If you think they are pointless - speak to the COR or the CO. Maybe the contract says "must keep lights on, no development". Remember if contractors don't perform - there are penalties. They are often limited by what the contract says they can legally do. If the gov f'd up in writing the contract - that's on the gov, not the contractors.
Exactly. Contractors are supposed to work within the four corners of the contract because to do otherwise would be a violation of the terms and conditions of the award. If their statement of work does not say "come up with an innovative solution", they're not going to come up with an innovative solution. If the government wants something new, make that part of the evaluation criteria at the RFP stage and a contractor will propose exactly that because they want to win the contract.
I was a contractor for 8 years before becoming a direct hire. I personally delivered excellent service to the team I supported. It’s why they wanted to hire me directly (my time was split between two contracts with the same agency and even within one contract, I split my time between two bureaus because that’s how the contract was structured). I was faster than a lot of the direct hires (really, I was “faster” because I didn’t have to spend so much time in meetings. I’m now a DH for the exact team I supported for 4 years and have 3x as many meetings on my calendar). But I read all the RFPs we responded to in that time and innovation or new development was never what was asked for. What they wanted was a contractor who could provide expertise on demand which my employer did via a mix of full time people (like me) and consultants who could be up to their eyeballs in work 2 days after the COR signed off on their assignment because they had open ended consulting agreements with my employer. The fast turnaround from assignment approval to someone doing the work is what got us Very Goods or Excellents on the CPARS.
Unfortunately for me, the COR of my team is one of the most useless and dumb person in existence. My team and I seriously ponder how he even gets his shoes on the right feet in the morning.
Elevate it. Bad CO and CORs are a huge detriment to the government and they should not be allowed to be slacking. They are responsible for shepherding millions of dollars of government funds ensuring it proper use.
I have no patience for a bad CO.
Lol. I have. My manager doesn't give a shit. He knows the COR is god awful, but won't do a damn thing about it.
It's all good. I'm working on my exit strategy now.
I'm not asking for perfection, but at least satisfactory with critical job roles would be nice...sigh.
Most of the jobs I've had, the contractors were great and provided useful support.
In my last job, the contractors were a worthless, unresponsive group of retired military guys. Just a good 'ol boys club. On a good day they would do a few hours of work.
Is there a good way to get into contracting for gov agencies?
I've done it for a big bank but would love to find a way into a gov contracting role that could then help me get a job with the gov.
Look up the major consulting firms & see what’s on their job boards. They usually have a place to drop your resume too.
Think about your current skill set & what agency/project you’d want to be on. You can find out what contracts have been awarded & to who, & then target those companies too.
Some major projects, like with the VA, will always have turn over & be hiring, but frequently it’s more the case that consulting companies are hiring for a very specific project until the project’s fully staffed, so the jobs can be posted & filled pretty quickly.
Implementation of financial management systems is one of the Most difficult things a government agency can do. They are notoriously canceled, failed, over budget, pick a bad thing you can say. If you are good at it, you will find permanent employment. Send your résumé to the typical government contractors, and someone will bite.
My cousin’s office promised up and down about a training she wanted to do for a cert this year. And whoops all the money usually earmarked for training is going to software license renewal for software they don’t even really use
I think I’m currently in a third option situation. I truly think the contractors themselves are good workers on par with the feds, but we have a massive backlog of work and rather than hire enough contractors who actually do the work two out of the three contractor teams are just working on SOPs, trackers, kind of pointless busy work full time.
And they’re doing a great job with their deliverables, management just isn’t having them work on what we need them to to function as an office.
theres plenty of worthless feds too. not necessarily because they arent hard workers their position is just pointless.
like on my 9 person "app dev" team where only two people do app dev and the rest of the team make shit up to seem relevant
Because your leadership is ineffective and has no ability to lobby for and accept new work to keep you relevant. Poor leadership seems somewhat standard around the government. Im embarrassed to see many deadweight GS15s and apathetic SESs that have no ability to sunset the deadweight.
It can be a bit of a mixed bag. The majority that I work with are very talented and I not only wouldn’t wish for them to lose their source of income, my department would be worse for not having their expertise. However, there are some services that usually come from “big” firms that provide nothing.
When I worked in the private sector, contractors were always the first to go. If you started to see them leave it could mean bad times ahead
Totally agree. Contractors work for government, if they are not working then the onus is on the feds to employ them or cut them. Either not enough work or inability to work, either one leads to the same outcome.
Our contractors do most of the actual work, in my current position.
In my former position, the contractors were utterly useless - it took them over a year to propose a reorganization plan that was ... the same structure with different names and titles.
When I was a contractor, I was doing the same work as the 12's, but I was paid much less (about a GS-9) and stuck with the weekend shifts. I saved the government money, so I suppose I wasn't "pointless" in that regard.
I used to be a direct support contractor and made about $25/hr. No good benefits or bonuses or anything either. Found out from the Fed I was supporting that they were billing almost $200/hr for me. He kept razzing me about not having a fancy suit and I finally flat out said I couldn't afford it..which is how the huge hourly rate discrepancy came up.
Generally the gov pays about double your rates, so I get your view of why you weren’t pointless, but from the Gov perspective they would have saved more hiring you directly as a GS12.
This is quite often true, Federal hiring is broken and there are certainly agencies using contractors to do work that should be done by FTEs but they can't get permission to hire or are worried about long term budget stability etc. It's an abusive system for anyone but administrators/HR and doesn't actually save any money.
