I worked for the US Census Bureau from late 1975 through the end of 1981. For the first 3-and-a-half years most of my job with Census was on something then called The Annual Housing Survey that was sponsored and paid for by HUD, but I never worked directly for HUD.

If it makes you feel better, the system I worked on at Northrop has never been sold to another country. However, when you say "awful causes," that's your opinion.

Mason

Hi chezlaw:

I agree with this and when leaving the Census Bureau I was not concerned about finding a new job, even though it did take a few months.

As for your second point, another reason why older employees have a higher risk/reward when leaving a job is that they are usually paid more than younger employees, and that alone often makes it more difficult to find another job.

Best wishes,
Mason

I got that. My Dad worked for HUD at at that time worked in DC and SF. That might of been the kind of thing he worked on at the time as he was working on part of the only, or one of the only anyway, large computer systems in the Department around then.

Obv it's my opinion. It doesn't make me feel better or worse whatever you worked on. I just often harp on the point that people are responsible for choices like where they work and regardless of the system you worked on you worked for a war contractor and supported that effort.

It's possible. But keep in mind that Census was a relatively small government agency (at least at that time) while HUD was a gigantic Department.

I've stated many times that I worked on blowing up the Soviet Union. However, I would argue that making the United States strong helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that was a good thing.

Best wishes,
Mason

You don't get this conclusion for free from those assumptions. It depends entirely on the discount amount and the distributions of the job security valuations of the two groups.

Sure, I’ll buy that. I’ll also buy that 100 years ago there were probably companies like Grumman that were ok to work for. That doesn’t change the fact that unions have been a net positive on society and that without them, on the whole, working conditions for the working class were horrid and income disparity was huge.

I genuinely don't know why Mason bothers to try to engage in an exchange here. After all, none of us have had the experience of working for the Census Department for a couple of years, corresponding with Ronald Reagan or defeating communism. So I don't know what any of us could possibly offer up in this conversation. Seems like it would be best if he could just lay out how the world works and maybe give us a few rules for how to live.

This is all well and good when applied to hypothetical workers in a hypothetical world, but it kinda falls apart in the real world. There's lots of reasons for why people would want security, especially those of us that spent time looking for jobs in 2009 or 2010. You could even argue that the people who want more job security tend to be more intelligent, because they have a better understanding of the downsides of being laid off, and how easily that could result in lifelong negative consequences.

I don't see how firing bad federal employees solves anything. It's not like being unemployed and broke is going to make anybody more competent. The alternatives are worse - they either move on to being incompetent in the private sector or living on the public dole. A more enlightened system would just export them to Chile.

This supposes the superior worker has genuine alternatives which is often not the case, particularly outside of rich, advanced countries like the US (in many countries there is only one business of type X). However, the bolded describes quite well the situation in the public sector in Spain. Job security, once attained, is absolute, although salaries are low, and getting lower (in real terms) year by year. Except in limited contexts, such as academic research, where there are no alternative employers, the highly skilled, competent, and ambitious leave the public sector (even leave Spain ...). For example, this has been a problem in the medical sector.

Of course this dynamic is well understood by the rightwing political forces that take advantage of it to degrade public institutions. The US has relatively robust public institutions that function better than those elsewhere precisely because it pays better and offers somewhat less absolute job security.

Many competent employees become incompetent ones when they can't be fired.

Straw man. You're right, a top-notch employee with good social and networking skills wouldn't ever be worried. How about the person who's good at their job but irritates the boss in some way (or has different political beliefs)? How about the solid but not spectacular employee? Etc.
The point of my post was that by focusing on one factor that supports your argument (high bar for firing -> more likely to have bad workers in the pool, all else equal) does not win the argument for you. edit: I think there is a discussion to be had about updating the process for firing federal employees...but I'm not on board with wholesale public-sector bashing.

Hi Man:

Please keep in mind that I left the Federal Government 37 years ago. I assume that things are probably worst today, but perhaps that’s not always accurate.

Best wishes,
Mason