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The Pareto Elon Memo
The Pareto Principle is sometimes called the 80/20 rule, fondly remembered by me as “20% of the beer drinkers drink 80% of the beer”! rule (I do my best at 6’4” and 300 lbs). There is some evidence that the leverage of technology has made it more like 90/10 in STEM fields — 10% of the techies produce 90% of the value.
I’ve worked with a few geniuses, though none close to the combination of leadership + technical skills of Elon. Prior to his losing a son to trans, and realizing that society was in uncontrolled rapid descent to hell, he was a major hero for the left. He is even more of a hero to the reality-based population now. When I saw the booster land in the “chopsticks,” it was equivalent to the moon landing for me. The most significant positive technological event since 1969!
Having worked in tech for 34 years, reporting status on a regular basis was basic. When you drive a performance car, you have gauges, and you monitor them. If your vehicle is not high-performance, idiot lights will do. Gauges (and even idiot lights) provide feedback, and all systems, including our bodies, require feedback to operate.
If you have a system that doesn’t care about feedback, it is a parasite… which is what government is (it doesn’t produce anything). That is not to say that parasites are not useful! A human body has billions of parasites that we need to live! We won’t go into details, but if your intestinal tract loses some critical ones, you will need a fecal transplant to restart your gut to proper operation.
A business requires constant status reporting so that management/leadership can spot areas that are not making the progress they need for success. Perhaps there are conflicts between people and other departments, perhaps too much effort is being applied to testing or “improvements” (sometimes called “polishing the turd”). Maybe projects having cross dependencies not proceeding at complimentary rates so overall goals can be achieved. Sadly, just plain incompetence or “sloth” is common (see 90/10), especially if there is little or no monitoring — and like infection, it DOES spread!
It is now obvious that our vast bureaucracy and the media that works in concert with it have no idea of these principles. They have been completely in charge since at least 1990, and they are certain of their invulnerability. They were surprised by Trump in 2016 and the entire deep/administrative state attacked even before he was elected. (See Crossfire Hurricane.) The Russia Hoax was quickly manufactured, and impeachment proceedings were initiated, because he worked to expose the Biden Crime family’s activities to enable war profiteering in Ukraine, etc. The list is endless and nauseating, but praise be to God and the American people, he survived!
It is clear that Trump was locked and loaded the day he took office, and Elon directing the assault on the federal kleptocracy is a show that requires extra buckets of popcorn. Will Trump, Elon, and America win? It is early in the first quarter, and although the DC home team (the away team for the rest of us) is back on its heels for the moment, we can be assured it will fight back, and it has no scruples nor cares for we Deplorables nor America in general. Five of the top ten richest counties in the US surround DC. Following the money shows us a glimpse of what we are up against.
That is the uncertain reality, but for the moment, each new day has been an opportunity to enjoy the smell of victory!
Published in Domestic Policy
I go with the square root of the number of employees. If there are four workers, two probably do most of the work. If there are a hundred employees, ten probably do most of the work. The federal government has about two million civilian workers last I checked. That means there might be fifteen hundred doing most of the work.
Some of the federal employees are working. They are doing exactly as mandated. But what is mandated is useless. I don’t know how it is now, but nigh on twenty years ago I had a consulting gig. There was apparently a mandate for all federal processes to be documented. But the process repository was difficult to use and understand without serious training. The people executing those processes never used the process repository. If they made changes to how they did things, they did not update the documented processes. Nor did they follow the documented processes. Thus, the people who were on the process team were doing make-work. The point of a process is not to document it, but to implement it in a way that nobody goes around the process. The proper way is to make it easier to follow the process than to make stuff up on the fly.
I am as cynical as they come and I am surprised at the level of corruption that is being revealed. Wow. I look forward to the unveiling of cartel money in our banking system.
I’m more interested in the % of government activities that 90% of citizens derive benefit from and believe the benefit is conveyed successfully. I’ll bet 80% of what the various governments (Fed, State and county) do is not of benefit to most of its citizens. I’ll bet that 80% benefits governments and its personnel in some way. That’s a derivation from my belief that public schools are not now run for the benefit of the children, but for the benefits of the associated adults. I for sure don’t want government activities that no one knows what the end product or service is.
In conclusion – I’d like to buy only that 20% of what the government offers that I want and benefit directly from. I will buy military defense for all but I’m not interested in buying medical services for optional sexual activities by anyone. Taxes a la carte. Government involvement in citizen life by invitation.