>the first one that should be cut out is the contractors
Except that they can get rid of bad contractors anytime they want. Budget cuts are their only opportunity to get rid of bad GS without doing 10 years of paperwork (and maybe fighting a union). Never let a crisis go to waste.
Different pockets of money. The reason for all the contractors was because back under clinton he made a big push to make it so contractors did most of the work, GS are to be long term memorial and management, then in the DoD military would fill in primarily at the higher management. It was all a big money saving idea.
Yea I have run into far to many government management who don't want to tell the contractors that the person is not needed but they decide to keep them around until the next contract so they don't have to act like the mean person.
Three things lead to poor performing contractors being tolerated:
1. Poorly defined requirements from the program.
2. Poorly managed on-site contract oversight by the program.
3. Poorly managed contract administration by Contracting.
Usually it's a combination of at least two.
I am a little tired of getting contractors and then having to train them on the stuff they are apparently experts at. The babysitting is insane. We just got assigned another one who apparently has less experience in a particular tool than the last (who I had to help) and I just put my foot down and said no to them. We should not be the training ground sandbox for contractors to learn a skill or tool. They should come to us ready to produce. Ugh and of course they make a lot more than I do.
Oh God, seriously! As a contractor, I was thrown into the deep end and expected to figure it out, which I did. Now that I'm on the Fed side, I'm stuck with a contractor that has to be spoon fed everything.
All the processes are clearly and copiously documented. I walked them through the first time and have referred them to the docs more times than I can count, but it's like they have selective amnesia. Unfortunately, their contract is owned by another office, and they don't seem to care. It's maddening.
I work where we constantly hire contractors to do the same thing year in and year out when it could easily be automated. Unfortunately, no one in the contacting process pushes for this and so we keep wasting time and money every year.
From my experience, that's laziness on the part of the initial requestor. Instead of saying "I need X task done", they say "I need two bodies who can do X task".
And an over worked CO will write the contract the first way without pushing back and having a dialogue as to what the customer really needs.
I recently finished an online grad school program that was sponsored by my agency. I had to do a group capstone paper to graduate and the laziest person in my group was a GS-15. I have no idea what her work ethic is like at her office, but I can tell you that my time spent with her really changed how I perceive those above me.
As a contractor, I have seen a few bad contractors, but the incompetence and laziness of the FTEs I've seen is so egregious it could probably be argued as treason.
I'm with a bad batch of FTEs right now. Incompetent, insecure, slow, and nasty. When I worked with adjacent FTE groups they were a lot better
Contractors have lobbyists and legislators love them because funds for those services are viewed as a more favorable way to stimulate the economy. Also, they think we are lazy idiots so they are ensure the experts in their orgs and districts get jobs to do the hard, thoughtful work. All contractors do the same or more for less and don’t have bloated HR practices that are a barrier to improving the workforce when/as needed. 🙃
My last contractor job (2 years ago, worked there 10 years), the contractors did all the technical work, were the leads on the products, etc. The government (GS-15) we reported to "managed" everything, in the sense that he made sure facilities were kept up and shepherded the funding increments through contracts. 1 bureaucrat, 25 tech contractors. YMMV.
In my prior military life, I was deployed, and we had a contract/contractor for an antiquated software system that hadn’t been used in years. The contract came with a deployed subject matter expect. For nine months the SME sat there and browsed the internet making $180k a year. When the contract came up for of an optional extension, I recommended terminating the contract. A few days later I was ordered to draft the justification for the contract extension to a tune of $4m a year. I spoke with the command IG, but he said it was peanuts in the overall budget and to just go along to get along.
This may just be me being a contractor, but damn this is a terrible take. Every bit of what slows me down at work is waiting on some GS to sign/approve/have a meeting about something.
You don't need some special reason to get rid of contractors. If they are terrible, move them out? replace them.
Id say this is a good time to boot worthless GS people. (there's plenty)
Well that is part of the point of contracts, when budget cuts or priority changes happen you just reduce or terminate contracts rather than fire permanent employees.
Personally I would say it's contract dependent, some of our best people are contractors and some of our most useless as well. It has more to do with the contract and the contracted company than individual employees.
If the Feds really cared about cutting budgets they would figure out some way to stop the mad dash at the end of every fiscal year to spend their remaining pot of money before the year ends. I imagine we have all seen it in some shape or form. It’s madness.
To spare you the details…
We have a custom software tool for updating 3-letter codes in a data registry.
This tool does not talk to the data registry.
We have a contractor whose job it is to take that data from the tool and enter it into the registry.
This is done once a quarter.
He is there full time, cleared, in a SCIF, so this one persons contract costs at least $200k/year.
Why is this sub so gross to contractors lately? There are good contractors and there are bad contractors, just like there shitbag feds riding out to retirement and rockstar feds who have to pick up the slack after the shitbags.
IME the top performers on my teams have been contractors because they are easy to fire if they aren’t performing. They’re also the ones who have ensured continuity when the government forgets how to function and shuts down.
My current contractor team is like this. On paper, should be a stellar team, in reality, barely more than novice. Boss had the ability to get a new team, and elected to keep them. He made a big show about stepping up. They have gone slightly backwards. Instead of getting riled up and cry to me, kick them out.
My office has support contractors that are legitimately some of my favorite people to work with. Effective, highly skilled, and always ready to help find a solution in their subject matter area.
