Issues with Governments
People who want to help the world rarely have all the skills themselves to help others. This fact is simple and true. One man or woman is not an island. It takes many skills to run a society of human beings.
Anyone who has the talent for selling their services does. People usually gravitate to what they do best, not always what makes them happiest. As we are a teaching species, this usually includes what they are taught to do well. If what you are taught to do well or have a natural inclination to do well pays well, you usually get along swimmingly. If not, one finds it difficult to eke out a living in this world. This is another fact of life.
If for some reason there is no market for your particular services, or you can’t sell yourself well, you still have to get along in this world; what do you do? You may have to work for less or you could work for the government. I am one of these people. I work for the government. It seems that the world at large does not care for the services I give out. It just seems that way. I do quite well when given a chance to perform my service for anyone or any company. However, I do not sell well. Maybe it is because I developed skills that give in depth service that is ordinary and everyone can do if they put their mind to it. What I mean is pointing out the obvious. What is obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to you. Each person has a certain focus, or way of looking at the world.
What I do particularly well is troubleshoot systems that are failing and make cases that build up solutions. This means I dive into the details. By understanding the details of how and why something works, I can build a better system. Most people are not inclined to believe that this will work. This is why I find it difficult to sell myself. Once I am in a system, it is easy to sell what I do because people begin to see my value. It just takes that initial leap of faith and I am off doing my thing. I am extremely good at what I do so I quickly rise to the top and become heavily responsible and responsive to the needs I see need to be met. I am deeply into service. It is what I do best. On the other hand, I am very sure of myself and most of the time, I overwhelm people with service. What do overwhelmed people do; they shut down. Most of the time, people shut down during the selling of me because I seem too good to be true. I am, but the old adage about what seems too good to be true is usually a scam gets me a lot. This gets me a lot. I have trouble stopping once I get started. I tend to oversell and say too much, putting the person in sensory overload right away.
Most people are generalists by nature. Some people are big picture by nature. I am detail by nature. There aren’t very many of us around. This makes me a very good engineer, but a lousy salesman or conversationalist. I am too intense for most people to stand. I tend to go straight to the heart of the matter. There is no tea and crumpets for me. I am not a nice or kind person, just get to the point right away. Because of this, I get carried away easily and tend to forget about all the other unimportant stuff that other people tend to need. I am a find a problem, solve it person. I tend to become an expert at what other people don’t pay any attention to. People tend to forget the same things time after time because they don’t even think in those terms. If they do think of them, they usually will delegate the task to someone else and promptly forget it even existed.
My whole point in explaining all this is to let you, the reader, know my worth. But even that is secondary. Every company needs someone to do the details or else nothing works. If it is a small company, the boss usually takes care of this. The larger companies hire this done or employ a person to do this. This is what engineers are supposed to do, but in fact, rarely do.
I‘ll give you a case in point. When a company buys a boiler it comes with all the connections ready to turn on in most small cases. You bring the water and gas to the boiler and turn it on after you wire it up and program it. Well, I am the person who comes along and makes sure that the pipes don’t corrode because of incompatibilities between dissimilar metals. I add a dielectric union to make the piping last. I make sure the ground is good so that stray currents don’t degrade the metal over time. I am the finisher if I come in as the inspector. I am the drawing checker if an engineering firm is doing the drawings. I make sure things fit together. I check the mfr specs that final time to make sure that the machine will do what we want it to. It has been my experience that the generalist engineer will usually skim over these details and hope someone else has done their job. He completely forgets that this is his job. This is what he was hired for. There is a law in engineering that is very true. Don’t expect what you don’t inspect. This is true for the world as a whole, but especially this is true in engineering.
Engineering as a profession is made of many kinds of people, just like any other profession. Doctors, politicians, pilots, or any other skilled profession that requires more than just average training all have the same basic problem, which is the 80-20 rule squared, or 95-5. As a profession requires more skill and training, the level of competence must go up. If 80 % of normal people just get by in their jobs and wait for each Friday to come so they can booze it up on Friday and party all weekend; that leaves 20 % to be somewhat responsible and do a good job. In the so called higher professions the figure is 95% just get by or not and 5% do the work. Whenever you hear of a bridge failure or an oil spill that just means that one of the 5% did not check the other 95% of the work force.
