What ratio of managers and or support worker to programmatic workers would be appropriate?
Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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How about 1 direct level manager per every 50 "worker bees" and around 1 support worker per every 5 research or tech staff member. Follow that up by doing what LANL's Sig Hecker did back in the mid-1990s and wipe out half of the bloated Directorates and Division through consolidation.
That would put the labs more in line with what you see in a normal research environment and would drastically lower the operating costs at these labs.
August 12, 2013 at 9:15 PM
Hecker was a great leader, but a terrible manager. His "Flat Land" management structure was a colossal failure. The lack of a hierarchical structure resulted in 27 essentially independent fiefdoms with inconsistent rules, policies, and management tone. Chaos reigned until John Browne took over.
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/25/exposing-managements-dirty-little-secret/
In a lot of divisions they got rid of many teamleaders. The way they did this is saying you are not a TL.
The work however stayed the same.
This is probably also what happened in a similar form to the poster
August 14, 2013 at 9:46 PM
And then we have a few division leaders at LANL who are sitting together and working out a new
"nuclear pillar strategy". A few town meetings later, where they happily ignored the community input, voila we have a new "pillar"; more like the pillar of ignorance. No wonder we need a lot of managers, when all they do is chasing rabbits down the holes.
I would have liked to see people like Bethe and Oppenheimer and Fermi discussing nuclear pillars, but when I bring this up, I am told times have changed.
Yes times have changed, science is marginalized, and we all pray to the god of PBIs
Additionally, as the number of real workers decrease, why wouldn't the labs need less management and support positions?
Managers have staffs and go to meetings. Worker accomplishments provide them with talking points.
Some of that is necessary, but not to the extent it currently exists.