I am sure the attempts of hiring for government jobs will go well, after all the indiscriminate firings experienced by many government agencies thanks to the DOGE and company.
“Yes, it’s true 95% of the forests in CA are prone to wildfire and many have recently burnt, but trust me my house in the forest is safe, it isn’t in a forest that has burned yet!!! Would you like to buy my house?”
So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?
One of the biggest problems with ATC hiring is that location assignments happen after trainees pass the academy. A lot of the academy graduates quit when they get an assignment they don't like. It's not like the military where they can force people. The trainee pay also sucks so the prospect of getting sent somewhere undesirable and then barely being able to afford it just isn't attractive. If they would hire based on location like they used to graduates wouldn't quit as often.
The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
> The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this.
It was even worse than that. What they actually did was write up a phony “personality test” and distribute the answer key to applicants who were members of preferred racial organizations.
In the actual OIG report, it seemed the person who gave "answers" to the test didn't actually have the behavioral test or the answer key.
He stated he stressed things like answering questions like an air traffic control "and we’re alpha personalities, we’re dominating, we don’t take no for an answer." He also mentions that he got calls, from multiple people, saying they failed the behavioral test.
So it seems that while he did coach answers, they weren't the literal test answers, but rather advice one could have gotten from public sources with enough research or presumably, talking to some FAA air traffic controllers.
In the end, the report stated the findings in the investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.
OIGs are structured to be independent specifically to avoid the "investigating yourself" problem. There also doesn't seem to be much evidence the person who shared information about the test was acting at the direction of the FAA, rather than as a rogue employee. That would certainly be a key factor in the lawsuit, so it will be telling whether it comes out.
>OIGs are structured to be independent specifically to avoid the "investigating yourself" problem.
You ever worked in an organization that had an OIG and met the folks that work there? They wear the same uniform you do, and their behavior betrays that fact.
I do have some experience, and while I certainly won't argue they're perfect, my observation has been that they're more than capable of delivering conclusions that reflect negatively on an organization. Dismissing their conclusions out-of-hand in favor of an alternative theory with no evidence feels like just believing what you want to believe.
>Dismissing their conclusions out-of-hand in favor of an alternative theory with no evidence feels like just believing what you want to believe.
Of course. I've also seen them first-hand nearly ruin multiple careers and marriages over allegations that were easily disproven at the onset of the investigation (Person wasn't even on base when incident allegedly occurred in this case).
By the time the investigations had cleared the accused of wrongdoing they were already passed up for a promotion and nearly ready to retire after 4 years of needless investigation. Part of the 'punishment' is the investigation itself. In my experience OIGs are political beasts because they're made of up humans which are inherently tribal/political.
I was saying nothing to the veracity of alternative theory.
Isn't this the exact opposite point of your previous comment, and consistent with what the parent comment is saying? If they're willing to ruin careers over incorrect allegations then certainly they are willing to investigate true problems.
Most of the job is exceptionally routine to the point of being boring. In busier airspaces the most common stress is just associated with maintaining timing. Ironically the ground controllers face more of this problem than anyone. The further you get from the airport and it's class B airspace the easier it all gets.
Until an emergency or a conflict suddenly occurs. There's often very little you can do here other than quickly and clearly provide the necessary information and instructions to aid pilots in averting the disaster. The pilot is in full control during emergencies and you're simply there to give them anything they need. In a severe emergency and in an ATC center they're going to dedicate you to the emergency and bring another controller on to manage other planes in that airspace.
As the technology became available to give planes the ability to see and avoid each other with Traffic Advisories and automated Conflict Resolutions we made it mandatory equipment for passenger transports. We made it mandatory for pilots to obey this system with _higher priority_ than any prior or new instructions from ATC.
So you want people who think ahead, constantly prepare for conflicts, and have a reliable level of vigilance. So when the emergency happens they're situationally well prepared and capable of managing all available resources that their stress levels barely increase. A bad weather day with lots of cancelled flights and closed airports should be the highest stress factor they face in their careers.
The actual, as another poster provided, was a racist hiring procedure hidden in a test and apparently designed to rug-pull all the trainees paying their own way in training.
Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy.
It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from.
Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?
"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring.
I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...)
The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
> I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well.
I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences.
But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs.
There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize?
I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job...
While you have a point, we can't just ignore the fact that white people have systemic advantages simply because they're white. White people have always had "DEI" or whatever you want to call it. If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone:
This is a thread about a system that intentionally and explicitly advantaged one race over another. To then claim that white people have a systemic advantage seems absurd and at best counter factual.
It is counter to the facts in the thread which are systemic and documented. Your subjective feelings and perception do not necessarily correspond to reality as documented or experienced by others. For the individual their perception is their reality so there is no advantage in arguing against it. If your belief system makes you feel better that is all well and good, but it doesn't give you the right to impose it on others. Your shahada is not shared by everyone else.
It's counter to this specific thread. It's not counter to the world at large or, as you say, "reality".
Critical race theory is a real area of study and there are multiple studies backing this up. The systemic advantage white people face is so painfully real and obvious that, if you deny it, you are delusional.
> Your shahada is not shared by everyone else.
It's not "shahada", it's science. Just because it makes you feel slightly uncomfortable doesn't mean it's not real. I encourage you to find a box of tissues, and get over it.
You can call it "science" but your beliefs have more in common with quasi religious articles of faith. CRT is an area of study no different than theology. Aggressively proselytizing your religion is not as effective as you think, see the jehovahs witnesses. Lots of people feel their god is real and think non adherents are delusional, some even try to prove their god is real with "science".
Have you done any research into it? Or, because it makes you uncomfortable, you just write it off as a religion and ignore it?
A lot of people work backwards. They don't like the conclusions drawn by CRT and social studies so they work backwards and conclude that it's based on things that aren't real. But these areas of studies work forwards. Meaning, they identify obvious, real, and undeniable racial systems, such as redlining, and then study the long-term effects of that.
If you think something like, say, preventing black Americans from owning property, has no long-term effects on the demographic then you've probably just never thought about it. This isn't a TV show, this isn't a picture perfect depiction of a country. Our institutions are old, and things don't just - poof - get fixed. Integration was messy, and it took decades. Reconstruction wasn't linear, it progressed and then regressed. Segregation never disappeared - to this day, most cities are segregated. To just conclude "well that doesn't matter", based on zero research or understanding, is intellectually lazy.