This oil spill reminds me of 3 Mile Island where 3 independent safety systems also failed. If any one of the 3 systems fails that puts a lot more suspicion on the other safety systems, naturally. The one system failing means that some one did not do their job and the engineer that checked it did not check it for real. When one thing like this fails, it always brings up the obvious question, will anything work as designed? 3 Mile Island stopped 30 Nuclear Power Plants from being built in America. Can you imagine how many drilling platforms will be affected. I would say hundreds, at least.
The main reason for checks and balances in industry are fear of a lawsuit, or a possible hit to the bottom line.
In government, where I work and all over as far as I know, no one ever checks anything. This is why the government is fairly inefficient. Everyone checks to see that the work is done, but no one ever checks that it is done right.
The government engineers are not really engineers, but statement of work writers and bad ones at that. The people that do these tasks mostly copy other work before them including the same faults of those before them. No one ever looks or questions what they do. It’s like every manager has a quota of SOW’s to get out and it is a race to see how many they can do. Not one thought is ever given to quality because almost no engineers are in this process. The government is into spending money quickly. The government gets money only rarely during the year and then it is a race to see how much of it can be spent in the time they do have it available. This emphasizes production of SOW’s over doing it right the first time. The government is also all about form. It must be in the right form or it is not an SOW. Government contracting is all about schedule. Everything must be on schedule and tracked. The government is also into checklists and inspections. No question is ever put forth to ask if the inspection accomplished the intended result. There again it is hoped, that someone in the time of the project did something right. The only sin is to be late. Government people have too much to do with all the lists and checking, so no one does anything and the project gets signed off as if they everything fine. Everyone just on about their business as if everything was fine. There are, in short, so many rules and regulations to follow that no one follows any of the rules or regulations.
So very few in depth reviews are possible in government contracting, but everything is documented as if it were fully checked. The few people who do check are worn out pretty quickly because once the government finds out you are a worker, they inundate you with work. The pay is no better if you work or if you don’t, so eventually the best workers also slow down and play the game too.
The government is good at one thing; spending money. That is its job. Keep the economy oiled and running.
Anyone who has the talent for selling their services does. People usually gravitate to what they do best, not always what makes them happiest. As we are a teaching species, this usually includes what they are taught to do well. If what you are taught to do well or have a natural inclination to do well pays well, you usually get along swimmingly. If not, one finds it difficult to eke out a living in this world. This is another fact of life.
If for some reason there is no market for your particular services, or you can’t sell yourself well, you still have to get along in this world; what do you do? You may have to work for less or you could work for the government. I am one of these people. I work for the government. It seems that the world at large does not care for the services I give out. It just seems that way. I do quite well when given a chance to perform my service for anyone or any company. However, I do not sell well. Maybe it is because I developed skills that give in depth service that is ordinary and everyone can do if they put their mind to it. What I mean is pointing out the obvious. What is obvious to me is not necessarily obvious to you. Each person has a certain focus, or way of looking at the world.
What I do particularly well is troubleshoot systems that are failing and make cases that build up solutions. This means I dive into the details. By understanding the details of how and why something works, I can build a better system. Most people are not inclined to believe that this will work. This is why I find it difficult to sell myself. Once I am in a system, it is easy to sell what I do because people begin to see my value. It just takes that initial leap of faith and I am off doing my thing. I am extremely good at what I do so I quickly rise to the top and become heavily responsible and responsive to the needs I see need to be met. I am deeply into service. It is what I do best. On the other hand, I am very sure of myself and most of the time, I overwhelm people with service. What do overwhelmed people do; they shut down. Most of the time, people shut down during the selling of me because I seem too good to be true. I am, but the old adage about what seems too good to be true is usually a scam gets me a lot. This gets me a lot. I have trouble stopping once I get started. I tend to oversell and say too much, putting the person in sensory overload right away.
