Are LLNS employees comfortable raising work related concerns to their management chain, HR, or Staff Relations?
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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That about sums it up.
If you fall down the stairs or trip, you had better crawl back to your car, leave the lab and tell no one. Those who mess up the stats (and the subsequent executive bonuses) stand out in a bad way.
True and the "reviewer" #1 will be your AD.
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life."
Winston Churchill
"... Had a problem with an abusive manager, talked to HR, and HR talked to the division leader recommending a change. Know what happened? The Division leader refused. Then the retribution started..."
I'm sorry this happened to you. This is a common occurrence at LLNS and managers are becoming increasingly blatant about it.
If the for profit contractor LLNS deems HR/SHRM non-mission critical or as an excessive overhead cost, HR/SHRM staff are subject to the same employment policies they authored on behalf of the for profit contractor.
They could only be worse if they had a more demeaning name. Like Human Capital.
The previous 3 individuals are the first ever Vice Presidents without a Ph.D. in Science or Engineering to lead technical divisions at Sandia. A quick search on the internet shows that Adam Rowen went to a school in New Mexico.
Steve Renfro deputy AD Nuclear Weapons, BS without PhD (also comes from a New Mexico school)
How about hiring any one of the many managers from Sandia that don't have a Ph.D.?
The entire upper management in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Weapons Program do not have PhDs either. James Owen (W-Division Leader), John Benner (AD for Weapons), and Craig Leasure (Acting Weapons PAD). It's Knapp's legacy of picking fellow incompetent, do-nothing, con-artist, henchmen.
June 15, 2014 at 10:50 AM
Owen spent two years (two years mind you) at the University of Colorado failing to get a lowly M.S. (while on a full-time salary) and Benner failed to pass his PhD oral board at UC Davis. Both were handsomely rewarded with a Division Leader job and an AD for Weapons job for their successes by Knapp. What a farce!
June 15, 2014 at 1:35 PM
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the labs no longer need people with Phds? Think about it from Congress point of view. These labs have been nothing one problem after another.
Spies, lost disk, lost locks, stolen mustangs, fires, chile cook offs, lasers not igniting, meth scandals, and now WIPP. Hey here is a bright idea maybe we need to really implement the big changes they have been asking for all this time and just maybe that would be begin by getting rid of an arrogant culture that thrives on the idea that a Phd is somehow worthwhile. Do not get me wrong at one time you needed people with Phds at the lab, but now, not so much.
http://llnlthetruestory.blogspot.com/2013/08/dysfunctional-llnl.html
My name is Kevin Moore and I recently left the Lab after 10.5 years. My new job has shown me just how dysfunctional LLNL is, and revealed the lab's greatest problem: it's inability to fire those who should be.
Repeatedly, I watched failed scientists/engineers not be terminated, but"coaxed" into management. These folks, typically with no managementexperience beyond some two-day LLNL coarse, made horrible managers. Theymoved their way through middle management, arriving to a place where theywere seen as a person who guides science/engineering at the lab. We then had a failed science/engineering with poor management skills trying to
build programs and direct the lab. The result is what we have today: a rudderless monolith with ghastly overhead.LLNL was a truly sad place to be, and the day I got out was one of the most happy periods I had in years.
If I can suggest anything to our government, come into the weapons labs with a team of competent strategists and start slashing useless managers and failed scientist. Use metrics like peer-reviewed publications to gauge a persons quality, not spot awards or other worthless internalrecognitions.
Kevin Moore
Manager, Materials & Corrosion Engineering
Exponent Failure Analysis Associates
149 Commonwealth Drive
Menlo Park, Ca 94025
Wow he sure sounds like a real pleasant person. In any case if you have a problem with the lab that leave and don't let door hit you in the ass.
This seemingly bold individual is typical of a manager that will run behind the skirt of the legal department at the first indication of a problem of their own making.
Without a corrective feedback loop for lab managers, we get more of the same going forward.
The Laboratory is completely dysfunctional. This is caused primarily by a useless management that overwhelms overhead costs and wastes the time of direct-funded personnel through endless unfunded mandates. I find myself constantly apologizing to sponsors for our high costs.
So Global Security is reorganizing again. They reorganized last year, they're reorganizing this year, and they will reorganize next year. The sad part is that they believe these meaningless administrative changes are earth shattering events. No one cares. GS management has essentially no (positive) impact on programmatic work or the actual people who bring in the dollars.
What purpose or value added do frequent reorgs accomplish other than to be able to state management is providing "improved" business units by pointing to the endless brokering and churn? Did they thin out the GS management team in the process?
I doubt the "experts" left at these labs even have the expertise to pull off a working bomb design any longer. Running pretend simulation codes, yeah, they can do that but little else. Congress seems to be fully satisfied with this situation.
There is change leadership and then there is management. Two different roles for high level employees.
LLNL has no change leadership. Why should it? High salaries, with minimal responsibilities. Any significant change can jeopardize the party.
You can always count on him for pithy, topical comments.