When did that happen? I didn't see anything saying they were taking anything away. I saw they increased pay by 5%, authorized retention bonus, and are supposed to add about a 5% increase in the number of license workers.
You could just increase pay by $20k and add another 100 workers, but that ignores concerns about operational inefficiency and outdated technology. It will be interesting to see if the privatized pilot increases efficiency or not. I wouldn't hold my breath, but we'll see.
Yes, and they can't even fill the positions they have under that cap.
'“Whether the root cause is a lack of money, that’s still to be determined. Or whether it’s how we’re spending the money that’s already appropriated,” Boliek said.' From your article.
If it cap salary at 2000 levels then that you won’t be able to fill. That’s happening all over the federal government. The pay is so low the only way the compensation works is if employees do the bare minimum
Government employees have been getting COLAs. It just appears that the private sector has been giving larger increases and is subject to more competition. For example, as a developer you can job hop or negotiate raises in the private sector, but that doesn’t work in the public sector. I think inflation and wage growth in the covid era hit this especially hard. Why would I want to deal with DMV customers all day for $45k when I could work at an Amazon warehouse for $70k or even Walmart/McDonald's/etc for $50k?
Also the high cost of living areas jobs don’t adjust appropriately for costs in the local areas. A post office job in the city pays almost as much as one in the middle of nowhere but the costs are radically different
"I saw they increased pay by 5%, authorized retention bonus, and are supposed to add about a 5% increase in the number of license workers." From the context.
You can also read the articles back in the context, including things like the audit where they are investing if it's that they don't get enough money or if they aren't spending it well. If you can make technological advancements that increase efficiency, then it's stupid to just throw more bodies at the problem. Studying the problem makes sense before political finger pointing.
They can't fill and retain the positions because of a number of factors, but in a large part the pay is about $45k/yr and people find better options. They had almost 25% vacancies after covid, likely due to the wage growth in many other low paying sectors.
Is the privatized NC DMV any better than the public one? I was just at the Delaware DMV getting my 2 vehicles inspected and registration renewed, and while not an entirely horrible experience, it did seem like there were a lot of inefficiencies and complacentcy.
I've also noticed the difference in the US post offices around me and the FedEx stores and wonder why the post offices aren't nicer customer experiences.
I’ve dealt with DMVs across multiple living locations and the differences are incredible.
The worst ones were a nightmare to deal with that virtually required taking a half day off work. One time I had to line up outside in the sun (I hadn’t brought sunscreen) because they decided that the line needed to be outside the building instead of inside, despite having space for it. My only guess is that they were being measured on some metric like average wait time and someone’s genius idea to game that metric was to make people in line bake in the sun so they’d rather leave than go home.
The best DMV I’ve been to ran like a well oiled machine. They had someone posted at the door to pre-review your goal and ensure you had the right papers with you to avoid surprises at the counter. You got a numbered ticket to hold. Signs showed your position in line and estimated wait time. There were thoughtfully placed chairs. Every time I visited I waited no more than 10 minutes. Even the Google reviews for the DMV office were great.
As far as I can tell the difference had nothing to do with staffing or headcount. The bad DMVs oddly had bigger offices, they just had people who moved at a snail’s pace and didn’t care about anything other than running the clock out until they could go home.
This is what people dislike about poorly run government offices: There’s a palpable malaise in some government interactions that is clearly not present in well run offices. I don’t think privatization is the obvious fix, but I can see why after years or decades of nothing changing at famously mismanaged offices that people would be willing to try alternatives
My local DMV got a lot better when they created "ready to go" and "not ready to go" lines. If you know what you are doing and already have the paperwork all completed, you can go in the "ready to go" line and somebody just very quickly looks over your stuff to make sure it's good, and gives you a number. If you don't know exactly what your doing, or have questions, you go in the "not ready to go" line which leads to a few windows where people will help you get everything figured out and if you don't have everything you need, you aren't waiting an extended time to then find that out from a grumpy employee. Either way, by the time your number gets called for one of the main windows, you're already sorted and so the transaction is quick and things keep moving along for everybody.
> The bad DMVs oddly had bigger offices, they just had people who moved at a snail’s pace and didn’t care about anything other than running the clock out until they could go home.
Well, all of the people?
You are certainly looking at the consequence of something that you don't fully understand. All of the people in a place don't start acting the same way for no reason.
I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but it’s no mystery why certain institutions start functioning this poorly.
It’s because there are no consequences for slow or poor performance. The people who want to do a good job get fed up and leave. The people who just want paychecks and no consequences stay.
Ok, I'll have to call bullshit on every level of that rationale.
- Those people are not doing teamwork. People (competent or not) don't leave good jobs just because some random coworker is lazy.