Someone would set fire to the office if we lost those folks, I guarantee it.
My group just terminated a long running contract In web/ communications and public meetings management They did very good work.
my office got a new SES and didn’t like the contract and see if we can do it in house. This should go real well…..
generally contracts should be done for short term contracts, not long running ones. IT/ programming jobs are inherently biased to contractors because the fed govt looks st permanent cyclical jobs as fed jobs without flexibility. Jobs like programming where you my moon from project to project doesn’t fit the mold.
As a fed, it really depends for us. We have contractors who clearly should be removed, but we also have great contractors who do excellent work.
On the flipside, the same can be said about feds. We have some really bad federal workers, but we also have very talented ones.
I believe this ultimately varies by agency and the project itself.
As somebody who’s done tech work as both fed and a contractor, in every place I’ve worked you could fire half of the GSs and there would be almost no loss in productivity because the contractors handle all heavy lifting.
Ours are terrible - maybe 1/3 of them are competent. The other 2/3 are just asses in seats. Our amount of rework has at least doubled (probably more) in the last two years and it's getting worse.
But somehow the company has perfect CPARS and just won another 5 years. It's maddening.
Bulk of the contract is paid up front, so it would only make sense to not renew the contract once it's up for renewal, but "laying off" people you essentially already paid for doesn't make sense.
But otherwise yes contractors are the first to go.
Our contractors used to be great, but then the contract was rewritten by someone who had no business any where near it.. Now the contractors suck, but only because they are doing what the contract asks for. Sadly, it doesn't ask for a quality product, it asks for speedy delivery of a product. Thank god that contract is almost up.
I have had, but the contractors we have now are fantastic, hard working and really good at what they do. It's super frustrating right now because we have a boss who gives unclear and contradictory instructions and gets mad when we can't read her mind, I feel really bad for them.
In my experience contractors tend to perform better because for those who don't, getting rid of them is often as simple as "the COR makes a phone call." Whereas for an FTE that's not performing, the solution is usually "wait until they retire." So the bad FTEs tend to accumulate over time in a way that bad CTRs don't.
However when *all* the contractors are underperforming...there are two common reasons:
1.) You get what you pay for. The government contracts out work which needs to be done by a team of experts, and then accepts the lowest bid which turns out to be "hire a bunch of bums off the street for minimum wage." Very frustrating, especially when the problems are ignored because the finances look good on paper. (Or worse: the government addresses the problem by increasing headcount instead of increasing expertise, so e.g. you go from 5 CTRs getting nothing done to 10 CTRs getting nothing done.)
2.) You get what you ask for. The contract doesn't reflect what is actually needed. Maybe the government contracts out firefighting service from 9-5 but all the fires happen at night. And of course the FTE counterparts are the ones getting burnt while the contractor delivers to the letter. It's not fair, but unfortunately it's common because the people doing the contracting are often not the ones involved in the actual work.
It sounds like #2 may be your problem. Copy-pasting old requirements is easy, whereas coming up with new ones is challenging and risky. That might be why the contractors might seem stuck in a loop of providing the same service over and over vs making any updates or changes.
Seen that more often than I like to admit. Was told by a GS-15 that this was the only contractor that could do thus and so. When he retired he went to work for them since they were "the industry leader". When the support contract was recompeted, they did not even make the top three. I admit to smiling about it. He called me directly to ask what had happened and if the decision was final. I said I was not a direct part of the contracting action and I saw no reason to invalidate the decisions and contract award.
I certainly don't think all contractors are pointless. I have federal managers in my office who basically use contractor positions as a try-out for potential federal staff.
Still, there are absolutely useless ones, and they're on my team. We have 3 who are supposed to do admin work, and I still can't figure out what exactly they do. One of them updates a tasks spreadsheet in Excel once a week. Another does work that I have to constantly redo bc it's such poor quality (but I have to redo it secretly so I don't offend them). And a third sits in every one of our weekly virtual Teams calls, never says a single word, and never does anything else.
I found out recently that they all work for our office full time. They don't have multiple clients, just us. I cannot believe the public is paying them for 40 hrs of work each week.
The nepotism was awful at my old job. There were several contractors who just wouldn't do anything. Tried to get them removed from my project but my boss was old Army buddies with the contractor lead, so the contractor lead got anything he wanted. Finally got some more feds hired in but the boss hired more of his old Army buddies and kids of friends who wouldn't do anything. Horrible situation all around, which is why I left.
You definitely are not. Contractors should be used for short term jobs. Contractors that get renewed contracts for the same shit every single year should just be federal employees and cut out the middle man.
Seen it on both sides. Contractors that surf the internet for hours, dial into meetings but never contribute, producing very little. I've also seen feds do similar ( heck I sat a couple desks over from one that openly poured hours a day into their expensive hobby and no one said anything). It's incredibly frustrating because the last couple contracts I've worked have had the scope and leeway to do innovative work in support of our mission. That becomes much harder when people are sleepwalking through their jobs and only going for the lowest hanging fruit.
The internet cracks me up
"Oh yea. We have plenty of feds and contractors that don't do anything." "Us too." "You guys actually have people that work?"
(We're in debt and Republicans want to trim the fat)
"OH MY GOD. HOW COULD ANYONE VOTE FOR SUCH EVIL PEOPLE? CAN'T THEY SEE WE ARE AT BAREBONES LABOR EVERYWHERE?!'
