I’m currently on the seventh floor of the King County Courthouse building in downtown Seattle. The jury is deliberating in the trial of Bryan Gabriel, the medical marijuana provider at the center of the tragic circumstances from last June that I wrote about here, in which a medical marijuana patient named Jeff Roetter died during an epileptic seizure as Snoqualmie police were pressuring him to testify against Gabriel. The charges that Gabriel currently faces are unrelated to Roetter, but were curiously filed the exact same day that Snoqualmie police were forced by a judge to return 10 ounces of marijuana to Gabriel.
The reason I’m even able to be here today, though, is that yesterday was my last day of work at the job I’ve been at since late 2008. I don’t write much about my actual day job since I let work and blogging co-mingle a bit too much at Microsoft. I work much harder to keep the two things separate (which I make easy for myself by being a shitty blogger with a relatively small audience). This past job was even easier for me to do that, since a lot of the people I worked with weren’t local, and I became a father in 2009 – giving me even less time to write shitty posts.
My career is in software quality assurance (QA). I’ve worked on airplanes, office productivity products, online music systems, statistical modeling applications, and large-scale data warehouses. My career has presented me with numerous challenges and I genuinely like the process of having to solve difficult problems. In this most recent job, I succeeded in climbing up into management and got a different perspective on how QA is done and a better perspective on how large projects are managed and – more commonly – mismanaged.
But this experience has also made me ponder the parallels between how QA functions within a company building a commercial product and how government functions within a society. Working on flight control software at Boeing early on in my career, I saw the overlap between them, as the FAA worked directly with us in our certification efforts. While it’s true that Boeing cares a lot about safety, I’ve worked at enough places since then to know that corporate bottom lines are often the most immovable objects, and that FAA presence within the group was both welcome and necessary. It made it easier for those of us in QA to demand enough time to complete our job.
At many other places, that isn’t always the case. QA efforts are often undermanned and underfunded, and yet still end up taking the blame when things go wrong. Developers and sometimes even program management fail to see the value that QA provides until a horrendous bug is found in a production system that probably would’ve been found by that QA engineer that you laid off last year. It’s one of the basic tenets of software development that the longer it takes for you to find a bug, the more it costs you. You know QA has done their job well when you aren’t constantly reminded of how important they are.
This isn’t an argument to have government regulation for all types of software development. Most commercial software development doesn’t impact public safety the way that airplanes do, and companies survive or fail based upon the quality of the products they produce (and they often don’t, but that’s a whole other post) without us needing to interfere with that process. But the parallels to government and how it’s seen in our society is what this post is about.
At the town hall I attended last weekend, Republican State Rep Jay Rodne complained that the state Department of Transportation had 5000 engineers on its staff. He seemed utterly incredulous at this statistic, as if he’d discovered some secret cabal that’s bleeding the taxpayers of Washington state dry. He didn’t provide any examples of waste. In his mind, the mere presence of the workers is an indication of wastefulness. This is religion dressed up as politics, a belief that a public sector employee or any public project is inherently a drain on society.
One can easily look on the WSDOT page to see what those engineers work on. Currently featured is the work being done on the Alaskan Way Viaduct for earthquake preparedness. These are things that you tend to notice only when they’re not done right – or not done at all. And when you decide to skimp on those things, just like in the software world, you can end up costing yourself far more in the long run.
My latest work experience was a frustrating one. Without going into too much detail, it involved significant budget cutting to our QA groups, including an offshoring push. The efforts to rein in costs made it very difficult to do proper QA on a number of their systems, potentially costing them far more in the long run. They closed down our office before I got to see how it all unfolded, but with some free time inbetween jobs, I’ll have some extra time to watch what happens in our greater society as we continue to take the same approach with government programs – eliminating workers whose value is often underappreciated, and taking away projects whose presence keeps overall costs down.
Republican State Rep Jay Rodne complained that the state Department of Transportation had 5000 engineers on its staff. He…didn’t provide any examples of waste…. This is religion dressed up as politics, a belief that a public sector employee or any public project is inherently a drain on society.
Well said, Lee. More and more these days, I see this religious fervor a lot in conversations with friends and acquaintances about current societal goings-on, and it sometimes amuses me and sometimes appalls me how otherwise intelligent people argue about such large issues non-factually.
The whole tax debate is one such example: A co-worker of mine complained the other day about the upcoming tolls on the 522 bridge, and I took the time to:
1. Show him the WA state budget and ask him where he’d get the money, and
2. Showed him that federal tax rates have been cut by more than 50% at all levels since 1980 and asked him why the economy is so bad now if lower taxes are supposedly good for the economy.
Instead of answering my questions directly, he continued what can only be described as a religious mantra about being taxed too much, a la Rodne.
It’s hard to argue with religious zealots…
The right continues to chant the mantra that “government” can’t do anything right and “private enterprise” can do no wrong, despite a daily tidal wave of evidence of the exact opposite.
I think one of the problems is that, in general, our state legislature is dominated by people who own small or medium-sized businesses, many of which were founded by their fathers or grandfathers. If they are dealing in low-tech businesses, they just don’t understand that government is completely different, or that the exposure of government to huge liability can result from cutting back too much. People who work in high-tech businesses, or those in highly regulated businesses due to public safety issues, understand this better.
Consumers should never forget that our last REPUBLICAN president wanted to fire all the federal meat inspectors and give the money to meatpacking companies to hire and supervise their own meat inspectors. Remember the tsunami of e.coli-tainted beef recalls that followed? But then, you shouldn’t eat meat, anyway. My veterinarian told me meat “is a killer” and eating it will take many years off your lifespan. Eat lettuce instead.