- Even if they were doing teamwork, hardworking incompetent team members are the ones that make life hard for everybody else, not lazy ones.
- Those people are not reaping any concrete benefit from being lazy. Being forced to sit in a chair the entire day with nothing to do is torture; if they are picking that instead of doing their work there's a real problem somewhere.
- I really doubt the people in question actually face "no consequences" and are not threatened all the time. That almost never happens in practice.
- When faced with some problem overspread through an entire organization, your proposal is to go and punish the least powerful people. I'd recommend you to think about why you think that is what is going to fix the problem.
- People with that kind of attitude have an almost perfect track record of creating this kind of problem or making it worse. It doesn't matter if it's in government or business.
> Being forced to sit in a chair the entire day with nothing to do is torture; if they are picking that instead of doing their work there's a real problem somewhere.
I don’t know what you’re arguing at this point. I’m not talk about people sitting in a chair doing nothing.
> - I really doubt the people in question actually face "no consequences" and are not threatened all the time. That almost never happens in practice.
Are you just rejecting the existence of this situation because you don’t believe it?
I really don’t understand what you’re trying to even imply. I have anecdotes about different offices that accomplish the same exact task, but one was run very well and the other was not the slightest bit interested in running well. If you’re just choosing not to believe that a DMV office could be run poorly then I don’t know what to say, other than this conversation is going nowhere.
If you live in the 5 county metro Atlanta area you have to do a biannual emissions inspection. You can go to any of the plentiful inspection stations pay a mandated $20 and they send the results in electronically. You can then pay for your tag online. Change of address within the state can also be done online within GA.
Even when you do go in, you just get a number and wait for it to be called. It’s very well organized. This is definitely a red veering on purple state.
We moved to Florida three years ago and the process for getting a license was not that much different. My wife had to jump through a couple of more hoops to transfer her CDL.
We've had privatized tag agents in Oklahoma for as long as I can remember.
It actually works pretty well. If you need a driver's test or CDL background checks, you need the DPS office (which is very hit-and-miss). For everything else - tags, license renewal, etc. - a tag agent handles it. They all charge the same fees and offer the same services, so it doesn't matter which one you go to. If the local agency is always busy, someone will open another one.
I'm not normally a fan of privatization, but this is one of the cases where it makes sense. It's one of the few things Oklahoma gets right.
There is an entropic force that leads most organizations to optimize for survival of the organization over time, and worsen the ability to serve the ostensible purpose the organization exists to serve. Changing the type of the organization doesn't matter much if this tendency is not addressed honestly in the mission statement or somewhere similar.
I was totally with you until you proposed that a careful mission statement is the solution to organizational ossification. I've always considered them a symptom, and to the extent that they are prescriptive, you can safely assume that the operational reality is the polar opposite.
I said "honest" not "careful", but really it's about actual intentions, not paper promises. It's just a label for intentions, and as you point out, manipulated to hide intentions more than describe them.
When I lived in North Carolina a few years ago, it was common for local private companies to get a contract with the state to run offices that issue license plates, while only the state ran the offices that issue drivers licenses and everything else. The private companies are highly regulated. They can’t charge whatever price they want, and I’m sure they get the plates from the state. They really just handle the paperwork.
I personally had better experiences getting license plates than getting drivers licenses. But they are very different transactions, and issuing license plates seems much simpler to me. And I had good experiences getting a drivers license in smaller towns; the only time I waited for hours in an NC DMV was in a large city. And I would choose that experience again over the California DMV, or the Nevada DMV, but not the New Jersey DMV (which they call the MVC).
> Is the privatized NC DMV any better than the public one?
Nobody knows. But the only things guaranteed are:
- service prices will rise because now shareholders will seek a return every year.
- AI powered elevator music phone service where you must wait 30 mins before reaching a human.
- Fees and costs for every interaction.
- Workers will be encouraged to do work fast - by providing less service to people, asking people to come over and over again
- More lobbying to reduce license and registration durations because they need people to constantly renew to collect fees and profits.
About FedEx, I don't know why you think US post offices are bad. I personally find USPS to be astonishingly high quality and decent humans. FedEx is decent quality but 10x higher prices than USPS.
> Nobody knows. But the only things guaranteed are:
Ironic that you jump from “nobody knows” to statements where you’re absolutely sure that it’s worse.
Your “guarantees” aren’t even consistent with the language of the authorization. They aren’t giving these services carte blanche to define their own laws and processes. They’re just allowing someone else to execute part of the process.
It’s hard to have these conversations when one side is arguing based on ideological abstract ideas, not the actual language of the bill.