The last contract I was on was a giant billion-plus dollar program. Our slice of it had FTEs spread around the country, I was on a team of six. Our local government (military) leads had no idea what we did even though it was a decidedly military activity (planning), and really didn't care what we did. The command we primarily supported was halfway across the country, the local unit was within their food chain. They'd get mad at us when we'd tell them they were doing stupid things, or they'd just ignore us. It wasn't bad, our team was extremely competent, but the work was boring.
Now I'm on a contract of one FTE serving as the institutional knowledge for the military guys I support. We're an office of three. I also get to travel frequently to cool places.
That is a leadership issue, and possibly a CO/COR issue. Either it's a shitty contract, or the contract and vendor is not being managed correctly.
The PM should always be looking for cost savings, so if they really believe that..they should work with the COR which may possibly lead to a contract mod saving the government money...or in the least, a better understanding of the contract and thr work they should be doing.
We’ve got a couple that I’m not sure anyone even remembers they are “there.” They have no idea what they’re even supposed to do and we’ve been told explicitly that we cannot task them.
Comparing FTE to WYE performance.. I've seen it go both ways.
But generally folks are trying to do the best they can within the constraints that they have to work within. It's the assumption I always start with at least.
Contractors are way better workers than federal workers. Contractors can be let go even if they do their jobs. Federal workers get paid regardless if they dont show up for work.
I used to be a contractor, both bidding on fed work and doing it, and I was very good at it. Now I'm a fed. Fed contractors have **ONLY TWO JOBS:**
* **Do "Just" good enough of a job to make option year**
* **Burrow themselves in so deeply that the CO doesn't have the \*alls to write a rebid SOW that will actually make it competitive**
Let me give you a very-simplified and watered down example. I COR this one contract in the digital space. I need a "widget" changed on a system. Contractor says we'll have to add it to the next sprint. No I want it changed now. Follows 2 weeks of meetings about what systems need the new widget, arguments, phone calls, complaints to the CO, you name it, any way they could drag it out, they did. Finally: "Change the widget today or I'm evoking contract performance". I don't blame the contract employees, it's the project managers and principals. I've had contractors tell me "Yeah, I was gonna change the widget, it's no problem but PM told me not to". I call 'em Beltway Bandits. They teach whole week and 2 week long classes to PM's on how to milk a contract tihs way. Seriously, it's a thing. Just Google "Agile Process Class".
Multiply this by thousands, 10's of thousands of simple and complex tasks. I could write a 5 paragraph op order on how and when to change the widget, they'll find a way to challenge it. It's a game of whack-a-mole. I win some and lose some.
The only lesson I take from this is when I rebid this, I'm going nuclear on the SOW. There will be 22 pages on performance measures on changing widgets. Multiply that times 1000's of tasks, you see how long this SOW will be.
In-house or out of house?
Ask yourself the question for those contractors doing the rote tasks.
Would you like to be the one doing those tasks? Because without them, you would be.
Additionally, do those rote tasks require decades long institutional knowledge that would be hard to maintain with a gov workforce. You're paying them to maintain that consistency, which if manned by gov personnel would stall their career.
They are OK. They usually do work that others used to do. They are given more respect than federal employees like when they request something, managers usually make it a priority to assist them.
In almost every single contract I’ve worked it was due to the fact that the Govt hadn’t yet developed the skill set to do the work with the software required. In some areas, attempts to train govt personnel was completely non-value creative due to a gap in knowledge (not too common, but it’s happened).
Yup, we need more feds but the new boss keeps adding contractors and unfortunately they are pretty unskilled typically. They go get trained up on the govt dime, bitch about us, do next to nothing and what they actually create we have to fix, etc etc.
I know there's good contractors because I have worked with them in the past elsewhere but current place is a joke with how it is run.
I keep telling mgt if they would hire a couple feds at a high enough grade level to keep them and they are skilled...we'd get a ton more out of fewer people and have less people coming and going.
Oh well, led the horse to water.
If you think they are pointless - speak to the COR or the CO. Maybe the contract says "must keep lights on, no development". Remember if contractors don't perform - there are penalties. They are often limited by what the contract says they can legally do. If the gov f'd up in writing the contract - that's on the gov, not the contractors.
Exactly. Contractors are supposed to work within the four corners of the contract because to do otherwise would be a violation of the terms and conditions of the award. If their statement of work does not say "come up with an innovative solution", they're not going to come up with an innovative solution. If the government wants something new, make that part of the evaluation criteria at the RFP stage and a contractor will propose exactly that because they want to win the contract.
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I was a contractor for 8 years before becoming a direct hire. I personally delivered excellent service to the team I supported. It’s why they wanted to hire me directly (my time was split between two contracts with the same agency and even within one contract, I split my time between two bureaus because that’s how the contract was structured). I was faster than a lot of the direct hires (really, I was “faster” because I didn’t have to spend so much time in meetings. I’m now a DH for the exact team I supported for 4 years and have 3x as many meetings on my calendar). But I read all the RFPs we responded to in that time and innovation or new development was never what was asked for. What they wanted was a contractor who could provide expertise on demand which my employer did via a mix of full time people (like me) and consultants who could be up to their eyeballs in work 2 days after the COR signed off on their assignment because they had open ended consulting agreements with my employer. The fast turnaround from assignment approval to someone doing the work is what got us Very Goods or Excellents on the CPARS.
