Salary should be decent, but I’m not wholly convinced it needs to be at “market rate.” By having reasonable rates but below “market” value, you are likely creating a selection bias for people who are in it for the mission more than they are in it for the money. I think that’s a good thing.
It’s like the idea that politicians should be allowed to trade stocks or else you won’t get the “best” talent. I’d argue I don’t want politicians whose primary motivation is financial gain.
Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy.
People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in large enterprise. You haven't seen civil servant yet.
I cant remember which party it was but stopped the Pay Band usage and everyone is simply paid by the starting rate. UK civil servant has basically stopped most salary increase for a long time.
Because of that, instead of pay raise a lot of people got promoted which is basically everyone in every department has inflated grades. These promotion are also problematic, again, not based on merit. There are now more SCS1 than ever.
40% of work are irrelevant and made up by seniors to improve their chance of promotion. Another 50% of the work are getting around bureaucracy, only 10% of the work are actually useful.
And there is no way to fix it. Ministers dont want to fix it because they rely on cvil servant to get things done. Civil servant internally lack the interest to reform. And if anything the power of a department is measured by how many staff it has.
But none of these are new. We are now close to 50 years since Yes Minister first aired. And the documentary remains relevant, and everyone should watch it if they want to understand more. And as far as I can tell, this is not UK specific.
The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.
It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.
Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big.
Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.
My original point was about achieving a balance to avoid hiring mercenaries. I think that is important in domains where ethics matter and ultimately leads to better long-term outcomes. When people defend the pay aspects being the best motivation, they are quietly telling us about their own (anti-social) value system.
One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Silicon Valley types. They’re more interested in the mission than in getting rich. The fact that so many people look at a job as a money optimization problem says a lot about society.
This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.
Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.
I'm not sure the pay argument holds. For example, where I live, the average starting teacher salary is higher than the median overall salary. When you couple that with the fact they are on 4-day workweeks and get substantial time off (summers/holidays), the pro-rated pay is actually reasonably high for a starting salary. (Granted, I think it hits a ceiling relatively fast.) From talking to them, I suspect the driving force that make it hard to retain teachers is the lack of quality of life. I think it was Csikszentmihalyi who talks about the need for autonomy in one's career for it to be fulfilling, and the current system seems to limit that to an extreme. Just like u/lotsofpulp's comments about doctors, I think this means the job shifts much of the work from the purpose teachers chose the profession in the first place, and leads to burnout.
People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out).
You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at work ratio.
If you do not increase quality of life to make up for lower pay, you will end up with less driven or less capable people. Note that quality of life also includes security of income, which can reduce that type of stress.
With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.
With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.
As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.
Yes, to an extent.
Looking at the costs of housing, especially in a market like DC, the motivation isn't "making lots of money" per se, but rather "maybe I can actually make enough to afford the mortgage on an 800k crapshack" and the acknowledgment that gov roles aren't likely to cover that.
1-A wealthy ruling class who can afford and feels entitled to be the government. See: the British Empire.
2-A wealthy ruling class who can afford to postpone profits while they accumulate power, to eventually trade that power for profit through grift. See: western democracy.
Pay people as well as possible for their work and ruthlessly go after theft, corruption and incompetence. That’s how you build a lastingly successful system. Shades of Singapore.
I don't think we can, yet, call Singapore a lastingly successful system, considering most of the time since its independence has been under a father or his son.