Those are not parasites, they are symbiotes. A parasite is an organism that provides no benefit to its host.
And over those 34 years, how many status reports did you tender in response to unsigned emails demanding one sent from outside your organization? There’s good reason the State Department and other agencies instructed their employees to ignore the DOGEbags’ unilateral assertion of managerial power. Made Musk look like an idiot, it did, and the parvenu can’t have liked that very much.
Not that you would ever have the objectivity to understand this (“Trump is a Russian asset!”), but those resisting the email gave Musk exactly what he wanted. Certainly he’s smart enough to know that asking feds to justify their jobs would provoke the arrogant who could not so justify into refusing. Or at least get them thinking about it. Perfect.
None.
IBM had a powerful culture when I worked there. It was expressed in a written credo that every worker knew by heart. One of explicit values, which managers trespassed at their peril, was “Respect for the Individual”. It would have been unthinkable for any manager, least of all the CEO, to tolerate an action like this.
That said, I would certainly have obeyed the order, to stay out if trouble. I think the Federal employees would be well-advised to do so.
I don’t think that’s relevant to the workers’ decisions. Your CEO and his consultants looking like idiots is no reason to disobey their instructions and get fired.
The Boss is still the Boss!
Wow does this set me off. My company is still following SOX auditing processes implemented for a law passed in a panic after the Enron business collapse of 2001. Sarbanes and Oxley are both long dead, Enron is totally unknown to recent generations, yet the auditing processes remain.
The best I have ever made of the whole mess is to try to structure auditing processes so that they help answer future questions:
When an audit trail clearly allows you to compare what should have happened with what did happen, it has diagnostic value. When it records actions of compliance purely for the sake of compliance it is wasted effort.
The email responses are an interesting filtering method to find the chaff. A “first cut”, you might say.
According to administration court filings, Elon Mush [sic] is nobody’s boss, merely a humble consultant and advisor to the OI.
You appear to believe you’re arguing with actions or non-actions taken by “workers,” but in fact you’re arguing with people like fake-drug grifter Kash Patel who instructed FBI employees to not respond to the message. Similar instructions were issued at the State Department, DHS, FEMA, CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon.
Global business forced IBM to do ISO 9000 when I was there. I know there are many other international certifications now. ISO 9000 audited that you had a process and followed it. It said nothing about if the process was effective, made any sense, etc.
Primarily an international version of working to exclude small business and innovation from the global market.
I have cited before a church to which we used to belong (we have subsequently moved): The missions committee usually asked groups newly asking for missions money what the group had ACCOMPLISHED before the missions committee agreed to provide funding. They were all prepared to cite what they hoped or intended to accomplish, but it was clear from most of them that it was the first time, and very surprising, to be asked about actual accomplishments.
As a lawyer with an engineering background and an interest in some politics, I can appreciate of the tendency of Ricochetti and other politically-oriented people to focus on the details of the merits of and risks of these details. But, I try to think of how I think people who pay only modest attention to politics might see. I imagine a lot of people who aren’t into the details see government employees who refuse to do or to deal with things that most Americans have dealt with for decades. Those who pay only modest attention see: government employees who 1) don’t want to return to work, 2) don’t want to explain what they do, 3) don’t think they should be subject to the possibility that their work might become redundant at some time (and thus subject to layoffs), and 4) don’t think they should ever have to think about whether they might be contributing actual value for the taxpayer and whether an employment buy-out might be of value.
And their primary experience with the government is at the DMV.
YMMV
DOGE is nothing new. It is a renaming of President Barack Obama’s 2014 United Stated Digital Service, a group reporting to the Executive tasked with providing updated IT services to try to fix the disastrous Obamacare rollout.
There have been many similar attempts. “Bureaucratic Efficiency” is never going to happen, but it is clear that there is a lot of opportunity to improve. I’m never going to be skinny, but that doesn’t mean I ought to just keep piling it on.
The fact that the FBI decided not to respond shows it isn’t an “order”. I think it is primarily a way to smoke out people that are being paid, yet n0t even checking their email.
When I joined in ’78, “respect for the individual” was mostly true. Unfortunately, people became more and more entitled and IBM needed to bring Lou Gerstner and start trimming the fat. I was in favor, because there were WAY too many people that were on “in plant vacation”.
As time went on, the December “Resource Actions” became a holiday tradition. “Respect for the individual” was “Respect for the resource”.