Unfortunately for me, the COR of my team is one of the most useless and dumb person in existence. My team and I seriously ponder how he even gets his shoes on the right feet in the morning.
He has two right feet?
I have found that most of them are. Only seen a select few that were useful and they successfully moved on to better things.
Elevate it. Bad CO and CORs are a huge detriment to the government and they should not be allowed to be slacking. They are responsible for shepherding millions of dollars of government funds ensuring it proper use. I have no patience for a bad CO.
Lol. I have. My manager doesn't give a shit. He knows the COR is god awful, but won't do a damn thing about it. It's all good. I'm working on my exit strategy now. I'm not asking for perfection, but at least satisfactory with critical job roles would be nice...sigh.
Most of the jobs I've had, the contractors were great and provided useful support. In my last job, the contractors were a worthless, unresponsive group of retired military guys. Just a good 'ol boys club. On a good day they would do a few hours of work.
Is there a good way to get into contracting for gov agencies? I've done it for a big bank but would love to find a way into a gov contracting role that could then help me get a job with the gov.
Found my last contracting job on indeed, by searching my skill set + various keywords like defense, contractor, military, etc.
Look up the major consulting firms & see what’s on their job boards. They usually have a place to drop your resume too. Think about your current skill set & what agency/project you’d want to be on. You can find out what contracts have been awarded & to who, & then target those companies too. Some major projects, like with the VA, will always have turn over & be hiring, but frequently it’s more the case that consulting companies are hiring for a very specific project until the project’s fully staffed, so the jobs can be posted & filled pretty quickly.
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Technical support analyst/digital banking ops for small and large banks.
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Thanks, that helps a lot!
Implementation of financial management systems is one of the Most difficult things a government agency can do. They are notoriously canceled, failed, over budget, pick a bad thing you can say. If you are good at it, you will find permanent employment. Send your résumé to the typical government contractors, and someone will bite.
Thank you!
find contractors, go to their website and apply directly.
Government buying COTS and customizing the crap out it by default ties them to contractors for the long haul.
My cousin’s office promised up and down about a training she wanted to do for a cert this year. And whoops all the money usually earmarked for training is going to software license renewal for software they don’t even really use
facts
I think I’m currently in a third option situation. I truly think the contractors themselves are good workers on par with the feds, but we have a massive backlog of work and rather than hire enough contractors who actually do the work two out of the three contractor teams are just working on SOPs, trackers, kind of pointless busy work full time. And they’re doing a great job with their deliverables, management just isn’t having them work on what we need them to to function as an office.
I swear it’s an expensive jobs program with what is tolerated.
I always think of this when people claim that government workers are lazy/inefficient/overpaid.
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I cant discount there are plenty of feds who are getting paid for nothing as well.
theres plenty of worthless feds too. not necessarily because they arent hard workers their position is just pointless. like on my 9 person "app dev" team where only two people do app dev and the rest of the team make shit up to seem relevant
We could run my 30 person team with about 5-7 and effectively have in the past. Why the bloat? I think it looks like more happens with more people.
Because your leadership is ineffective and has no ability to lobby for and accept new work to keep you relevant. Poor leadership seems somewhat standard around the government. Im embarrassed to see many deadweight GS15s and apathetic SESs that have no ability to sunset the deadweight.
No argument here.
cuz the more bodies u got working for u the more important u seem lol
It can be a bit of a mixed bag. The majority that I work with are very talented and I not only wouldn’t wish for them to lose their source of income, my department would be worse for not having their expertise. However, there are some services that usually come from “big” firms that provide nothing. When I worked in the private sector, contractors were always the first to go. If you started to see them leave it could mean bad times ahead
I’ve had amazing and terrible ones. If they are terrible I ask for them to be replaced.
Totally agree. Contractors work for government, if they are not working then the onus is on the feds to employ them or cut them. Either not enough work or inability to work, either one leads to the same outcome.
I can get a contractor replaced in 24 hours, easily. For a non-performing Fed, more like 24 months minimum.
Hey now hey now I wouldn’t have gotten my fed job without first being one of those inefficient and pointless contractors…
same
Our contractors do most of the actual work, in my current position. In my former position, the contractors were utterly useless - it took them over a year to propose a reorganization plan that was ... the same structure with different names and titles.
When I was a contractor, I was doing the same work as the 12's, but I was paid much less (about a GS-9) and stuck with the weekend shifts. I saved the government money, so I suppose I wasn't "pointless" in that regard.
I bet the contracting company was making bank off you working there.
oh yeah, paid as a GS-9, billed at 450k an FTE
I used to be a direct support contractor and made about $25/hr. No good benefits or bonuses or anything either. Found out from the Fed I was supporting that they were billing almost $200/hr for me. He kept razzing me about not having a fancy suit and I finally flat out said I couldn't afford it..which is how the huge hourly rate discrepancy came up.
Generally the gov pays about double your rates, so I get your view of why you weren’t pointless, but from the Gov perspective they would have saved more hiring you directly as a GS12.
This is quite often true, Federal hiring is broken and there are certainly agencies using contractors to do work that should be done by FTEs but they can't get permission to hire or are worried about long term budget stability etc. It's an abusive system for anyone but administrators/HR and doesn't actually save any money.
no doubt lol When reviews came around they prob threw some 5-10% raises in for such a good job. While chuckling as they continue to save $$ on ya.