Of course, if you do start to do research into it, congratulations, you have re-discovered the discipline of CRT. Because that's all it is. So, you have no choice but to stay ignorant, because otherwise you threaten your entire belief system. And we can't have that, can we?
I think there might be a bit of crosstalk here. For background I largely agree with you. There was a powerful clip during the George Floyd protests where a woman passionately explained that it was a game of Monopoly where, when blacks actually did get money, whites burned Tulsa to the ground.
With that out of the way, let me go back to this:
> If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
This is where we have the difference of "base rate" vs "lived experience". My example is gender as opposed to race but it generalizes: I have an expensive and difficult hobby that is largely male-dominated. As such there are various scholarships and mentor groups for women. As I open my pockets and overcome challenges, seeing these posters around telling me that if I were a woman, I would have money and mentorship laid at my feet, it is not difficult for me to see why the rhetoric of privilege doesn't land easily.
Going back to race, at my employer there are various employee groups for LGBTQ, Connected Black Professionals, Asian Heritage, and so on. How privileged does a regular white guy without any particular connections feel? (Assume he then goes home and tries to help his high-achieving white teenage son strategize on college applications)
To reiterate, I am not disagreeing with the underlying "stacked deck", but I also don't blame those for whom it doesn't land, because at the very least: the marketing sucks
See also: the blue-collar worker who barely graduated high school and worked in a factory before we shipped it off to China, without which the community has become poor and run-down and ravaged by drug addiction. How privileged do you think he feels? (Is it any wonder he voted for who he did?)
Nothing I say could ever convince you otherwise because it is your deeply held belief and system of faith. It provides you a community of others that share your beliefs and practices as well as opportunities for religious experiences.
Just don't proselytize, the rest of us find it as annoying as the jehovash witnesses.
Your article basically says auto dealers are racist but federal contractors and "profitable companies" are generally more comparable. The solution would be to enforce racist regulations against the auto dealer, not falsely generalize the problem and enforce a solution. Secondly, there are fields of academia that make it a point to show racism exists and to uncover racism, so publications like this are as fraught with conflicts of interest as a cigarette company researcher investigating the benefits of nicotine. Pointing the finger at white people is also problematic, it's a racial supply/demand, and generally at competitive fields like medicine or programming, competitive schools, one sees a proportional oversaturation of asians (per capita) versus whites. Shall we say employers are favoring asians and talk about the asian menace, as we do the white menace? If particular races, often tagging a cultural history, are associated with different cultural preferences for lifestyle or career, I would simply say "so what?" If the goal is to homogenize equal participation from all demographics groups to all vocations, to me that seems silly and runs against human nature, it can be expected to work as well as the communist efforts of societal homogenization we saw in the 20th century. Yes, we need to kick the tires and convince ourselves that all are afforded somewhat fair opportunities, but seeing race as a confounder here or there, and immediately leaping to systematic racism as the purported mechanism - that's just poor science.
I'm not "pointing the finger" at anyone. Part of the problem with pointing out systemic racism and unconscious bias is that white folk are very fragile. They get uncomfortable when you point out very obvious deductions - like hundreds of years of racial injustice not magically disappearing in the late 60s.
I'm not saying that other racism doesn't exist. But I am saying that complaints from white people on account of their whiteness is pathetic at best and willfully ignorant at worst. At the end of the day, white people, which includes me, are advantaged in virtually all areas of modern society.
It would be easy to say that I got where I am based purely on my own skill and intellect. It would also not be true. The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
Humans are racist because humans are tribal. Yes, we should work on improving as a society, but don't be surprised that making broad pejorative racial statements doesn't do it.
This is a far better argument:
> The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
I would also add to that, "the values, attention, nutrition, and opportunities provided by my parents in my formative years"
> > The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
Right, this is a very good argument. That's the argument behind CRT, lol.
What you're missing is that what I described is tangibly and undeniably intertwined with race. Most of the US is still segregated. Why do you think I mentioned zip codes? For fun? Do you truly believe that has nothing to do with race or demographics? Even you could not be so ignorant.
While it's easy and fun to believe race is just something that exists outside of our world, it's just not true. It's linked with crime, with homelessness, with drug use, with school funding, with opportunities, with healthcare outcomes, with pedestrian deaths, with access to medicine, with access to DMVs, with access to voting, and on and on. And those are all tangible.
You can say that I got where I was based not on my race, but rather on my zipcode. Sure. But my zipcode is directly associated with race, so in reality, you agree with me.
I think I'm going to head out for now, but give me a holler when this strategy brings someone over to your point of view
> so in reality, you agree with me
Just so! You aren't actually arguing with what I said, which was basically, "I don't think your framing of this is effective", which is what I meant by "this is a far better argument"
"The difference between cannibals and liberals is that cannibals eat only their enemies" - LBJ
Donald Trump is, indeed, personally signing the executive orders instructing the US government to do a lot of questionable things. Obama, by contrast, did not sign an executive order directing the FAA to hire unqualified air traffic controllers.
Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
Of course he didn't sign an executive order saying to hire unqualified controllers. But guess what executive order he did sign: promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workplace. This feels like a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid criticizing Obama.
This is a great post that lays it out. I suggest putting tribal politics aside and reading it, you can see in black and white that the FAA, under Obama, consciously weighed diversity over performance, and royally screwed the ATC hiring pipeline. "Pobody's nerfect"
Eh. The lawsuit is still ongoing (for 9 years now!). The article summarizes the plaintiffs' argument and conjecture as if it was a finding of fact which is a bit disingenuous.
I spent a bit more time going down the rabbit hole of the article footnotes, but I need to take a step back, as my time management on this has been poor
There's a wave of ATC retirements now because they were all hired at the same time when Reagan fired the ATCs. Bad policy can have long lasting effects.
Another problem you haven't mentioned is the level of union control in the industry. Which is great as far as protecting jobs and salaries for existing controllers but it makes getting a desirable position difficult for a new graduate. From your comment it sounds like they just get dumped with the least desirable location until they've climbed high enough up the totem pole to get a good job.
U.S. ATC here. I don't think you know what you're talking about: the union is doing nothing for our salaries. The union has no say on where new graduates get placed.
Our union is a joke. They send emails saying they're "monitoring the situation" instead of talking with the media stating our case for better working conditions.
Our salaries have not kept up with the industry. Do not use this to try to push an anti-union agenda.
