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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38803 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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absurd privilege that this is what his job gets to be.

You're welcome to apply if it's such a good deal. Well, you aren't, because land management is in a hiring freeze, but you would have been before Jan 20.

Actually, I did, and they didn't take me because I'm not a DEI-favored category or a disabled veteran. When I worked government HR I noticed that disabled veterans took up the majority of our white male hiring quota. I only got that HR job because I can speak Spanish, which put me in a different hiring pool with fewer disabled veterans in it.

Securing federal employment is, in fact, incredibly competitive exactly because the job is such a good deal. For large swathes of educational backgrounds it is not just a competitive compensation package, but top 5% or so. What this means, in practice, is the federal workforce is highly credentialed. Lots of people with obscure masters and Ph.D degrees who some computer software and some generic HR person found to pattern match to a long winded job description.

Do you have a specific example in mind? Within land management, it's been my experience that if you know how to jump through the hoops on USAJobs (which takes a little Googling but is hardly a special qualification) and are willing to apply to multiple remote duty locations, entry-level jobs are pretty much there for the taking. There are some competitive positions (climbing rangers in Denali NP, hazard tree removal in Yosemite, smokejumpers and most hotshot crews) but they're competitive for a reason and nobody starts out there. There are a lot of remote duty locations that would like to hire more people than the number of minimally-qualified applicants they receive.

I'll also note that if there is, say, a GS-5/6/7 ladder biology tech position in a hypothetical DOI pipevine swallowtail conservation program for which a Ph.D. on the pipevine swallowtail is a de facto requirement (and I emphasize I don't know of such a thing), 1) that seems like a fairly reasonable meritoratic outcome and 2) it's not actually all that great of a deal, is it now.

My experience is with engineers and lawyers. Outside of the prestige positions like DOJ which are a revolving door between biglaw and the feds (and even then, the career prosecutors tend to be unimpressive compared to the shortlived people who leave), these agencies generally serve as landing spots for people who have washed out or are tired of actually working.

And even your hypothetical doesn't seem like a bad deal for this person. What good is a swallowtail Ph.D in the world? Its actually a great example of the problem with federal hiring. That person is unlikely to be qualified to do any real work at all. They have a silly degree indicating a silly personality.

these agencies generally serve as landing spots for people who have washed out or are tired of actually working.

And yet they're competitive for the top 5% compensation packages for their educational background? My guess is that it's probably a smaller paycheck but with shorter hours and better job stability, which isn't necessarily off the market average seller's indifference curve. In the other direction, it's worth noting that sometime in the last decade OPM spun up special non-GS pay scales for doctors and IT guys because even with benefits and job stability the GS compensation packages weren't attracting enough new hires.

And even your hypothetical doesn't seem like a bad deal for this person.

That's market heterogeneity for you. Grinding billable hours at biglaw isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, spending a month at a time at sea in the Alaskan fishing fleet isn't a bad deal for the right kind of person, cutting firewood for cash sale when you feel like it and living cheap isn't etc. But none of it, in expectation, is a free lunch. You could argue, of course, that the government shouldn't be in the pipevine swallowtail business at all, but that seems to me like an entirely separate matter.

You could argue, of course, that the government shouldn't be in the pipevine swallowtail business at all, but that seems to me like an entirely separate matter.

It isn't though. That is a major issue with federal employment, that there is no similar market based job, because there is no market for the "skills" for huge swathes of the workforce. They'd have to take large pay decreases going into the private sector because they are, typically, extremely over-credentialed but also not very good at doing things that produce value. Much of the government is full of pipevine swallowtails. Large numbers of people who's job is to give out free money for various projects.

If your definition of "real value" implies a market outcome, sure, that follows. I still think this is separate from the question of whether Federal employment is a good deal for the employee, but at this point I'm content to let anyone still reading make up their own mind on a) the object-level goodness of the deal and b) whether these are, in fact, separate questions.

If you are a non-minority non-veteran, those jobs are all but closed to you.

I've definitely met enough white guys with no military service working those jobs to say this is false.

He's directionally correct. I was an HR manager for a federal agency for a couple years. I was the only white male who wasn't a disabled veteran, I got the job by having the highest test score of anybody fluent in Spanish in our district. (so essentially I got the job for being Hispanic)

You get 5 bonus points on the exam for minority status and 5 points for disabled veteran status. People assume this is 5% but it's actually 5 questions on a 35 question test. If a black disabled veteran gets a 26/35 on the exam, they get an adjusted score of 36/35 and hired over a non-disabled veteran white male who got a 35/35. The test is really quite easy and most applicants get close to a perfect score, making it nearly impossible to get in without qualifying for "bonus points". This is why the postal service has so many black employees.

Somebody forgot to tell me or damn near everyone I work with, I guess. (Quite a few Mexicans, but there are a lot of Mexicans living around here in general and working outside around here specifically.).

I won't say affirmative action in government land management hiring has never happened, but it's massively overblown in online discussions by people who think it's called the National Forest Service, don't know the difference between district rangers, LEO rangers, interp rangers, and backcountry rangers, have never submitted an application or visited a potential duty station or Googled "how to write a resume for USAjobs", etc. etc.

Mexicans are one of our DEI-favored groups so you're agreeing while pretending that you're not agreeing. Mexicans get the bonus points for being brown and Cubans don't (unless they're black). How many Cubans did you meet?

Approximately 100% of the Cubans in the surrounding three counties, so one guy. And he wasn't from there, he came there for the job.

I believe your observations, but I also believe my observations: it's been fairly easy for me to get land management jobs without any special status, I've worked with a bunch of guys who had the same experience, and minorities aren't overrepresented relative to their presence in the recruiting pool (local high school and junior college sports, general private sector blue-collar labor.). Were you working for a land management agency? Entry-level fire, at least, has been mostly direct hiring authority since 2020 or so, with no obvious change in the composition or quality of new hires, so I don't think the points system is even applicable--the postings would specifically say no vet pref. Before that, they asked for racial self-ID on USAJobs but not in the agency questionnaire where they ask about vet status, displaced Fed status, and how much of an expert you are with a shovel--which is not to say they weren't using the race data, but it does seem like further evidence against it.

LEO rangers

I'm glad to see the Space Force has begun recruitment, and avoided the accusations of ripping off 40k's Space Marines in favor of poaching Airborne infantry.

(I presume this isn't as exciting as it sounds haha)

Law enforcement officer, not low Earth orbit. (Yet.).

I suppose "officer" is redundant, I've generally heard them referred to as LEOs and I think the USAJobs postings usually say "ranger (law enforcement)".

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