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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (13371)	5/24/2002 3:44:33 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

What did you say about firing incompetents in the private sector? Doesn't always work. It rarely does. I've seen my share of incompetents in the private sector and they're rarely fired. Even when the immediate supervisor wants them fired the next level up, doesn't want to be bothered and tells the supervisor to 'do something with them'. 'Do something' usually turns out to be: overload your good workers and underassign the poor workers. [You might recall that theme in Dilbert] Proposals are notorious for screw-ups like this. In most companies I've seen, their job is just to get the contract. Fine. Incompetence is common in the private sector. Thank you. So money is lost on the contract? Only with the really incompetent ones. Virtually all development contracts are cost plus and the government and taxpayer pays. What appears in the newspapers?....Look at this example of overruns on government contracts. The real truth is that the private sector is rampant with incompetence. Well, obviously those who executed the contract screwed up. Not their fault. How typically...'conservative'. The private sector screwed up, it's common that the private sector screws up and it's not their fault! What? Was it their mother's fault? No big deal, a factor of 20 overrun and it's not their fault. How many separate funding actions were their to 'get it right'. I wouldn't believe for a second that there was one contract action, that went from $n to 20*$n. At that point, then the question becomes whether those separate contract actions [until it was right] was just another repeat of incompetence or submitting an incremental request that your company knew was insufficient to cover the cost-to-complete. Since you made a point of saying that you were not with the company when the original bid was submitted. How many of those subsequent funding increments were you personally involved in? jttmab