And carrots! YUMMY!! I (heart) carrots!!! But make sure they’re ORGANIC carrots otherwise you’re eating the same stuff the Red Army used to kill Afghan villagers.
@1 I’m for firing the highway engineers, letting the bridges crumble, and encouraging Republicans to drive on them. Hell, if they can scheme to eliminate unions, then why can’t we scheme to eliminate Republicans?
I think we should leave the Alaska Way Viaduct where it is and adopt a policy that only Republicans can drive on it.
@2 The right wants so-called “tort reform” so they can’t be sued when private prison companies bribe corrupt judges to send innocent kids to jail in order to fatten the private prison company’s bottom line at taxpayer expense. Wingers may be stupid but even they understand that if each and every one of the thousands of kids victimized by that company were to be awarded a million-dollar judgment against the company, that company would be out of business instantly.
@1 If guys like him feel they’re paying too much taxes, one area to cut is, um, Michelle Bachmann’s pension. She has a much better deal than any state or local worker.
“In a recent speech to South Carolina Republicans, for example, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said, ‘We’ve got to get real about what we can and cannot afford’ in state pensions.”
http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ons16.html
Roger Rabbit Commentary: I have a better idea. Let’s get real about what we can afford to pay for congressional pensions!
As for quality control, who’s going to work more conscientiously, a public employee who accepted lower pay and shitty working conditions because of an altruistic desire to do public good, or a private-sector wage slave working to make someone else rich — someone who has no loyalty to his employees and will outsource that person’s job without blinking?
Speaking of Republicans who simply don’t understand the whole concept of being penny-wise and pound-foolish:
SHE’S BAAAAACCCCKKKK!
Sharon Angle has announced that she’s going to run for Congress for the Nevada 2nd Congressional District.
I guess she wants to be able to pal around with Michelle Bachmann, and go on tours to visit Concord and Lexington, NEW HAMPSHIRE, where (according to Bachmann) the American Revolution began.
@11
When I saw that Michelle Bachmann was going to kick off her Presidential campaign by providing her birth certificate, my first thought was “That’s probably smart, because considering how little she knows of American history, I’m not convinced she was born and raised here”.
Lee @ 12: Hey, let’s play around with Bachman for a while.
She’s probably going to produce a copy of a birth certificate issued by the hospital, which isn’t official, or she’s going to prodicue a certified copy from the state or county registar.
Since the deniers claim that both of these are invalid to prove Obama was born in the U.S., lets just insist that she provide us with the original, official document. Which she probably can’t do, because the government keeps it in their records and doesn’t let someone just come in and walk out with it.
That should give us some entertainment for a few weeks.
As for Bachmans’s mis-statement with regard to the location of the “Shots Heard ‘Round the Word”….
Usually, I dismiss such mistakes, when they are made by a very tired candidate who’s going through his fifth (or tenth) speach of the day, and probably doesn’t even really know what city he or she is in. I think it was Dole who once made a mistake about the date for Pearl Harbor, but being a WWII veteran he clearly knew the difference, and just made a mistake. I think there were some comments about Obama referring to the U.S. as 52 states, which I passed off for the same reason.
When Gerald Ford in the 1976 debates said that Poland was an independent country not under the domination of the Soviet Union, at first I assumed he was making a similar mis-statement. But when given an opportunity to correct his mistake, he doubled-down and insisted it was correct, a point which probably doomed any chances he had for re-election. I still wonder what he was really thinking at the time.
But with Bachman, you have a completely different situation. With most politicians, you start with a presumption that they have a reasonable amount of intelligence, and that if they make a mistake about a simple fact, it’s either a simple mis-statement, confusion over the question, or fatigue. But Bachman has proven, over and over again, that she’s not only crazy, but ignorant as well.
We should expect those who hold or seek national office to have at least average knowledge which would be possessed by someone holding an undergraduate college degree in liberal arts or general studies. I don’t say they have to have the degree, but they should at least know as much. It’s really not that much to ask.
But Bachman has repeatedly proven that her teachers committed professional malpractice when they promoted her from 9th grade.
The thing about Bachman is that even in the explanation, she blew it. She said she “should have said Massachussetts instead of New Hampshire”. Except she didn’t say “New Hampshire”, she said “this state” while standing in New Hampshire, praising its citizens for the birth of the revolution. Now why would she go to New Hampshire to talk about Massachusetts?
Didya’ know that, in order to be counted as urban a county has to have a population of greater than 100 people per square mile and that only 7 counties (Clark,
King, Kitsap, Pierce, Snohomish, Spokane, Thurston) in the state of Washington qualify as urban?
Next time someone accuses you of picking on rural eastern WA, tell ‘um “nah, I’m picking on the 13 rural counties in Western WA.” And then you might want to point out that about 25% of the folks in Eastern WA live in URBAN Spokane County. Hell, throw in the decidedly non-rural tri-cities and you’re up to about 38% of everyone in Eastern WA.
*All numbers used back of the napkin.
It was not Dole but Geo Bush I who said Pearl Harbor happened on Sept 7th. No one knows why.
Just by happenstance, I ran across this quote today:
Simon Cameron, 1861, first Secty of War during Lincoln’s administration, commenting on the subject of the Smithsonian Institution.
If you recall, Cameron was removed from his office after less than a year due to corruption within the department and mis-management. He is also credited with the famous quote: “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”
Instead of hiring engineers directly, the Republicans want governments to have to pay their buddy’s firms for those engineers at consultant rates. It’s all about making sure their cronies can skim some off of every dollar that government spends.
Crony capitalism at it’s best.
I will guarantee you those Washington State engineers are paid below market.
@20
I know one that works for a rural eastern WA county, she’s getting way below market.
@13 Bachmann can’t produce a real birth certificate. Only mammals have live births. She’s a reptile. She was hatched.