Most people are generalists by nature. Some people are big picture by nature. I am detail by nature. There aren’t very many of us around. This makes me a very good engineer, but a lousy salesman or conversationalist. I am too intense for most people to stand. I tend to go straight to the heart of the matter. There is no tea and crumpets for me. I am not a nice or kind person, just get to the point right away. Because of this, I get carried away easily and tend to forget about all the other unimportant stuff that other people tend to need. I am a find a problem, solve it person. I tend to become an expert at what other people don’t pay any attention to. People tend to forget the same things time after time because they don’t even think in those terms. If they do think of them, they usually will delegate the task to someone else and promptly forget it even existed.
My whole point in explaining all this is to let you, the reader, know my worth. But even that is secondary. Every company needs someone to do the details or else nothing works. If it is a small company, the boss usually takes care of this. The larger companies hire this done or employ a person to do this. This is what engineers are supposed to do, but in fact, rarely do.
I‘ll give you a case in point. When a company buys a boiler it comes with all the connections ready to turn on in most small cases. You bring the water and gas to the boiler and turn it on after you wire it up and program it. Well, I am the person who comes along and makes sure that the pipes don’t corrode because of incompatibilities between dissimilar metals. I add a dielectric union to make the piping last. I make sure the ground is good so that stray currents don’t degrade the metal over time. I am the finisher if I come in as the inspector. I am the drawing checker if an engineering firm is doing the drawings. I make sure things fit together. I check the mfr specs that final time to make sure that the machine will do what we want it to. It has been my experience that the generalist engineer will usually skim over these details and hope someone else has done their job. He completely forgets that this is his job. This is what he was hired for. There is a law in engineering that is very true. Don’t expect what you don’t inspect. This is true for the world as a whole, but especially this is true in engineering.
Engineering as a profession is made of many kinds of people, just like any other profession. Doctors, politicians, pilots, or any other skilled profession that requires more than just average training all have the same basic problem, which is the 80-20 rule squared, or 95-5. As a profession requires more skill and training, the level of competence must go up. If 80 % of normal people just get by in their jobs and wait for each Friday to come so they can booze it up on Friday and party all weekend; that leaves 20 % to be somewhat responsible and do a good job. In the so called higher professions the figure is 95% just get by or not and 5% do the work. Whenever you hear of a bridge failure or an oil spill that just means that one of the 5% did not check the other 95% of the work force.
This oil spill reminds me of 3 Mile Island where 3 independent safety systems also failed. If any one of the 3 systems fails that puts a lot more suspicion on the other safety systems, naturally. The one system failing means that some one did not do their job and the engineer that checked it did not check it for real. When one thing like this fails, it always brings up the obvious question, will anything work as designed? 3 Mile Island stopped 30 Nuclear Power Plants from being built in America. Can you imagine how many drilling platforms will be affected. I would say hundreds, at least.
The main reason for checks and balances in industry are fear of a lawsuit, or a possible hit to the bottom line.
In government, where I work and all over as far as I know, no one ever checks anything. This is why the government is fairly inefficient. Everyone checks to see that the work is done, but no one ever checks that it is done right.
The government engineers are not really engineers, but statement of work writers and bad ones at that. The people that do these tasks mostly copy other work before them including the same faults of those before them. No one ever looks or questions what they do. It’s like every manager has a quota of SOW’s to get out and it is a race to see how many they can do. Not one thought is ever given to quality because almost no engineers are in this process. The government is into spending money quickly. The government gets money only rarely during the year and then it is a race to see how much of it can be spent in the time they do have it available. This emphasizes production of SOW’s over doing it right the first time. The government is also all about form. It must be in the right form or it is not an SOW. Government contracting is all about schedule. Everything must be on schedule and tracked. The government is also into checklists and inspections. No question is ever put forth to ask if the inspection accomplished the intended result. There again it is hoped, that someone in the time of the project did something right. The only sin is to be late. Government people have too much to do with all the lists and checking, so no one does anything and the project gets signed off as if they everything fine. Everyone just on about their business as if everything was fine. There are, in short, so many rules and regulations to follow that no one follows any of the rules or regulations.
So very few in depth reviews are possible in government contracting, but everything is documented as if it were fully checked. The few people who do check are worn out pretty quickly because once the government finds out you are a worker, they inundate you with work. The pay is no better if you work or if you don’t, so eventually the best workers also slow down and play the game too.
The government is good at one thing; spending money. That is its job. Keep the economy oiled and running.
posted by Mike Liesveld @ 3:27 PM
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