Most ATCs spend their whole career at one or two towers. 'Desireable' in the case of graduates is usually wherever they or their family was living when they got hired. The union doesn't have any say in tower assignment.
>> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
These generally are not positions that people compete for across the nation. Once in a particular airspace, controllers will generally stay in that airspace. An outsider unfamiliar with an airspace would be at significant disadvantage to any local.
> >> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.
Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
I really want to like unions. They make all the sense in the world in principle. But in practice they always seem to end up centered around this "pay your dues" climb the ladder bullshit.
In the United States 100 years ago, there was a real political concern about the spread of socialist revolution, with labor unions in the center of that. There was a premeditated action through politics and business in the USA to remove socialist union leadership, and build strong hierarchical management that was politically predictable. Many of the eager candidates for this kind of structure were Mafia-connected. When actual organized crime had the opportunity, multiple family fortunes were built on control of Unions. This is very well documented but the language that is used will vary by source.
Essentially the USA made a political choice to negotiate with and on occasion criminally prosecute Mafia-related leadership in national labor unions, instead of "allowing" the uncertainty of committed socialist labor leaders.
While the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
I haven't been able to find it since but at one point I came across a quote saying that NextGen was the "greatest failure in the history of organized labor." Or something to that effect. A bit of an overstatement but I have to admit I found the parts I could see circa 2010 ridiculous.
Based on what I read earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on AI that Musk recently purchased. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though. I also hope whatever it is, it doesn't make the ATC system dependent on some proprietary monopoly.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
The US Government is not interested in hiring outside of law enforcement so they won't be able to find people to fill positions outside of law enforcement.
Maybe federal government which hasn’t grown much (they contract everything). State and especially local government employment has been growing consistently for years, or growing very fast if you count education
ATC should probably be private like it is in Canada, where it functions very well, and also better lines up with how the federal gov operates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
A lot of services are provided by contractors, including a few hundred control towers, the weather briefing system, the vast majority of flight and medical examiners, etc.
I'm not sure how "we want ultra-high non-woke pure-meritocracy hiring standards and we'll aggressively filter out anyone who even smells like they won't pass those standards" is compatible with "we need butts in seats doing this work immediately." I also am not at all surprised that people do not want to begin working for a government which has made it clear it despises all of its workers. You really can't have it both ways. (And plenty of perfectly capable/qualified people, myself included, read all this "anti-DEI" stuff exactly the same way that the anti-DEI people read DEI itself, as a means of preselecting who is entitled to compete for jobs.)
The solution is not to "de-wokify" anything - nor is it to "wokify" anything. All of that stuff is a sideshow. The solution would be to offer massive incentives in order to get highly competent people to see ATC as a good career choice. That means big salaries, very flexible training timelines, and in general, willingness to spend a lot of money on the program to make it attractive. ATC is an intense job being done by people who are under a lot of strain. It doesn't sound appealing to most. That would need to change.
Can any controller or person who otherwise works in this area comment on the tracingwoodgrains blog post? I always see it linked on HN, but never mentioned anywhere else. Seems like there would be a huge scandal with lot of commentary and links if it were true.
U.S. ATC here: opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect that of the FAA. But to be safe: no comment. Otherwise, if I knew something was untrue, I could say that.
"The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old."
this is okay for the post office or DMV, but probably not as okay for air traffic control infrastructure.
FAA, but not ATCs. I think a lot of the FAA folks were also offered their jobs back, like with other agencies. As a consequence of court decisions and "oh shit, those are actually important jobs".
Would tend to make recruitment more difficult, though. "Yeah, we just had a bunch of people fired by some weird Twitter idiot, but you should totally train for years to come work for us, that couldn't possibly go wrong."
It would be great if actually needed, demanding government jobs could pay a market rate. And even better, we could somehow pay better people more. And even even better - fire poor performers. The more-less lockstep pay scales across the US government are bizarre, as well as government unions, negotiating with politicians. As FDR said:
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”
Easier firing would increase the market rates for every role. At least unless combined with generous unemployment benefits, as in Denmark. It could make the government more efficient in the long term, at the expense of higher spending (and therefore higher taxes) in the short term. Which many voters would not like.
The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.
Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.
The limits on government salaries seems entirely counterproductive.
I am all for evaluating things in an effort to establish more government efficiency.
But that means you need smart people who understand that domain evaluating, and you need to be able to bring smart people on board to do the work…. not artificially low wages/ arbitrary cuts…
Then the question is, “how do we prevent politicians from hiring their family and friends on excessive salaries”?
Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?
Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.
This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
I think that’s right - more discretion creates more room for corruption.
Although there are other ways to limit corruption risk, namely process and transparency. In the Australian government you can pay someone higher than standard pay through an Individual Flexibility Agreement (IFA). But in order to do so there’s a whole process the manager has to go through where they have to justify the higher salary on a limited set of grounds (e.g. higher market value of role) and then get it all signed off by someone higher up the chain.
That’s the process side. On the transparency side you could publish everyone’s salaries and then it becomes obvious when a manger is paying their second cousin way above normal for some strange reason.
Most managers even in the private sector couldn’t really pull this off because they would need someone to approve the requested salary. You’d have to have a whole pyramid scheme of kickbacks going all the way up to the top executives, but the top executives have no incentive to cooperate because they’re already pulling a similar scheme against the shareholders for their salaries.
If the limits are to prevent corruption, why do they have to be so far below market rates? I don't think anyone is objecting to there being limits. Every company out there has level based limits. The issue is where those limits are set.
Government salaries are based on objective measures today -- years of service and job role. There is no "merit" part or anything subjective.
To move to a system where "good people make more money", someone has to decide who the "good" people are. That person is susceptible to corruption. Moreso than in a private enterprise and with wider consequences, because government is not a business. So overpaying people doesn't have the same consequences as doing it privately.
NSPS was an attempt to push towards something more merit based (still pay band structured, NSPS bands spanned 2-3 GS grades). NSPS was rolled back in 2010 or so because the requirement was that everyone had to be on it by 2009 (early 2010?) and that didn't happen.
There are various *demo (lab, acq, I think some others) that are basically the same as NSPS (in principle) and ostensibly merit based. But they're also capped because of the correspondence to GS grades. Pay can increase much faster, in theory, than under GS but also you can be denied any raise except the general pay increase (below inflation, so a real pay cut even if a nominal pay raise) if your performance is poor.