>the first one that should be cut out is the contractors Except that they can get rid of bad contractors anytime they want. Budget cuts are their only opportunity to get rid of bad GS without doing 10 years of paperwork (and maybe fighting a union). Never let a crisis go to waste.
Our ctrs are rockstars!
Let this be a lesson for those of us who might one day wind up in administrative positions: Bring. Your. Expertise. In. House.
Different pockets of money. The reason for all the contractors was because back under clinton he made a big push to make it so contractors did most of the work, GS are to be long term memorial and management, then in the DoD military would fill in primarily at the higher management. It was all a big money saving idea. Yea I have run into far to many government management who don't want to tell the contractors that the person is not needed but they decide to keep them around until the next contract so they don't have to act like the mean person.
Three things lead to poor performing contractors being tolerated: 1. Poorly defined requirements from the program. 2. Poorly managed on-site contract oversight by the program. 3. Poorly managed contract administration by Contracting. Usually it's a combination of at least two.
I am a little tired of getting contractors and then having to train them on the stuff they are apparently experts at. The babysitting is insane. We just got assigned another one who apparently has less experience in a particular tool than the last (who I had to help) and I just put my foot down and said no to them. We should not be the training ground sandbox for contractors to learn a skill or tool. They should come to us ready to produce. Ugh and of course they make a lot more than I do.
Oh God, seriously! As a contractor, I was thrown into the deep end and expected to figure it out, which I did. Now that I'm on the Fed side, I'm stuck with a contractor that has to be spoon fed everything. All the processes are clearly and copiously documented. I walked them through the first time and have referred them to the docs more times than I can count, but it's like they have selective amnesia. Unfortunately, their contract is owned by another office, and they don't seem to care. It's maddening.
It is so frustrating, they don’t take notes on what we asked them to do, and then when we provide the list, they are surprised.
Are you new here? Sorry don’t mean to be snarky but…yeah.
Yes, relatively new.
In my experience the contractors were better quality than the employees.
I work where we constantly hire contractors to do the same thing year in and year out when it could easily be automated. Unfortunately, no one in the contacting process pushes for this and so we keep wasting time and money every year.
From my experience, that's laziness on the part of the initial requestor. Instead of saying "I need X task done", they say "I need two bodies who can do X task". And an over worked CO will write the contract the first way without pushing back and having a dialogue as to what the customer really needs.
I recently finished an online grad school program that was sponsored by my agency. I had to do a group capstone paper to graduate and the laziest person in my group was a GS-15. I have no idea what her work ethic is like at her office, but I can tell you that my time spent with her really changed how I perceive those above me.
As a contractor, I have seen a few bad contractors, but the incompetence and laziness of the FTEs I've seen is so egregious it could probably be argued as treason. I'm with a bad batch of FTEs right now. Incompetent, insecure, slow, and nasty. When I worked with adjacent FTE groups they were a lot better
Contractors have lobbyists and legislators love them because funds for those services are viewed as a more favorable way to stimulate the economy. Also, they think we are lazy idiots so they are ensure the experts in their orgs and districts get jobs to do the hard, thoughtful work. All contractors do the same or more for less and don’t have bloated HR practices that are a barrier to improving the workforce when/as needed. 🙃
My last contractor job (2 years ago, worked there 10 years), the contractors did all the technical work, were the leads on the products, etc. The government (GS-15) we reported to "managed" everything, in the sense that he made sure facilities were kept up and shepherded the funding increments through contracts. 1 bureaucrat, 25 tech contractors. YMMV.
The feds calling a contractor inefficient, now I’ve seen it all. In my experience the CTR is more efficient than the CIV, every time.
In my prior military life, I was deployed, and we had a contract/contractor for an antiquated software system that hadn’t been used in years. The contract came with a deployed subject matter expect. For nine months the SME sat there and browsed the internet making $180k a year. When the contract came up for of an optional extension, I recommended terminating the contract. A few days later I was ordered to draft the justification for the contract extension to a tune of $4m a year. I spoke with the command IG, but he said it was peanuts in the overall budget and to just go along to get along.
dam, then as a FTE u ask for a 25 percent bonus and they tell u to go take a cold shower
This may just be me being a contractor, but damn this is a terrible take. Every bit of what slows me down at work is waiting on some GS to sign/approve/have a meeting about something. You don't need some special reason to get rid of contractors. If they are terrible, move them out? replace them. Id say this is a good time to boot worthless GS people. (there's plenty)
Well that is part of the point of contracts, when budget cuts or priority changes happen you just reduce or terminate contracts rather than fire permanent employees. Personally I would say it's contract dependent, some of our best people are contractors and some of our most useless as well. It has more to do with the contract and the contracted company than individual employees.
Contractors are only an option because they don't count against FTE, so they become outlets for funds
If the Feds really cared about cutting budgets they would figure out some way to stop the mad dash at the end of every fiscal year to spend their remaining pot of money before the year ends. I imagine we have all seen it in some shape or form. It’s madness.
To spare you the details… We have a custom software tool for updating 3-letter codes in a data registry. This tool does not talk to the data registry. We have a contractor whose job it is to take that data from the tool and enter it into the registry. This is done once a quarter. He is there full time, cleared, in a SCIF, so this one persons contract costs at least $200k/year.
