On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 9:53 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Well that depends on your definition of "insanity".

I'm sure that someone could pick apart your fav admin config & declare it 'insane' for some reason or another.

Judging from the folks I've talked to over the years, in both public & private employ, I've long ago ceased to be surprised to hear about instances of 'insanity' in any org.

I think the sweet spot can be anywhere between 50 and 100 employees. After that, you're into no longer privately held companies and then you have insanity. You might stretch it to 200, but not much further.

When one of the IT firms I worked for got bought, they wanted to have everyone feel involved (they bought several other IT firms across the country at the same time roughly - all had different process, clients, business focus, etc). To help this, they kept sending out stuff like "Person X who formerly held position Y has now changed to being in charge of group Z. Person Q has been placed in an 'acting' role in position X until a final decision on a replacement is completed."

The problem was we didn't know where this position was (location organizationally or where in the country), we had no idea what business group they were in, we had no idea what they did beforehand, or afterwards, and the names were unfamiliar to all of us. They kept hitting us with these until everyone I knew (including middle managers) just stopped paying any attention to anything HQ sent because they figured it was a waste of time.

It seems to me that once any org gets big enough, you can *always* find someone judging it to be 'insane' in one way or another.
And that 'someone' could be either internal or external.
And that includes me, btw.

Well, if a government has a law and their own civil service is trying to cheat that law, then they are effectively committing a crime of some sort. That's something that you really don't want ever to get out and you don't want a court case to bring it public attention... so that would be an insanity in my books.

Heck, I was still a part-timer when I personally made my first "That's insane!" observation.

With big companies, it doesn't take too long.

What I've observed is when governments (elected) get into power, they start to dictate things related to their agenda to their civil service. Fair enough, except that half the time the people pushing an agenda have promised things that violate laws, violate collective bargaining agreements, violate privacy or equity standards and processes, and in some cases they also fail to recognize international treaties we've signed that pertain. The politician wants his project to go ahead because he told his voters he'd do it when he got there and damn the torpedoes.

One other example:

Customs / Immigration is on dept and Border Services is another. At one point, one department's minister was pushing a change that the other minister indicated was not going to stand the first court challenge, their lawyer seconded, and the originating department's lawyer said as much. But an ego and a commitment was at stake, so it got pushed a long way costing hundreds of thousands in the long run.
One of our recent national governments (PM Stephen Harper) pushed any number of bits of legislation or repeals of same which brought Supreme Court cases... and I think they lost well over 90% of them costing taxpayers a stupid aggregate amount of money. Why? Not because their civil service briefers didn't tell the PM and his Ministers that this was the sure outcome.... but because even if they failed, they could say to their vote base they did everything they could (without mentioning costing taxpayers millions).

Insanity.

Big entities (gov't and civ and mil) tend to be siloed and any time they try to execute (in one brilliant push) to transform their IT in some major way, it is inevitably a fluster cluck. They rarely do small pilots, they rarely account for the massive number of departments with different processes and even contracts, and they sometimes even turn down the original system and get the hardware removed in order to ensure no going back.... even though it turns out the new system is a raging mess. We've been dealing with one of these for maybe 6 years now from IBM - our national pay system for all federal civil servants.

And this was predictable.

So was the mess with our long gun registry. Same sort of stupid approach.

There's an impetus for leaders who are only around for a year or three and then hope to move up to show a great success so all great attempts must fit within about a two year execution window. No big project for a large enterprise of any sort happens that fast from idea to delivered and working product.


And, of course, it was TOTALLY INSANE for them to push me into retirement!

That happens a lot too.

p.s. no one who's 'internal' likes the idea of having to compete with 'externals' when a better (better=higher paying) job slot opens up but, in the course of my life, that seems to be the trend.

Agreed, but at least up here, it guts morale.
The AA/EEO people really love it & really push for it. 
^^^^^^^^
(AffirmativeAction/EqualEmploymentOpportunity & here in the USA, once any org gets large enough it will have an AA/EEO dept monitoring all hiring & firing of "protected classes" of people.  BTW, said people comprise somewhere around 2/3 of all people & the % is always increasing. The guy who was my direct boss for over 20 years, & who was in a 'protected' class himself, was always complaining about the extra paperwork he had to produce for the AA/EEO people.) 

The problem with any similar systems (and unions to an extent, though I understand the need for them to counterbalance massive corporate powers): When they start out, they are addressing a problem and they push hard and maybe 80% of the major issues get dealt with. But after that, they become an entity that must generate further initiatives in order to maintain their funding so.... then things start to go off the rails.

It's like my dad working in a prison teaching small engine repair. Prison rules meant workshops had ONE set of tools and they had to be accounted for after each day. Sometimes they break. Dad went into stores, found 8 or 10 sets of everything. He asked about that - turned out if you didn't spend all your budget, it was assumed you didn't need the extra in coming years so they cut it (so when you need it, you could well not get it!). So they always bought new stuff even beyond needs just to keep their budget allocation.

Insanity.

I have NEVER been drawn to Megacorps or the Bureaucrat career. I don't even know why the latter is a Traveller staple when many other cooler ones weren't (like bounty hunters) for a long time.

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On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 12:15:10 PM MST, xxxxxx@gmail.com <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


It is an insanity to not have some form of internal promotion architecture.

