economics

Firing Kathleen Sebelius

Everyone involved in the disastrous rollout of the disastrous Obamacare website has been fired or has had something horribly bad happen to their careers, from Human Health and Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius downwards. It turns out that people working for the government, like people with tenure, can be punished by the left, though not by the right.

If ever the right should try to fire people, see my post on how to fire big bird.

The website was fixed by “the tech surge” – fixed by white males organized in teams that showed very little interest in providing a supportive environment for women and people of color. The screw up was primarily female. Being PC, they had women work on a website and of course the website did not work. Men had to come in and take over. 

But the stupid girlie team had plenty of white males. Standard operating procedure in software engineering is that white males do the actual work for team woman, much as Marie Curie got her bright idea when she was with her famous scientist husband, who subsequently hired a male to the actual work of implementing Marie Curie’s bright idea.

This, however, only works if you hire on the basis of quotas – the smartest x% of males, the smartest 2x% of females. But if x is a rather small number it then becomes obvious that every person hired to fulfill the quota is dumber than every person hired on his merits.

This, of course, is a hostile work environment. So you don’t hire the smartest x% of males. You hire males that fit in, which is to say, stupid males. And then, unfortunately, you cannot build a website.

But there is something odd about this account of events. Government work is enormously rewarded, and Obama spent a stupendously large sum on the website, ridiculously large. Should not the very smartest white males have somehow snuck in when people’s backs are turned? Don’t the smart people wind up getting all the cherries?

Evidently the smart people do not wind up getting all the cherries.

In any society, the normal and natural outcome is that the best people wind up ruling – though not necessarily in the interests of that society. They may wind up doing a very good job of stealing anything not nailed down and setting fire to anything that they cannot pry up, the typical dark age government that has been the norm throughout most of human history, but chances are they will be very good at stealing and lighting fires. There is a strong correlation between intelligence and reacting fast to the movement of your opponent’s sword, and even better correlation between intelligence and reacting fast with the best sword move.

We, however, are seeing government by people of very ordinary intelligence, which requires vigorous, active, and effective filtering to keep the smartest people out, which filtration starts in our most prestigious universities.

The original World Bank writers called a run a run. Their replacements called a run “negative feedback loop” because they try to scatter as many erudite phrases in their writings as the original writers were apt to do – but, like Mrs Malaprop, scatter the wrong erudite phrases in the wrong places. It is obvious that Mrs Malaprop is imitating people who are several standard deviations smarter than she is – and today’s World Bank writers are similarly imitating yesterday’s World Bank writers.

12 comments Firing Kathleen Sebelius

Elric of Melniboné says:

As a drunken black man walking down the middle of a street yelled recently in my hometown:

“White people! White people! Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo!”

Art says:

“The website was fixed by “the tech surge” – fixed by white males organized in teams that showed very little interest in providing a supportive environment for women and people of color. The screw up was primarily female.”

I am curious how you know that.

jim says:

I cannot give you links and citations, but when they were interviewing the failed team, the team leader was usually a woman, and often a colored woman, whereas when they interviewed the tech surge, they made snarky remarks about whiteness and maleness, but, more importantly, the absence of information – that the government did not want the tech surge interviewed.

Art says:

The fact that technical teams were represented by women does not mean that women did the technical work or made engineering decisions.
In my experience in successful technical companies or IT departments women often hold administrative positions.
Talented engineers rarely find this line of work interesting. But women who hold engineering degrees but don’t have the talent often make a good fit, and they tend to do that work well, al long as for technical decisions they rely on the opinions of engineers – which they usually do.

On the other hand female administrators often do not have the balls or the smarts to communicate political problems to engineers. Such problems can often be addressed with technical workarounds but in order to offer a solution engineers must understand the problem.
Considering the political nature of that project this may have been a significant factor.

peppermint says:

yes, they hire their quota of diversity, then try to put it where it does minimal damage. One female game designer was going to make a popular character from the Mass Effect series into a tranny in the third installment; it never happened but a different character was made gay.

At least she wasn’t writing shaders that take too long to run, or glitchy map triggers.

[…] Firing Kathleen Sebelius « Jim’s Blog […]

Foseti says:

“Everyone involved in the disastrous rollout of the disastrous Obamacare website has been fired or has had something horribly bad happen to their careers, from Human Health and Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius downwards.”

What?

Who else besides Sebelius (who is only part of the temporary government and would have lost her job in 2016 at the latest anyway) was fired?

In a pinch, I’d probably have to admit that Sebelius had more to do with the development of the Obamacare websites that you or I did, but not much more. Many of the remaining almost 80,000 permanent employees of HHS undoubtedly did have a lot to do with the development of the sites, and I can’t find any indication that any of them have been fired.

The only thing that seems to have happened is that some additional contractors were hired to help with the development.

If that’s your definition of “firing” people, it’s a very odd one.

jim says:

CGI got laid off, then un laid off, then laid off again. Their successor, Accenture, appears to not be on the job any more, but they have not been fired and have a lucrative contract. The tech surge is basically men from Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Alas, none of these are permanent government, as you say, no one in the truly permanent government got laid off, but CGI is quasi governmental – normally any screw up they do just results in them being paid more money to fix it.

It turns out that people working for the government, like people with tenure, can be punished by the left, though not by the right.

They can also be punished by changing circumstances unrelated to ideology. When a President loses reelection, his cabinet generally lose their jobs.

But right-wing punishment is categorically unacceptable.

Michael says:

You don’t really need a reason why a large multi-year project came in late and over budget. Especially when it’s a software project. That’s a normal planning fallacy outcome. If a multi-year software project comes in on time and within budget, that’s the weird thing that needs explaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

jim says:

It should not have been a large multi year project.

[…] If your state is based on egalitarian principles, it quickly becomes obsessed with the idea of “meritocracy” or fairness of opportunity, inevitably translated into any person with enough ability can get to any position. The problem with this is how it assesses ability, which is usually through tests limited to a specific discipline and application of known techniques. Equality-based societies find it troubling to assess people based on general abilities, such as general intelligence or moral character, and prefer to narrow the field as much as possible. This creates a robotic culture based on reproduction of past successes. In education, this translates to a memorization-based regime which emphasizes having the right number of details rather than a big picture view that is flexible, realistic and correct; in the workplace, this translates into statistics which cover “satisfaction” instead of measuring how all of an employee’s acts worked toward overall quality. In this system, the intelligent are systematically excluded in favor of the not-stupid but not-smart, and the smart people do not wind up getting all the cherries: […]

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