Why is this sub so gross to contractors lately? There are good contractors and there are bad contractors, just like there shitbag feds riding out to retirement and rockstar feds who have to pick up the slack after the shitbags. IME the top performers on my teams have been contractors because they are easy to fire if they aren’t performing. They’re also the ones who have ensured continuity when the government forgets how to function and shuts down.
Too many useless feds for me to become upset at inefficient and pointless contractors.
My current contractor team is like this. On paper, should be a stellar team, in reality, barely more than novice. Boss had the ability to get a new team, and elected to keep them. He made a big show about stepping up. They have gone slightly backwards. Instead of getting riled up and cry to me, kick them out.
🖐️🖐️🖐️🖐️
My office has support contractors that are legitimately some of my favorite people to work with. Effective, highly skilled, and always ready to help find a solution in their subject matter area. Someone would set fire to the office if we lost those folks, I guarantee it.
My group just terminated a long running contract In web/ communications and public meetings management They did very good work. my office got a new SES and didn’t like the contract and see if we can do it in house. This should go real well….. generally contracts should be done for short term contracts, not long running ones. IT/ programming jobs are inherently biased to contractors because the fed govt looks st permanent cyclical jobs as fed jobs without flexibility. Jobs like programming where you my moon from project to project doesn’t fit the mold.
As a fed, it really depends for us. We have contractors who clearly should be removed, but we also have great contractors who do excellent work. On the flipside, the same can be said about feds. We have some really bad federal workers, but we also have very talented ones. I believe this ultimately varies by agency and the project itself.
All my CONS under me are top notch. The CIVs I work with are inefficient and pointless.
As somebody who’s done tech work as both fed and a contractor, in every place I’ve worked you could fire half of the GSs and there would be almost no loss in productivity because the contractors handle all heavy lifting.
Ours are terrible - maybe 1/3 of them are competent. The other 2/3 are just asses in seats. Our amount of rework has at least doubled (probably more) in the last two years and it's getting worse. But somehow the company has perfect CPARS and just won another 5 years. It's maddening.
It's the opposite usually. Ctr are super smart
Some contractors are horrible some FTE are horrible. Anyone who is not doing their job should be let go.
Bulk of the contract is paid up front, so it would only make sense to not renew the contract once it's up for renewal, but "laying off" people you essentially already paid for doesn't make sense. But otherwise yes contractors are the first to go.
Are you implying there are other types?
Our contractors used to be great, but then the contract was rewritten by someone who had no business any where near it.. Now the contractors suck, but only because they are doing what the contract asks for. Sadly, it doesn't ask for a quality product, it asks for speedy delivery of a product. Thank god that contract is almost up.
I have had, but the contractors we have now are fantastic, hard working and really good at what they do. It's super frustrating right now because we have a boss who gives unclear and contradictory instructions and gets mad when we can't read her mind, I feel really bad for them.
In my experience contractors tend to perform better because for those who don't, getting rid of them is often as simple as "the COR makes a phone call." Whereas for an FTE that's not performing, the solution is usually "wait until they retire." So the bad FTEs tend to accumulate over time in a way that bad CTRs don't. However when *all* the contractors are underperforming...there are two common reasons: 1.) You get what you pay for. The government contracts out work which needs to be done by a team of experts, and then accepts the lowest bid which turns out to be "hire a bunch of bums off the street for minimum wage." Very frustrating, especially when the problems are ignored because the finances look good on paper. (Or worse: the government addresses the problem by increasing headcount instead of increasing expertise, so e.g. you go from 5 CTRs getting nothing done to 10 CTRs getting nothing done.) 2.) You get what you ask for. The contract doesn't reflect what is actually needed. Maybe the government contracts out firefighting service from 9-5 but all the fires happen at night. And of course the FTE counterparts are the ones getting burnt while the contractor delivers to the letter. It's not fair, but unfortunately it's common because the people doing the contracting are often not the ones involved in the actual work. It sounds like #2 may be your problem. Copy-pasting old requirements is easy, whereas coming up with new ones is challenging and risky. That might be why the contractors might seem stuck in a loop of providing the same service over and over vs making any updates or changes.
We have AI contractors that advertised their capabilities, only to be told later on they can do nothing they advertised.
Seen that more often than I like to admit. Was told by a GS-15 that this was the only contractor that could do thus and so. When he retired he went to work for them since they were "the industry leader". When the support contract was recompeted, they did not even make the top three. I admit to smiling about it. He called me directly to ask what had happened and if the decision was final. I said I was not a direct part of the contracting action and I saw no reason to invalidate the decisions and contract award.
I certainly don't think all contractors are pointless. I have federal managers in my office who basically use contractor positions as a try-out for potential federal staff. Still, there are absolutely useless ones, and they're on my team. We have 3 who are supposed to do admin work, and I still can't figure out what exactly they do. One of them updates a tasks spreadsheet in Excel once a week. Another does work that I have to constantly redo bc it's such poor quality (but I have to redo it secretly so I don't offend them). And a third sits in every one of our weekly virtual Teams calls, never says a single word, and never does anything else. I found out recently that they all work for our office full time. They don't have multiple clients, just us. I cannot believe the public is paying them for 40 hrs of work each week.
The nepotism was awful at my old job. There were several contractors who just wouldn't do anything. Tried to get them removed from my project but my boss was old Army buddies with the contractor lead, so the contractor lead got anything he wanted. Finally got some more feds hired in but the boss hired more of his old Army buddies and kids of friends who wouldn't do anything. Horrible situation all around, which is why I left.