It is also an insanity to take someone who your government's own rules say should be hired because they've done a job for at least 6 months (a rule put in place to prevent departments not hiring full time when that was what the employee was defacto) and change some cosmetic text in their contract every six months just to keep them as a contract worker and to try to ignore their own rules about not doing that.

The number of things that go wrong with schools, public service departments, universities, and hospitals when they manage them as they manage for-profit businesses is large. When you only see costs, liabilities, and economies, you get decisions that are a mess in the long run.

One example: Our provincial ministry of health used to have IT staff that could be quick at response. If a manager had an new staffer arrive suddenly, within 2-3 hours, they'd have credentials, have a machine built, been assigned passwords and accounts, have a run of the appropriate network to their workstation, any customizations of the work station, they'd be in the payroll system, access cards, etc. Then they went to IBM. It now takes a minimum of 48 hours, most often 72+, to get these people to that state. This means multiple wasted days to save some bucks.... from the IT budget. The wasted time of the new employee comes out of the budgets of the department employing the new staffer. So IT bosses get to look efficient and service suffers and someone else in the government spends more money or at least gets nothing for some of the money being spent. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Tom

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 2:27 PM Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
Yeah, downsizing does occur periodically but then there's always periods of upsizing.
Went thru that several times myself. Always managed to dodge the silver bullet w/ just enough seniority.
Finally would up as the only one left & then, as they used to say on the BBC classic "Are You Being Served", I was 'made redundant' but, by then, I had enough service to get a full retirement.
(BTW, do they really say, "made redundant" in Merry Olde Englande or is that just a throw-away line?)
I never really expected to find a promo path other than the usual seniority-based ones (ie: IT Tech I, II, III, etc).
You want a promo you need to go to night school or something similar on your own time.

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On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 09:37:38 AM MST, xxxxxx@gmail.com <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


Yes, government careers lean that way as do ones that are expensive/brutal to get into. OTOH our provincial and federal gov't have moved a number of former gov't roles to private contractors and I see sick or injured gov't workers facing constructed dismissals fairly often. Many roles have no promotion path (you have to compete but have no time off to train up or study unlike many new people from the outside who have that time.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 11:36 Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml list), <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
A big exception still exists in civil service type careers.
(that's what I did)

It's still quite possible (in fact, even desirable considering retirement benes) to get into that right away & stay in for the duration of your working life.

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On Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 12:04:22 AM MST, xxxxxx@gmail.com <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


It's hard in a classic/basic generation system to make a coherent 'other'. It ends up coming off as a weird pot-pourri because it is 'everything'.

People who've kicked around in multiple careers are not necessarily that scattered, they just may have two focuses in different parts of their life.

I do take the point again about modelling the 18th century or even the 19th and early 20th where people stayed with employers for a lifetime. That ended at TL-8. And TL-9 makes the notion of a career even seem questionable (real world - gig economy).

I guess I'm not a Vilani. I grew up on Terra. I see the rates of change that are taking away long term static career choices and my own life has driven me to go through multiple notions of what my income should come from (I am going through one now) and that makes me feel like by the time I'm out, I'd have a spent terms in different schools, terms in software development, reserve time with the military (almost a 5 year commitment but I elected not to), and now possibly private business or re-education to another field.

So though I can see the 18th-early 20th century view of careers here (and that continued in the Vilani culture) but most on Terra now are living in job markets that the Vargr would get (fast shifting, dynamic). 

Again, I wouldn't say a change to multiple career support needed to be there for all settings/campaigns, but I think it is a good feature for some.

TomB

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 2:30 AM Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:


On 14Oct2020 1922, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 4:27 PM <xxxxxx@quibell.org.uk
> <mailto:xxxxxx@quibell.org.uk>> wrote:
>
>     On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 1:54 PM Rupert Boleyn
>     <xxxxxx@gmail.com <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>         On 14Oct2020 0633, xxxxxx@gmail.com
>         <mailto:xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         > One of my axes to grind (beyond the possible abuses of BPs)
>         is that  > I've yet to meet a basic MT generator that will let
>         me start an
>         spend > a term or two in a second career before play.
>         That's in houserule territory, so I'm not surprised. Taking a
>         second
>         career before play begins is a perk of being a Vargr.
>
>
> Likely, but it makes sense if you do a term in the military and then
> go into another career for 2 or 3 terms. It also would be sort of like
> going to schools or academies then a career. Most people go through at
> least 4 jobs in their life (of different sorts) apparently (last I
> heard).
>
> As a feature you could use if you wanted to, I'd rank it highly.
>
> When did this Perk come in for Vargr? MgT? Or back to CT Alien modules?

They've always had it. MgT let's everyone swap careers (so did TNE).

I've always assumed that CT/MT saw Imperial society as being like most
pre-20th century ones, where the vast majority of people followed one
career for their working life. Even soldiers used to sign up for 10-20
year stretches, and a great many kept on soldiering until they weren't
physically up to it any more.

PCs and other some Travellers were unusual because they changed their
career *once* (to traveller/general scum). This is not the 20th/21st
century west in space.

A guy who knocked around a lot, did this and that - he didn't have a
multitude of careers, but rather he took 'Other'. Later he probably took
Rogue. I wish Other had been a stronger career in the Book 1.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>

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