GS pay raises are only time-based in-grade, called steps. Each grade has 10 steps [0] and if you start at step 1 it can take up to 18 years to reach step 10 (less if you have good performance because then you can get a bonus step increase). Most people don't start at step 1, though, so maxing out typically takes less time.
There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.
[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
What incentives could possibly exist to go to work for government at this point? It used to offer job security but that’s no longer the case. All I see is low pay, poor benefits, no job security, lack of employer diversity and significant regulatory risk that is tied to whatever administration happens to be in office.
No, a lot of government agencies are specifically positioned to not favor money over safety.
Something like the FAA or FDA would never be conducted by the private sector. Because they're money sinks, and knowing how safe something is, is bad, actually. The private sector would much rather be blissfully unaware. Less liability that way.
The only time something like the FDA "fails" is when they give too much plausible deniability to the private sector. Like when they like J&J handle their asbestos BS in the 70s. And then... we got 50 years of asbestos baby powder. Oops! Should've never trusted them.
The US can easily fill in gaps by taking the Special Operators Combat Controllers (CCTs) who are actually all certified Air Traffic Controllers.
Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
If I was an enemy of the United States, I would very much like the US to increase the degree to which applying its warfighting capacity required stripping out hard to replace experts on which its civilian air transport ability relies for safe operation, and vice versa.
It would fit in well with the present administrations policy orientation, both toward militarization and toward making th country weaker and more fragile in general.
It would be great to help keep CCT skills fresh and current - rotate them around with 'deployments' to civilian facilities. It'd be a win all the way around.
It takes 1-3 years of facility based training in order to qualify as an ATC for a specific tower. A military enlistment is only 4 years. CCTs would end up doing their entire enlistment at one facility leaving no time to train as a CCT. You'd have to hire another person who's job is 100% CCT, at which point, why not just hire an ATC?
It sounds like a nice idea, but the only common factor between ATC and CCT is the certification and some fundamental core training -- everything else is super nuanced specific to each scenario. Some CCT who's specialized in deconflicting a stack overhead in wartime can't just waltz into ORD tower and say "all right boys and girls, go ahead and take a break, I've got this." Each requires domain-specific experience.
And to add on what others have said: yes CCTs represent a pool of proven ATC candidates, but depleting that pool just to knee-jerk a short term-ish solution creates an equal problem for the military -- and it's a hell of a lot harder to recruit adequate candidates for CCT. For example, they have to do like, lots of pushups...
As for not falling out of the sky or hitting other aircraft, I think the U.S. still has the safest airspace. If you're referring to immigration/law/customs/etc, I can't help you there.
Even flying (commercially?) in other countries is still probably safer than driving.
I am sure the attempts of hiring for government jobs will go well, after all the indiscriminate firings experienced by many government agencies thanks to the DOGE and company.
How bad were the firings in ATC?
“Yes, it’s true 95% of the forests in CA are prone to wildfire and many have recently burnt, but trust me my house in the forest is safe, it isn’t in a forest that has burned yet!!! Would you like to buy my house?”
So nearly every org in our government has been decimated twice over, including many critical ones, under staffed ones, and efficient ones. Is it far fetched that people would now be incredulous about the well being of the few departments not yet decimated twice over?
(Also, that forest actually did burn to the ground in 1981 when it went on strike!)
Non-existent as far as I've heard (source: am ATC)
Sounds like at least some people were fired: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-begins-firings-o...
I read your link and nowhere does it say that any ATC were fired.
One of the biggest problems with ATC hiring is that location assignments happen after trainees pass the academy. A lot of the academy graduates quit when they get an assignment they don't like. It's not like the military where they can force people. The trainee pay also sucks so the prospect of getting sent somewhere undesirable and then barely being able to afford it just isn't attractive. If they would hire based on location like they used to graduates wouldn't quit as often.
The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
> The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this.
It was even worse than that. What they actually did was write up a phony “personality test” and distribute the answer key to applicants who were members of preferred racial organizations.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
In the actual OIG report, it seemed the person who gave "answers" to the test didn't actually have the behavioral test or the answer key.
He stated he stressed things like answering questions like an air traffic control "and we’re alpha personalities, we’re dominating, we don’t take no for an answer." He also mentions that he got calls, from multiple people, saying they failed the behavioral test.
So it seems that while he did coach answers, they weren't the literal test answers, but rather advice one could have gotten from public sources with enough research or presumably, talking to some FAA air traffic controllers.
In the end, the report stated the findings in the investigation did not warrant a referral to a federal prosecutor.
The FAA investigated itself and found no misconduct.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. The evidence from the still-in-progress lawsuit is pretty clear.
OIGs are structured to be independent specifically to avoid the "investigating yourself" problem. There also doesn't seem to be much evidence the person who shared information about the test was acting at the direction of the FAA, rather than as a rogue employee. That would certainly be a key factor in the lawsuit, so it will be telling whether it comes out.
>OIGs are structured to be independent specifically to avoid the "investigating yourself" problem.
You ever worked in an organization that had an OIG and met the folks that work there? They wear the same uniform you do, and their behavior betrays that fact.
I do have some experience, and while I certainly won't argue they're perfect, my observation has been that they're more than capable of delivering conclusions that reflect negatively on an organization. Dismissing their conclusions out-of-hand in favor of an alternative theory with no evidence feels like just believing what you want to believe.
>Dismissing their conclusions out-of-hand in favor of an alternative theory with no evidence feels like just believing what you want to believe.
Of course. I've also seen them first-hand nearly ruin multiple careers and marriages over allegations that were easily disproven at the onset of the investigation (Person wasn't even on base when incident allegedly occurred in this case).
By the time the investigations had cleared the accused of wrongdoing they were already passed up for a promotion and nearly ready to retire after 4 years of needless investigation. Part of the 'punishment' is the investigation itself. In my experience OIGs are political beasts because they're made of up humans which are inherently tribal/political.
I was saying nothing to the veracity of alternative theory.
Isn't this the exact opposite point of your previous comment, and consistent with what the parent comment is saying? If they're willing to ruin careers over incorrect allegations then certainly they are willing to investigate true problems.
> alternative theory with no evidence
This is a straw man.
> There also doesn't seem to be much evidence the person who shared information about the test was acting at the direction of the FAA
There’s no other reasonable explanation for the biographical questionnaire and its utterly arbitrary scoring criteria.
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"Briggs et al vs. FAA 0x7df" does not appear to be a real court case. Is this a bot?
