boy, sounds like its going to be a fun week.

IG Quality of Life Survey

A while back I promised that if I managed to finish anything I wrote I would post it. At work on Friday I was asked to fill out a Quality of Life Survey. One of the last items on this generic survey was the question "If you could change one thing to improve this aspect of your quality of work life, what would it be?"

Here was my answer to that question.

Close the ever widening chasm of mistrust, misunderstanding and lack of communication that has formed between center management and the engineers, scientists and support personnel who actually do the work around here.

In VADM Massenburg's Quaterly Update of Oct 3, 2006 he presented us eleven short paragraphs about the status of NAVAIR. In only one paragraph did he briefly mention the work that most of us do. Paragraph four he cited several technical successes as a justification for continued support for the AIRspeed program.

Most of us worker level employees couldn't care less about AIRspeed. We are too busy trying to get our jobs done with less money, less materials, less support, less planning, and less attention by management (OK, so that last one is a good thing), less of everything, except for process improvements. There is plenty of that piling up around here. The engineering work is why we are here. Unfortunately management has forgotten about the work we do. They only concern themselves with how we do it. The "process" has become their product.

There are still a lot of hardworking dedicated people on this base who are still busting our behinds to provide the best weapons development, testing and integration for the United States Navy. Unfortunately none of them are in management.
Our managers spend all their time talking about

• "streamline development"
  
• "change how we work"
  
• "Lean"
  
• "Six Sigma"
  
• "Theory of Constraints"
  
• "why we do the things we do and then changing it"
  
• "merging the continuous process improvement activities"
  
• "business plans, artisans, leaders and funding lines will transition"
  
• "Enterprise Resource Planning" and my personal favorite
  
• "focusing on execution and accountability, and enhancing our productivity"
  

Funny, all this time I thought my focus was supposed to be on the product I deliver to the fleet.

You want to improve our quality of work life? Give me a management chain that understands that innovation cannot be mandated, genius cannot be regulated and brilliant science and engineering development cannot be squeezed out of a business model. Sometimes a manager needs to know when to shut the hell up, get out of the way and let the smart people try something just a little unorthodox. Then if it doesn't work according to plan, tell them to take another educated guess and give it another shot.

VADM Massenburg summed up everything that is wrong with our quality of work life today is one sentence; "One Master Black Belt said that in her 30 years of government service AIRSpeed is the first thing she’s seen that really works."
Really? Maybe someone should tell that Master Black Belt and the VADM Massenburg about a few other things around here that really worked: Sidewinder Missile, Shrike Missile, Walleye Missile, Phoenix Missile, STANDARD Missile, Maverick Missile, Harpoon Missile, Tomahawk Cruise Missile, The F14, F16, F18, A6, A7, HARM, RAPEC, VSS, SNORT, and I could go on for literally pages and pages but you should be getting the point by now. (if you don’t believe me check out this short China Lake History)

It is hard to come to work everyday knowing that the entire management structure that we work for has forsaken the goals we all started out with. To assure that the United States Navy is equipped with the best weapons, support equipment, and aircraft available in the world. Management’s "process" is not our product, and until they start recognizing the work their people do, and the level of effort we are putting in to get it done in spite of their new process oriented mindset this is not a healthy, happy or fun place to work.

I realize that my comments on this survey will have about the same effect of standing outside in the wind and yelling at it to stop blowing. But they asked.