Sunday 5 July 2020
Steve
Decades ago a young chap began working in a public sector scientific department just down the corridor from the lab where I worked. I’ll call him Steve because that wasn’t his name.
Steve was obviously bright, had only left school a year or two previously but for some reason hadn’t been to university after A levels. He lived with his parents in a Derby suburb not far from where Mrs H and I lived. Near enough for me to give him a lift to and from work on the few occasions when it wasn’t convenient for him to catch a bus.
Steve’s family ran some kind of small business. I can’t recall what they did but it may have been a printing business. It soon became apparent that the public sector was not what Steve had expected even though the department he joined did some interesting scientific work such as devising ways to combat fly nuisance at a sewage works.
For obvious reasons it is a good idea to build a sewage works well outside the town it serves. Smell is one reason and flies are another. However, councils sometimes give planning permission for houses closer and closer to the town sewage works, builders build them and people buy them. Then they complain.
However, although Steve was good at his job and adapted to it very quickly he wasn’t impressed with us. He knew that ultimately the organisation he had joined was engaged in what he referred to as just office work and he was right. It was a good job he had – secure with some field work, opportunities for more qualifications and certainly advancement for someone as bright as he was. But he saw where it would all lead to clearly enough. He left after giving it less than six months.
I was always impressed by the way Steve summed us up so accurately, saw his likely future and decided it wasn’t for him in spite of the advantages. It isn’t common in the public sector.
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6 comments:
I have a theory that one of the reasons for the under performance of the public sector over time is that it increasingly self selects its employees as the time servers, the disillusioned, the indolent, and the self serving. Either by driving the opposite types out as they can no longer put up with the working environment, or because they fall into the same behaviour themselves, trapped by financial need to continue working there, but with no interest in achieving anything. Its a form of Greshams Law - bad employees drive out good ones, particularly in organisations with little or no market discipline.
My line of work - education and training - started off as solidly public sector, and became increasingly dependent upon market forces. Towards the end, my job was to help turn the supertanker around, and I found that to be very tough. People fought long and hard and with a sense of rigid entitlement to keep their jobs nice and cosy.
I wonder what happened to Steve?
Back in the early seventies, I was made redundant.
As is the norm, the Thursday Daily Telegraph was scanned and perused rigorously, and one job advert with Tonbridge and Malling Council became an interview.
I probably/certainly lost at the first hurdle, by saying that I wanted mortgage assistance, not a council house.
Tra-laaaah... They try these little jibes early on before they chop you of the list.
Wonder where Steve is now.
The other factor would be the importance of paper qualifications in the public sector
Purely my own experiences.
In the public sector initial position and then progression depend on qualifications.
And quickly get involved in the appropriate trade union and politics.
Does not matter what the qualification is in, just the degree.
So a "good" degree in PPE trumps any amount of experience,common sense, or capability.
In fact being too clever will only make his boss and fellow workers nervous
He did well to get out when he did.
Sobers - one problem is that as bureaucracies become bigger they create their own internal disciplines such as health and safety, diversity and numerous formal processes then gold-plate them to such a degree that the point of being there becomes lost. Performance then becomes a matter of adhering to bureaucratic processes. It no longer matters if processes are a waste of time and money. The trouble is as you say, people become trapped by financial need to continue working there.
Sam - we did a certain amount of commercial work for years, but attempts to make us essentially commercial were clumsy and poorly conceived. Commercial experience just wasn't there. Fortunately I retired before the whole idea came to nothing.
Scrobs - you may have come across as too clued up - that might not have gone down well too.
James - successful but thinking about retirement is my guess.
Doonhamer - yes a degree was very useful and although I came across a few people who climbed the ladder without one, but they only reached a certain level however capable they might be and even that didn't last as centralisation took control.
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