Maybe you're referring to "Brigida et al vs Pete Buttigieg, Secretary US Dept of Transportation"? Motion to dismiss for which was denied in 2021? (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/distric...)
"As of February 2025, this case remains ongoing"? (https://clearinghouse.net/case/45988/?doc_page=2&docket_page...)
Why would you put the years in hex, except to obscure? The tracingwoodgrains report is compelling, people should listen to it.
Why the hell would you test for personality or intelligence. Surely the key skill here is calm under pressure and stress?
Most of the job is exceptionally routine to the point of being boring. In busier airspaces the most common stress is just associated with maintaining timing. Ironically the ground controllers face more of this problem than anyone. The further you get from the airport and it's class B airspace the easier it all gets.
Until an emergency or a conflict suddenly occurs. There's often very little you can do here other than quickly and clearly provide the necessary information and instructions to aid pilots in averting the disaster. The pilot is in full control during emergencies and you're simply there to give them anything they need. In a severe emergency and in an ATC center they're going to dedicate you to the emergency and bring another controller on to manage other planes in that airspace.
As the technology became available to give planes the ability to see and avoid each other with Traffic Advisories and automated Conflict Resolutions we made it mandatory equipment for passenger transports. We made it mandatory for pilots to obey this system with _higher priority_ than any prior or new instructions from ATC.
So you want people who think ahead, constantly prepare for conflicts, and have a reliable level of vigilance. So when the emergency happens they're situationally well prepared and capable of managing all available resources that their stress levels barely increase. A bad weather day with lots of cancelled flights and closed airports should be the highest stress factor they face in their careers.
It was just an artificial way to select the 'right' color of candidate. The link has the full details.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
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https://mslegal.org/cases/brigida-v-faa/
https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines-airports/lawsuit-a...
https://simpleflying.com/faa-air-traffic-controller-applican...
> Surely the key skill here is calm under pressure and stress?
... which is personality.
Not trying to defend or not defend what actually happened, but there's growing use of personality measures in various vocations for this very reason.
The actual, as another poster provided, was a racist hiring procedure hidden in a test and apparently designed to rug-pull all the trainees paying their own way in training.
Apart from that, the intelligence is certainly needed, but with a heavy dose of spatial reasoning. the right kind of 'calm under pressure' is an excellent command of the details of ATC; anything else here is just lethal apathy.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
This is indeed a thing that happened, but blaming "Obama" personally for it is absurd, it was entirely the FAA's fuckup.
Is Donald Trump personally carrying out all the acts he's condemned for?
Is it really unreasonable to say that pushing for diversity was a notable goal of the Obama administration?
Based on the signed executive orders yes.
What about the signed executive order promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce?
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-...
It is okay to admit that leaders you agree with are also imperfect. Of course Obama didn't deliberately want to destroy the ATC pipeline, but clearly it was an unintended consequence. I think it's important to understand where people who disagree politically are coming from.
Believe me, when Trump spouted all that schlock after the crash, it was humbling to find the element of truth to it. I don't think it caused that crash: it was a disaster waiting to happen in that airspace. But when I saw in black and white a slide from the FAA discussing how much performance they were willing to sacrifice for diversity, do I really disagree with those who think the answer should be "none"?
"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring.
I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...)
The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions
> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9
See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132
> I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content
I don't think that's a wild take at all and actually agree with you. But I also don't think it's a wild take to think there may be barriers to attracting or hiring good minority candidates independent of whether or not there is also a pipeline problem, and there is no reason you'd have to pick just one or the other. The water pressure analogy only works if you presuppose the water pressure issue is exclusively upstream, and of course in the real world faucets can be the source of waterflow problems as well.
I should also add that I'm not defending the particular case discussed by the blogger, although I'm less sold on the idea that it was clearly bad than a lot of other people seem to be. But even a bad example would not strongly support the idea that an EO or other push to promote diversity and equal opportunity must inevitably lead to lower performance.
I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences.
But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs.
There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize?
I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job...
*If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver...
By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
While you have a point, we can't just ignore the fact that white people have systemic advantages simply because they're white. White people have always had "DEI" or whatever you want to call it. If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
They've done studies on this, but I think even without the studies it's just obvious to everyone:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...
This is a thread about a system that intentionally and explicitly advantaged one race over another. To then claim that white people have a systemic advantage seems absurd and at best counter factual.
It's not counter-factual, it's just factual.
Look, I'm a white man. The unfortunate truth is that white people pretty much always have an advantage, because of unconscious bias.
White people don't need formal systems that advantage them because they're already advantaged and have been for a long time.
It is counter to the facts in the thread which are systemic and documented. Your subjective feelings and perception do not necessarily correspond to reality as documented or experienced by others. For the individual their perception is their reality so there is no advantage in arguing against it. If your belief system makes you feel better that is all well and good, but it doesn't give you the right to impose it on others. Your shahada is not shared by everyone else.
It's counter to this specific thread. It's not counter to the world at large or, as you say, "reality".
Critical race theory is a real area of study and there are multiple studies backing this up. The systemic advantage white people face is so painfully real and obvious that, if you deny it, you are delusional.
> Your shahada is not shared by everyone else.
It's not "shahada", it's science. Just because it makes you feel slightly uncomfortable doesn't mean it's not real. I encourage you to find a box of tissues, and get over it.
You can call it "science" but your beliefs have more in common with quasi religious articles of faith. CRT is an area of study no different than theology. Aggressively proselytizing your religion is not as effective as you think, see the jehovahs witnesses. Lots of people feel their god is real and think non adherents are delusional, some even try to prove their god is real with "science".
Have you done any research into it? Or, because it makes you uncomfortable, you just write it off as a religion and ignore it?
A lot of people work backwards. They don't like the conclusions drawn by CRT and social studies so they work backwards and conclude that it's based on things that aren't real. But these areas of studies work forwards. Meaning, they identify obvious, real, and undeniable racial systems, such as redlining, and then study the long-term effects of that.
If you think something like, say, preventing black Americans from owning property, has no long-term effects on the demographic then you've probably just never thought about it. This isn't a TV show, this isn't a picture perfect depiction of a country. Our institutions are old, and things don't just - poof - get fixed. Integration was messy, and it took decades. Reconstruction wasn't linear, it progressed and then regressed. Segregation never disappeared - to this day, most cities are segregated. To just conclude "well that doesn't matter", based on zero research or understanding, is intellectually lazy.
