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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (321115)	8/25/2009 11:52:00 AM
From: ManyMoose	10 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793964

I worked 38 years for Uncle Sam in an agency that drew in a profit for the first half of my career. I never had a burgeoning salary. Every job that I applied for had fifty or so applicants, and I usually got down to the top two or three. I got maybe 5 percent of the jobs that I applied for. If I got the job it required a relocation, which is very costly to me and the government. In my better days, I supervised an annual budget of about $2 million dollars and did a lot of the professional work myself that others in similar positions hired staff for so they could go to meetings and get the rewards thereof. My program brought in enough money from floral bough harvest to pay salaries of 9 out of 10 of my employees. My personal field work set the standards for harvest and reforestation of 30 million board feet of timber. I initiated and supervised the construction of a 75 acre seed orchard for genetically improved seed for reforestation. All this is down the tubes now because my successors staffed up with too many employees, which resulted in a RIF when the environmental crowd muscled in. Toward the end of my career I was responsible for gathering and maintaining vegetation data on 24 million acres. Instead of staffing up to do this work, as was expected by my supervisor, I contracted with the Research Branch of my agency to do the work. This made the work much more efficient AND more integrated with nationwide standards, something which had never been done before. I'm not complaining about my career or my 'burgeoning' salary. My base salary was never more than a little over $50 grand. Maybe I should have done it for free because I enjoyed the hell out of it. I can't speak for anybody else. I've seen some very poor government employees and some very excellent ones. The excellent ones are all underpaid. The poor ones should never be hired in the first place.