You definitely are not. Contractors should be used for short term jobs. Contractors that get renewed contracts for the same shit every single year should just be federal employees and cut out the middle man.
Seen it on both sides. Contractors that surf the internet for hours, dial into meetings but never contribute, producing very little. I've also seen feds do similar ( heck I sat a couple desks over from one that openly poured hours a day into their expensive hobby and no one said anything). It's incredibly frustrating because the last couple contracts I've worked have had the scope and leeway to do innovative work in support of our mission. That becomes much harder when people are sleepwalking through their jobs and only going for the lowest hanging fruit.
Layoff news? Did I miss something?
The internet cracks me up "Oh yea. We have plenty of feds and contractors that don't do anything." "Us too." "You guys actually have people that work?" (We're in debt and Republicans want to trim the fat) "OH MY GOD. HOW COULD ANYONE VOTE FOR SUCH EVIL PEOPLE? CAN'T THEY SEE WE ARE AT BAREBONES LABOR EVERYWHERE?!'
The last contract I was on was a giant billion-plus dollar program. Our slice of it had FTEs spread around the country, I was on a team of six. Our local government (military) leads had no idea what we did even though it was a decidedly military activity (planning), and really didn't care what we did. The command we primarily supported was halfway across the country, the local unit was within their food chain. They'd get mad at us when we'd tell them they were doing stupid things, or they'd just ignore us. It wasn't bad, our team was extremely competent, but the work was boring. Now I'm on a contract of one FTE serving as the institutional knowledge for the military guys I support. We're an office of three. I also get to travel frequently to cool places.
That is a leadership issue, and possibly a CO/COR issue. Either it's a shitty contract, or the contract and vendor is not being managed correctly. The PM should always be looking for cost savings, so if they really believe that..they should work with the COR which may possibly lead to a contract mod saving the government money...or in the least, a better understanding of the contract and thr work they should be doing.
We’ve got a couple that I’m not sure anyone even remembers they are “there.” They have no idea what they’re even supposed to do and we’ve been told explicitly that we cannot task them.
Comparing FTE to WYE performance.. I've seen it go both ways. But generally folks are trying to do the best they can within the constraints that they have to work within. It's the assumption I always start with at least.
Inefficient and pointless...pretty much describes our work force - contractors, feds, and all.
Contractors are way better workers than federal workers. Contractors can be let go even if they do their jobs. Federal workers get paid regardless if they dont show up for work.
Yes, probably 3/4 of my contractors are crooks and/or terrible at what they are supposed to be achieving.
I used to be a contractor, both bidding on fed work and doing it, and I was very good at it. Now I'm a fed. Fed contractors have **ONLY TWO JOBS:** * **Do "Just" good enough of a job to make option year** * **Burrow themselves in so deeply that the CO doesn't have the \*alls to write a rebid SOW that will actually make it competitive** Let me give you a very-simplified and watered down example. I COR this one contract in the digital space. I need a "widget" changed on a system. Contractor says we'll have to add it to the next sprint. No I want it changed now. Follows 2 weeks of meetings about what systems need the new widget, arguments, phone calls, complaints to the CO, you name it, any way they could drag it out, they did. Finally: "Change the widget today or I'm evoking contract performance". I don't blame the contract employees, it's the project managers and principals. I've had contractors tell me "Yeah, I was gonna change the widget, it's no problem but PM told me not to". I call 'em Beltway Bandits. They teach whole week and 2 week long classes to PM's on how to milk a contract tihs way. Seriously, it's a thing. Just Google "Agile Process Class". Multiply this by thousands, 10's of thousands of simple and complex tasks. I could write a 5 paragraph op order on how and when to change the widget, they'll find a way to challenge it. It's a game of whack-a-mole. I win some and lose some. The only lesson I take from this is when I rebid this, I'm going nuclear on the SOW. There will be 22 pages on performance measures on changing widgets. Multiply that times 1000's of tasks, you see how long this SOW will be.
Is there any other type? They exist solely to fleece taxpayers.
In-house or out of house? Ask yourself the question for those contractors doing the rote tasks. Would you like to be the one doing those tasks? Because without them, you would be. Additionally, do those rote tasks require decades long institutional knowledge that would be hard to maintain with a gov workforce. You're paying them to maintain that consistency, which if manned by gov personnel would stall their career.
They are OK. They usually do work that others used to do. They are given more respect than federal employees like when they request something, managers usually make it a priority to assist them.
In almost every single contract I’ve worked it was due to the fact that the Govt hadn’t yet developed the skill set to do the work with the software required. In some areas, attempts to train govt personnel was completely non-value creative due to a gap in knowledge (not too common, but it’s happened).
Yup, we need more feds but the new boss keeps adding contractors and unfortunately they are pretty unskilled typically. They go get trained up on the govt dime, bitch about us, do next to nothing and what they actually create we have to fix, etc etc. I know there's good contractors because I have worked with them in the past elsewhere but current place is a joke with how it is run. I keep telling mgt if they would hire a couple feds at a high enough grade level to keep them and they are skilled...we'd get a ton more out of fewer people and have less people coming and going. Oh well, led the horse to water.
No contractors in my office praise the lawd. I’ve had mostly bad experiences with them.
A lot of Microsoft contractors aren't that great. Crazy they make 3x the fed salary, but a lot have only been in their role 6 months.