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I’m pretty much here. I don’t understand just why these people are so allergic to the idea of having to prove to representatives of the elected government that they did five productive things in a week. Like how out of touch are they, that they don’t think they need to answer a question that most people with private sector jobs have to answer — what is it you actually do here, any why should you continue to get a paycheck from us. Rest assured, for even the lowest employee of any private business, if they are only doing 5 things in an entire week, they would be laid off as soon as possible. It’s an absurdly low standard. I think in most jobs if you only did five things a day, you’d be out. That’s all the public wants— they want everyone in the public sector to actually be held to some standard of actual productive work. We’re paying for it, and its unreasonable that they don’t think they need to do anything.
I'm half convinced all of the indignant posts on /r/fednews from so-called federal employees are North Korean agitprop designed to repulse ordinary people and get them excited about firing them in service of destroying state capacity.
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That heavily depends on your definitions. I've done a dozen things per day or one thing for an entire week depending on how you lump or split the tasks.
One example of a morning (today):
One example of a week (most of a year ago):
(The weeks before and after that were similar, but not quite as monotonous)
I've had weeks that could be accurately described as "tried to figure out why functionality X in project Y stops working on a seemingly random basis" (it turned out to be a cpu bug).
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I don't know about your workplace, but I've never had a job where I had to prove that to HR (the rough private sector equivalent of OPM here) or shareholders (the rough private sector equivalent of the "public" here) directly. That's always been strictly between me and my direct management.
Not in a formal sense, but managers are held to justifying every employee, and yes, employees do have to sometimes write up their own job descriptions to send to HR. Other times, your direct supervisor informs HR of what tasks you are doing. The only really unusual thing is that the employee is asked to send that information directly to DOGE, and that there aren’t these kinds of job audits happening regularly (which is why DOGE is necessary). The interesting bit is that not only are the employees shocked by the demand that they show some form of actual productivity, but their immediate supervisors are telling them not to comply. If there’s a giant red flag of “these people know their employees do shit all all day” it’s them saying “don’t you dare tell DOGE what you do all day.”
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