> FedEx is decent quality but 10x higher prices than USPS.
I ship a lot of packages and use a service that quotes from USPS, UPS, and FedEx.
It’s plainly false to claim that FedEx has 10X higher prices. This is just factually incorrect. FedEx comes out as the lowest price for maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of my shipments. It’s hard to trust someone’s arguments when they’re making egregiously false claims like this.
The claims are not as egregious as you think. You are not the only one shipping goods around. There is a market that USPS serves and I along with many others benefit from it.
The argument is always that a private mail company would deliver mail to the cheapest places first (like the American Letter Mail Company did) and the US post office would get stuck with the unprofitable mail. But that could be addressed by just requiring any mail company to deliver to all addresses. Instead we have a law that just requires companies charge more than the post office.
How long did you spend submitting numbers into the FedEx and USPS calculators to try to come up with a scenario to make this point?
I never claimed FedEx was always cheapest. I explained that I use a service which quotes all 3 providers because the cheapest service varies by package and by destination.
I don’t understand how anyone could even believe that FedEx remains a viable company by charging 7-10X more than competitors. The entire line of argument is illogical.
Actually, a single point can prove you wrong but a lot of data is needed to prove you right. The reply mostly agreed with you, they said 4/5 was cheaper but 1/5 wasn't. Your statement implies 5/5 is cheaper, the other poster is the one that only needs one data point.
> USPS and FedEx both serve meaningful markets.
You from two replies ago would be shocked to hear that.
NC outsourced safety inspections to private sector decades ago. And nothing you have described has happened.
- the service prices are all fixed ($30 or $13.60)
- tons of places to do your inspection, wait times are almost zero
- work is done in 10 minutes
- new reduced rate ($13.60) for newer vehicles was introduced some years ago
If they do something similar for driver license offices or vehicle registration offices it will be a giant leap in quality of service. Right now in bigger cities you cannot make an appointment 6 months in advance, and walk-in does not guarantee you will get any service even after spending whole day in line.
My experience (In NC, incidentally, with those two carriers):
FedEx blows. They are slower than USPS for domestic, and generally claim I wasn't home, despite living in a bldg with a concierge. UPS and DHL of course out do both, but FedEx is the worst.
You can't open your eyes when you work 50 hours a week, take care of kids, and are addicted to your smartphone. Wanna get people to open their eyes? Start taking data centers offline.
This is not a prescription when the diagnosis is propaganda. The "solution" for individuals is more akin to deprogramming, and a systemic solution is large organizations (including government) fighting the ability for any media to be nearly 100% propaganda. Unfortunately, for many reasons, including social media, and individuals believing that others could simply "wake up" being a solution, practical systemic solutions don't exist / require new approaches.
> As an example, they gutted NC DMV. So quality of service and wait times deteriorated. Then they go out and say that government doesn't work - must be sold to their private owner buddies.
They’re suggesting the DMV is privatized? Can you share a link?
> The North Carolina House has officially taken a first step toward privatizing the infamously mismanaged Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV), as issues and customer complaints have persisted for years.
> The proposed budget released on Monday includes a provision that would begin the process of privatizing DMV services by creating a new pilot program to allow third-party vendors to handle driver’s license renewals, a function traditionally managed solely by the state.
> The reforms come amid increasing legislative pressure to modernize DMV operations. State leaders have repeatedly criticized the DMV’s operations, arguing that the division “would be out of business if it were in the private sector.” With no notable improvement in sight, Rep. Jake Johnson, R-Polk, has been behind the push for legislative action. Earlier this year, he proposed overhauling the DMV’s structure by taking it out of the Department of Transportation.
We've had step one for decades in California. AAA does a portion of what the DMV does for their members. And they do it better and faster.
There's never been any step two (cynically, the organization does that themselves). Everyone has been doing step three since time immemorial which is why AAA lobbied to start providing DMV services to their members.
It is the best of both worlds. Nobody is denied service yet AAA members don't have to deal with poorly-incentivized government workers for many common bureaucratic tasks.
And step four, shut down the public option for further "efficiency and cost savings" allowing the private options to squeeze out higher and higher rents.
As someone that has done a lot of projects for "the government" in the last 2 decades, it's unfortunately the case that all government departments and projects don't run well and are doomed to fail (funding or not). The nature of the constraints and priorities given to the governmental agencies (like the DMV example above) is one that makes them fail or not do well. It's by design, coupled with all political parties treating government projects as glorified jobs-programs, and you end up getting a downward cycle that both sides feed on.
Then you get misguided attempts at "bringing in the private sector" like allowing DMV functions to be done by private entities, at their premises or through their apps. This is literally the worst of both worlds even if it works and technically isn't really "gutting" the governmental department.