Of course, if you do start to do research into it, congratulations, you have re-discovered the discipline of CRT. Because that's all it is. So, you have no choice but to stay ignorant, because otherwise you threaten your entire belief system. And we can't have that, can we?
I think there might be a bit of crosstalk here. For background I largely agree with you. There was a powerful clip during the George Floyd protests where a woman passionately explained that it was a game of Monopoly where, when blacks actually did get money, whites burned Tulsa to the ground.
With that out of the way, let me go back to this:
> If you show up to the interview and you're white, congratulations, you're 50% of the way there.
This is where we have the difference of "base rate" vs "lived experience". My example is gender as opposed to race but it generalizes: I have an expensive and difficult hobby that is largely male-dominated. As such there are various scholarships and mentor groups for women. As I open my pockets and overcome challenges, seeing these posters around telling me that if I were a woman, I would have money and mentorship laid at my feet, it is not difficult for me to see why the rhetoric of privilege doesn't land easily.
Going back to race, at my employer there are various employee groups for LGBTQ, Connected Black Professionals, Asian Heritage, and so on. How privileged does a regular white guy without any particular connections feel? (Assume he then goes home and tries to help his high-achieving white teenage son strategize on college applications)
To reiterate, I am not disagreeing with the underlying "stacked deck", but I also don't blame those for whom it doesn't land, because at the very least: the marketing sucks
See also: the blue-collar worker who barely graduated high school and worked in a factory before we shipped it off to China, without which the community has become poor and run-down and ravaged by drug addiction. How privileged do you think he feels? (Is it any wonder he voted for who he did?)
Nothing I say could ever convince you otherwise because it is your deeply held belief and system of faith. It provides you a community of others that share your beliefs and practices as well as opportunities for religious experiences.
Just don't proselytize, the rest of us find it as annoying as the jehovash witnesses.
Your article basically says auto dealers are racist but federal contractors and "profitable companies" are generally more comparable. The solution would be to enforce racist regulations against the auto dealer, not falsely generalize the problem and enforce a solution. Secondly, there are fields of academia that make it a point to show racism exists and to uncover racism, so publications like this are as fraught with conflicts of interest as a cigarette company researcher investigating the benefits of nicotine. Pointing the finger at white people is also problematic, it's a racial supply/demand, and generally at competitive fields like medicine or programming, competitive schools, one sees a proportional oversaturation of asians (per capita) versus whites. Shall we say employers are favoring asians and talk about the asian menace, as we do the white menace? If particular races, often tagging a cultural history, are associated with different cultural preferences for lifestyle or career, I would simply say "so what?" If the goal is to homogenize equal participation from all demographics groups to all vocations, to me that seems silly and runs against human nature, it can be expected to work as well as the communist efforts of societal homogenization we saw in the 20th century. Yes, we need to kick the tires and convince ourselves that all are afforded somewhat fair opportunities, but seeing race as a confounder here or there, and immediately leaping to systematic racism as the purported mechanism - that's just poor science.
I'm not "pointing the finger" at anyone. Part of the problem with pointing out systemic racism and unconscious bias is that white folk are very fragile. They get uncomfortable when you point out very obvious deductions - like hundreds of years of racial injustice not magically disappearing in the late 60s.
I'm not saying that other racism doesn't exist. But I am saying that complaints from white people on account of their whiteness is pathetic at best and willfully ignorant at worst. At the end of the day, white people, which includes me, are advantaged in virtually all areas of modern society.
It would be easy to say that I got where I am based purely on my own skill and intellect. It would also not be true. The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
I can't help but laugh when people make broad racial statements as they attempt to transcend racism. To wit, "white folk are very fragile"
How much do you think "white privilege" rhetoric resonates with, say, French-speaking Mainers? Who also had the experience of "your name got you scorned from jobs or spit on in school" https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/us/longscorned-in-maine-f...
Humans are racist because humans are tribal. Yes, we should work on improving as a society, but don't be surprised that making broad pejorative racial statements doesn't do it.
This is a far better argument:
> The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
I would also add to that, "the values, attention, nutrition, and opportunities provided by my parents in my formative years"
> This is a far better argument:
> > The zip code I was born in, the schools I went to, and the overall landscape of modern America have an incalculable influence in my success.
Right, this is a very good argument. That's the argument behind CRT, lol.
What you're missing is that what I described is tangibly and undeniably intertwined with race. Most of the US is still segregated. Why do you think I mentioned zip codes? For fun? Do you truly believe that has nothing to do with race or demographics? Even you could not be so ignorant.
While it's easy and fun to believe race is just something that exists outside of our world, it's just not true. It's linked with crime, with homelessness, with drug use, with school funding, with opportunities, with healthcare outcomes, with pedestrian deaths, with access to medicine, with access to DMVs, with access to voting, and on and on. And those are all tangible.
You can say that I got where I was based not on my race, but rather on my zipcode. Sure. But my zipcode is directly associated with race, so in reality, you agree with me.
> Even you could not be so ignorant.
I think I'm going to head out for now, but give me a holler when this strategy brings someone over to your point of view
> so in reality, you agree with me
Just so! You aren't actually arguing with what I said, which was basically, "I don't think your framing of this is effective", which is what I meant by "this is a far better argument"
"The difference between cannibals and liberals is that cannibals eat only their enemies" - LBJ
Donald Trump is, indeed, personally signing the executive orders instructing the US government to do a lot of questionable things. Obama, by contrast, did not sign an executive order directing the FAA to hire unqualified air traffic controllers.
Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
Of course he didn't sign an executive order saying to hire unqualified controllers. But guess what executive order he did sign: promoting diversity and inclusion in the federal workplace. This feels like a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid criticizing Obama.
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/president-signs-order-promote-...
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This is a great post that lays it out. I suggest putting tribal politics aside and reading it, you can see in black and white that the FAA, under Obama, consciously weighed diversity over performance, and royally screwed the ATC hiring pipeline. "Pobody's nerfect"
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Eh. The lawsuit is still ongoing (for 9 years now!). The article summarizes the plaintiffs' argument and conjecture as if it was a finding of fact which is a bit disingenuous.
I think the FAA slide which discusses "how much adverse performance are we willing to sacrifice for diversity" is pretty damning
What could be potentially damning is the answer, not the question.
Getting clarity and avoiding potentially incorrect assumptions by asking questions is something professionals should do.
I would very much like to see the rest of the deck for context.
