Stuff like this ought to be really outrageous to the public, but it barely gets a wink and a nod in most quarters. One thing that really gets me the more I think about it is... why should government employees be subjected to protections that wouldn't exist in the private sector? Don't give me that crap about people being fired for political reasons and how that would politicize the federal workforce. I think it's pretty obvious at this point that such protections have only helped to foster certain ideological tendencies in parts of the federal government such as the infamous Department of State. I can be fired if my management really doesn't like me because it's an at-will employment. I think that one of the best things the Republicans could do to really get themselves back on track would be to propose a bill to turn all non-military employment into at-will employment.
These "protections" are one of the biggest barriers to making the government more effective. It is high time that someone got around to fixing the obvious flaw in the system: if you can't easily fire employees, they will invariably have less incentive to work hard and ensure that they are very competent.
Heh.
Radley rocks.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Keep up the great work, Mike.
Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay wrote five seasons of "Yes, Minister" about precisely this subject. The conundrum is like that of Microsoft and IT repairmen, Microsoft will create a cap product garunteed to breakdown so the repairman will have something to do. The IT repairguy, will fix it and continue to recomend Microsoft products in order to keep his job. Beating a dead horse is what keeps them both in buisiness.
But, but...Mike! Don't you know that life is supposed to be fair?!? And don't you know that anything I don't like or approve of, like getting fired, is UNFAIR?!?
Where have you been???
You kinda have to be careful when blaming Microsoft. I've worked around a lot of Unix boxes before and they're just as bad as Windows ones if the guy handling them isn't very good at his job. Besides, if you've never done serious work in Java, you can't really appreciate Microsoft .NET. It is a whole lot better in many respects. There were issues that the guys I work with had to fix lately that would have simply never come up in a .NET application because the environment would just handle them for you transparently. C# and .NET are proof that when Microsoft allows their engineers to just go nuts on building a quality product that they can really do it in a short period of time.