The NC DMV situation was hilariously bad when I had a short stint there. Appointments were over a month out. People would come with camping chairs at 6:00 a.m. and hope to maybe get let in. People were there for many many hours and some people came back for many days on end.
That particular playbook long predates Trump: campaign on the ineffectiveness and incompetence of government and, once elected, prove it—with ineffectiveness and incompetence. Repeat ad infinium.
CA has been a one party state minus a couple governors my entire life. You'd think the Democrats would have this place running like a well oiled machine by now.
Why would you think that? No one is saying that the Democrats are good at anything. This is not a algebra, taking something from one side doesn't get added to the other.
Worth mentioning that democrats have their own issues bogging things down, such as internal splintering, state gov fighting NIMBY-aligned local gov, localities throwing tantrums if they’re not included (big factor in the SF ↔ LA rail project), etc.
Yes, it predates trump. But prior to trump, Republican voters would hold their representatives accountable. Today, trump's cult is so brainwashed that they are completely ok with pedophilia, internment camps, destruction of services, destruction of science - literally willing to burn American society to ground so that Trump continues in office.
Their priority is Trump and not America. Which is why no one can take republican voters seriously.
> Republican voters would hold their representatives accountable.
I don’t think that’s accurate, unless it was for a crime they just couldn’t forgive. Debacle in the Middle East? Stay the course and re-elect Bush. Find out a senator had a gay experiment once? Out, so to speak.
You’ve been able to do what you want within the GOP for decades, so long as it’s Old Testament compliant.
I'm going to actually push back on this. Yes, the 2004 election was depressing. But if you take a quick look at George W. Bush's approval rating, you'll see it was extremely low even before the financial crisis in late 2007 [1]. The war in Iraq was really unpopular during his second term. If you look at the electoral map in 2008, you'll also see Obama winning states that we can't even imagine a Democrat winning, because people used to be more open to voting for the other side. Politics in America has changed in a big way, and GOP politics has changed wildly.
They've been doing this for generations. In a nutshell that's why the US South is so poor. They build infrastructure for political/economic exclusion, and they tear down anything that even hints at inclusiveness. So the rich get richer, and everyone else suffers.
Trump won the popular vote. I think the reasonable people need to open their eyes and learn that Republicans won't ever change.
The flip side of that complaint is Democrats stuffing government bureaucracies with do-nothing jobs for their buddies. Both sides play in this cesspool. It would be nice if we as a nation could just do the work that needs to be done for the people without all of those games but it never has really been that way.
> Democrats stuffing government bureaucracies with do-nothing jobs for their buddies
Ignoring the partisanship this argument doesn't make sense on its face: government jobs pay extremely poorly. You might say "well what if you hold more than one of them?", but you can't do that: a federal employee can be employed in two different roles, but their pay is capped at 40 hours a week across the federal government.
Anyone keen on that level of grift has vastly better options in the private sector.
What are you on about? Government work is a wonderful career opportunity for the non-HN crowd. These are often people of at best average intelligence and near zero ambition who want a cushy career that you can't be fired from unless you punch a supervisor (and even then it's tough).
There are wonderful people in government, I've worked with them. But there are a ton of people along for the ride and it's absolutely insane to argue the opposite given hundreds of thousands of government employees on cruise control. Plenty of folks would (and do) love a GS-scale gig that requires nearly no work and provides terrific bennies. They were never going to work for FAANG or another high-payer anyway.
And many of the people "in on the grift" are constituents, not donors.
The pay, job per job, is significantly lower across the public sector. You take a massive pay-cut. I don't know what lied to you and told you it's "cushy", but it's definitely not.
Also, you can absolutely be fired for performance. In fact, across the public sector probationary periods are typically longer than in the private sector. Meaning, it's actually easier for you to get fired.
These are the types of things people just sort of... make up... and then other people run with it because they like how it sounds and it reaffirms their ideology.
Interesting past tense. Why did you leave and does it involve getting paid more?
I've worked in government and it's just like the private sector. You have people that are there check in, make money, and go home, and you have people that care about their work. And I don't think there are any significant ratio differences between public and private in regards to that.
So? You're one of millions, and many people are ideologically opposed to the public sector. Obviously, I cannot trust you, so I won't.
What I've said isn't up for debate, it's just true. If you find yourself disagreeing, please feel free to look up salaries and probationary periods. You will see you are incorrect. From there, you can decide whether to change your mind or continue to believe in lies.
> But there are a ton of people along for the ride
For someone who claims to be not in the startup hustle world of Hacker News, you also don't understand that people "along for a stable ride" is how 98% of the world views employment.