I was able to find that deck (make of it what you will): https://savecti.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Controller-Hi.... The phrase "adverse impact" means "results in racially disparate outcomes"
I spent a bit more time going down the rabbit hole of the article footnotes, but I need to take a step back, as my time management on this has been poor
It actually is though, I would go ready about it.
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There's a wave of ATC retirements now because they were all hired at the same time when Reagan fired the ATCs. Bad policy can have long lasting effects.
Another problem you haven't mentioned is the level of union control in the industry. Which is great as far as protecting jobs and salaries for existing controllers but it makes getting a desirable position difficult for a new graduate. From your comment it sounds like they just get dumped with the least desirable location until they've climbed high enough up the totem pole to get a good job.
U.S. ATC here. I don't think you know what you're talking about: the union is doing nothing for our salaries. The union has no say on where new graduates get placed.
Our union is a joke. They send emails saying they're "monitoring the situation" instead of talking with the media stating our case for better working conditions.
Our salaries have not kept up with the industry. Do not use this to try to push an anti-union agenda.
Most ATCs spend their whole career at one or two towers. 'Desireable' in the case of graduates is usually wherever they or their family was living when they got hired. The union doesn't have any say in tower assignment.
>> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
These generally are not positions that people compete for across the nation. Once in a particular airspace, controllers will generally stay in that airspace. An outsider unfamiliar with an airspace would be at significant disadvantage to any local.
> >> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.
This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.
Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
Ronald Reagan is laughing at the notion of a powerful ATC union (PATCO 1981 Strike)
I really want to like unions. They make all the sense in the world in principle. But in practice they always seem to end up centered around this "pay your dues" climb the ladder bullshit.
Works in Denmark. No statutory minimum wage, wages determined by collective bargaining agreement.
Indeed. There are all sorts of models for how a unions should work. I'm not surprised that some models work much better than others.
In the United States 100 years ago, there was a real political concern about the spread of socialist revolution, with labor unions in the center of that. There was a premeditated action through politics and business in the USA to remove socialist union leadership, and build strong hierarchical management that was politically predictable. Many of the eager candidates for this kind of structure were Mafia-connected. When actual organized crime had the opportunity, multiple family fortunes were built on control of Unions. This is very well documented but the language that is used will vary by source.
Essentially the USA made a political choice to negotiate with and on occasion criminally prosecute Mafia-related leadership in national labor unions, instead of "allowing" the uncertainty of committed socialist labor leaders.
While the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
I feel like I've been hearing about NextGen for decades.
Just looked it up and I'm not far off. NextGen started in 2007 and is still ongoing.
I haven't been able to find it since but at one point I came across a quote saying that NextGen was the "greatest failure in the history of organized labor." Or something to that effect. A bit of an overstatement but I have to admit I found the parts I could see circa 2010 ridiculous.
Based on what I read earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on AI that Musk recently purchased. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though. I also hope whatever it is, it doesn't make the ATC system dependent on some proprietary monopoly.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
The US Government is not interested in hiring outside of law enforcement so they won't be able to find people to fill positions outside of law enforcement.
Maybe federal government which hasn’t grown much (they contract everything). State and especially local government employment has been growing consistently for years, or growing very fast if you count education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_employees_in_the_Un...
ATC should probably be private like it is in Canada, where it functions very well, and also better lines up with how the federal gov operates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nav_Canada
Canadian ATC has serious issues, and the whole air travel system is much, much more expensive than the US.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ai...
A lot of services are provided by contractors, including a few hundred control towers, the weather briefing system, the vast majority of flight and medical examiners, etc.
I'm not sure how "we want ultra-high non-woke pure-meritocracy hiring standards and we'll aggressively filter out anyone who even smells like they won't pass those standards" is compatible with "we need butts in seats doing this work immediately." I also am not at all surprised that people do not want to begin working for a government which has made it clear it despises all of its workers. You really can't have it both ways. (And plenty of perfectly capable/qualified people, myself included, read all this "anti-DEI" stuff exactly the same way that the anti-DEI people read DEI itself, as a means of preselecting who is entitled to compete for jobs.)
The solution is not to "de-wokify" anything - nor is it to "wokify" anything. All of that stuff is a sideshow. The solution would be to offer massive incentives in order to get highly competent people to see ATC as a good career choice. That means big salaries, very flexible training timelines, and in general, willingness to spend a lot of money on the program to make it attractive. ATC is an intense job being done by people who are under a lot of strain. It doesn't sound appealing to most. That would need to change.
What am I missing here?
Can any controller or person who otherwise works in this area comment on the tracingwoodgrains blog post? I always see it linked on HN, but never mentioned anywhere else. Seems like there would be a huge scandal with lot of commentary and links if it were true.
I'm not qualified to evaluate that post, but there was some critique of it and the suit's merits in a thread a few months ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42874983
U.S. ATC here: opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect that of the FAA. But to be safe: no comment. Otherwise, if I knew something was untrue, I could say that.
"The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old."
this is okay for the post office or DMV, but probably not as okay for air traffic control infrastructure.
Didn't DOGE just lay off a number of probational employees (new, promoted or transferred) in the infrastructure division?
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
FAA, but not ATCs. I think a lot of the FAA folks were also offered their jobs back, like with other agencies. As a consequence of court decisions and "oh shit, those are actually important jobs".
Would tend to make recruitment more difficult, though. "Yeah, we just had a bunch of people fired by some weird Twitter idiot, but you should totally train for years to come work for us, that couldn't possibly go wrong."
It would be great if actually needed, demanding government jobs could pay a market rate. And even better, we could somehow pay better people more. And even even better - fire poor performers. The more-less lockstep pay scales across the US government are bizarre, as well as government unions, negotiating with politicians. As FDR said:
> All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.
> Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.
> … Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”
- FDR, 1937 https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-the-resolut...
Easier firing would increase the market rates for every role. At least unless combined with generous unemployment benefits, as in Denmark. It could make the government more efficient in the long term, at the expense of higher spending (and therefore higher taxes) in the short term. Which many voters would not like.
The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.
Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.
The limits on government salaries seems entirely counterproductive.
I am all for evaluating things in an effort to establish more government efficiency.
But that means you need smart people who understand that domain evaluating, and you need to be able to bring smart people on board to do the work…. not artificially low wages/ arbitrary cuts…
Then the question is, “how do we prevent politicians from hiring their family and friends on excessive salaries”?
Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?
Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
> with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services
The Chicago political machine is calling. They want your jobs. All of your jobs.