IBM went from being a tech company to a dividend cash cow. I was let go in 2012 because the really cool cell phone technology product I was working on was cancelled to meet a quarterly financial target. Ginni Rometty became a nice DEI symbol appointed CEO, and decided that cancelling what had been one of her pet endeavors was a worthy sacrifice. I did get some nice patents out of the project, and a lot of the years there were good.
The saddest part is that of all the ex-IBMers I know, not one misses the place. The people? Sure, but it had become a bureaucratic dinosaur that looked too much like the government to really enjoy working there.
Comment unnecessary: They voted for Trump, but now they’re losing their U.S. government jobs.
I joined at the same time and had the same experience. I was really speaking about the old IBM, to be honest.
It was clear in the election that government would shrink. The concept of NIMBY is very human. “I want more illegal immigration, I just don’t want any in my town”. “I want more windmills, just not around me”. I want “the rich” to pay more taxes, I just don’t want that to creep down to me”.
Often we realize something different needs to be done, we just get mad when it actually affects us.
I’m horrified that this simple request was met with shock, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Every employee of every organization on Earth should be prepared to answer this question at a moment’s notice. What do you expect to say if you bump into the Boss in the elevator at work? It just shows how mismanaged the entire apparatus of government is. Don’t managers WANT to know what their teams are accomplishing … or aren’t? Apparently not. If they did, then every team would have some sort of status report ready to go. (It might be that in some agencies, the work might be compartmented for security purposes and “what you did last week” might not be appropriate for a public email but something simple could surely be crafted in 5 minutes …. “security procedures dictate that this information not be disclosed in a non-secure email. We’d be happy to provide a secure briefing… yadda yadda yadda”) But in Government, power is measured in headcount and budget. No problem is ever “solved.” Rather problems continuously metastasize, requiring additional headcount and budget.
What does this phrase mean? I am sure the emails from OPM are marked as from OPM.
I used to have to bill my hours to different projects I was working on. That meant I had to know what I had been working on all the time.
So you’re finally getting the message?
Me too. That’s one reason the tooth-gnashing and grand-standing by some of the affected workers seems a bit silly.
Me three. Every hour of my incredibly important and stressful federal workweek was accounted for on a timesheet.
This sort of thing is why I think so much of the public is responding favorably to the DOGE work – government employees are reacting with outrage to being told to do things normal people have to do every day – show up to a workplace, demonstrate your work, and consider the possibility that work needs may have to change over time.
Imagine if they worked in a decent sized law firm where you not only have to bill in eighths of an hour but have have to exercise the creativity to bill 100 hours a week! :)
It’s just occurred to me* that in 1977, when I was fixing “big iron” for IBM (in a three-piece suit and tie and white shirt, no less…lubing the print trains and removing ribbon jams on 1403 line printers, no less), I had to account for my time in increments of 6 minutes.
All my time. Even on break. And none of my time was even billable! (I was stationed full-time at McDonnell Douglas Automation by the St. Louis Airport, and every piece of equipment was on 24/7 maintenance, usually leased.)
I had to specify a code saying what kind of activity it was, what the machine type and serial number of the machine was, and so on. Your manager went over a computer printout that showed how much “57” time you’d recorded. It better not be above the limit!
An example of time that should properly have been coded as “57” time that I shall never forget: 10 or so of us would be sitting in the CE room (for “Customer Engineers) on a slow day, waiting for something to break.
Larry Merkle, a lanky, unkempt fellow (3330 Disk Drive man, if I remember rightly) who looked and sounded like he’d moved into the city from the Ozarks, would be keeping watch on the windowed cross-walk between two buildings, just outside our own windows.
Suddenly, he would cry out, “Big Red Alert, Big Red Alert” and we’d all hurry over to the plate glass windows to catch a glimpse of Big Red sashaying by, with her bright red hair and a red mini-skirt. She must have been a good 5’11 high even without her high-heeled shoes on, and proportionately sized in the other two dimensions as well.
What I am trying to say is that “57” time was “Non-Productive Time”, and too much of it was not a good way to get a “2” (and a raise) instead of a “3” on your next annual appraisal. I don’t think I got up to “2” until my manager was angling to find me a promotion to Instructor at the Chicago Ed Center, at One IBM Plaza. (Yeah, we all saw the film-crew helicopters over the Chicago River that one day, and a car come flying out of about the 15th floor of the Marina Tower parking garage. Blues Brothers.)
* * *
*A five-word phrase that has also been used right after…