Wait until you’re doing a great job but have the wrong political take on a situation.
Make sure you’re regularly doing favors for people and giving out what freebies you can so you stay in office during the next cycle.
It sounded great in the post, but democracy is hard so don’t expect an easy answer.
Is that the concern? Hiring family?
But they don’t because of the salary limit?
I don’t think that’s the case.
The limits are there to limit corruption.
If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.
This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
I think that’s right - more discretion creates more room for corruption.
Although there are other ways to limit corruption risk, namely process and transparency. In the Australian government you can pay someone higher than standard pay through an Individual Flexibility Agreement (IFA). But in order to do so there’s a whole process the manager has to go through where they have to justify the higher salary on a limited set of grounds (e.g. higher market value of role) and then get it all signed off by someone higher up the chain.
That’s the process side. On the transparency side you could publish everyone’s salaries and then it becomes obvious when a manger is paying their second cousin way above normal for some strange reason.
Most managers even in the private sector couldn’t really pull this off because they would need someone to approve the requested salary. You’d have to have a whole pyramid scheme of kickbacks going all the way up to the top executives, but the top executives have no incentive to cooperate because they’re already pulling a similar scheme against the shareholders for their salaries.
If the limits are to prevent corruption, why do they have to be so far below market rates? I don't think anyone is objecting to there being limits. Every company out there has level based limits. The issue is where those limits are set.
I don’t think managers (even without limits) could just set salaries… it’s not like they all just pay the max at manager discretion now.
Government salaries are based on objective measures today -- years of service and job role. There is no "merit" part or anything subjective.
To move to a system where "good people make more money", someone has to decide who the "good" people are. That person is susceptible to corruption. Moreso than in a private enterprise and with wider consequences, because government is not a business. So overpaying people doesn't have the same consequences as doing it privately.
NSPS was an attempt to push towards something more merit based (still pay band structured, NSPS bands spanned 2-3 GS grades). NSPS was rolled back in 2010 or so because the requirement was that everyone had to be on it by 2009 (early 2010?) and that didn't happen.
There are various *demo (lab, acq, I think some others) that are basically the same as NSPS (in principle) and ostensibly merit based. But they're also capped because of the correspondence to GS grades. Pay can increase much faster, in theory, than under GS but also you can be denied any raise except the general pay increase (below inflation, so a real pay cut even if a nominal pay raise) if your performance is poor.
Years of service is a form of corruption, since years of service isn't a proxy for performance
GS pay raises are only time-based in-grade, called steps. Each grade has 10 steps [0] and if you start at step 1 it can take up to 18 years to reach step 10 (less if you have good performance because then you can get a bonus step increase). Most people don't start at step 1, though, so maxing out typically takes less time.
There are some jobs that will push you through grades on some regular cadence (usually 6-12 months in each grade), but those are usually "internships". New hires getting brought in at $50-60k/year GS-5 or GS-7 positions and moved up over 2-4 years into a GS-11 or GS-12 position. After that, they're back to competing for positions again for anything higher than GS-11/12 or whatever their target grade was.
[0] Technically there's step X, which means you're paid above step 10 for that grade. This is relatively rare, but when it happens they only get half the general pay increase each year until step 10 catches up to them and then they are step 10.
corruption is a word with a meaning
What incentives could possibly exist to go to work for government at this point? It used to offer job security but that’s no longer the case. All I see is low pay, poor benefits, no job security, lack of employer diversity and significant regulatory risk that is tied to whatever administration happens to be in office.
Of economy becomes bad enough, those jobs will be desirable again.
That’s the point, just hire private industries to do everything instead.
they'll never prioritize money over safety. nope, never.
And the government doesn't?
No, a lot of government agencies are specifically positioned to not favor money over safety.
Something like the FAA or FDA would never be conducted by the private sector. Because they're money sinks, and knowing how safe something is, is bad, actually. The private sector would much rather be blissfully unaware. Less liability that way.
The only time something like the FDA "fails" is when they give too much plausible deniability to the private sector. Like when they like J&J handle their asbestos BS in the 70s. And then... we got 50 years of asbestos baby powder. Oops! Should've never trusted them.
More context - https://viewfromthewing.com/diversity-in-the-skies-faas-cont...
The US can easily fill in gaps by taking the Special Operators Combat Controllers (CCTs) who are actually all certified Air Traffic Controllers.
Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
If I was an enemy of the United States, I would very much like the US to increase the degree to which applying its warfighting capacity required stripping out hard to replace experts on which its civilian air transport ability relies for safe operation, and vice versa.
It would fit in well with the present administrations policy orientation, both toward militarization and toward making th country weaker and more fragile in general.
It would be great to help keep CCT skills fresh and current - rotate them around with 'deployments' to civilian facilities. It'd be a win all the way around.
It takes 1-3 years of facility based training in order to qualify as an ATC for a specific tower. A military enlistment is only 4 years. CCTs would end up doing their entire enlistment at one facility leaving no time to train as a CCT. You'd have to hire another person who's job is 100% CCT, at which point, why not just hire an ATC?
Military enlistments vary from shorter than longer to 4 years.
ATCs regularly go TDY to support other locations.
You’re conflating ATC training with a location
It sounds like a nice idea, but the only common factor between ATC and CCT is the certification and some fundamental core training -- everything else is super nuanced specific to each scenario. Some CCT who's specialized in deconflicting a stack overhead in wartime can't just waltz into ORD tower and say "all right boys and girls, go ahead and take a break, I've got this." Each requires domain-specific experience.
And to add on what others have said: yes CCTs represent a pool of proven ATC candidates, but depleting that pool just to knee-jerk a short term-ish solution creates an equal problem for the military -- and it's a hell of a lot harder to recruit adequate candidates for CCT. For example, they have to do like, lots of pushups...
This doesn’t solve anything because the military still needs those people.
Not a surprise after the reputation they've built - https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
Didn’t they Doge just fire all their recently promoted and hired air traffic controllers?
I would currently be very afraid flying to the USA for a multitude of reasons. It doesn't help that I'm afraid of flying.
As for not falling out of the sky or hitting other aircraft, I think the U.S. still has the safest airspace. If you're referring to immigration/law/customs/etc, I can't help you there.
Even flying (commercially?) in other countries is still probably safer than driving.
Air travel is insanely safe, even in the shittiest countries.
you only hear about the dozen or so crashes every year. You don't hear about the 30-40 million other flights that don't have issues in a year.