Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Unthinkable growth!
With race riots and and a depression level economy brought on by the coronavirus, how is the country going to continue increasing the NW complex by 20% every year? I see LinkedIn and Indeed.com postings for all sorts of jobs at the labs. I assume they will continue to increase their workforce by double-digits every year indefinitely. I harbor no ill will against the labs or NNSA, but the situation is strange.
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22 comments:
Who said the budget would increase 20 percent every year. Of course that won’t happen.
The labs could survive by getting rid of the people who do nothing. Hmm could starting with the poster of UK growth be a good start? One down, keep posting.
There are two things happening - some modest growth is occurring, but a huge demographic of people retiring is another. The weapons complex in particular had very limited hiring in the 1990’s, and a lot of the cohort from before that era have put in their time and are turning in their badges. It takes a lot of hiring to replace them.
Is 9:49 PM a trying to make a sarcastic comment? I don’t know what “UK growth” means. Is that the GDP growth of Great Britain?
There are two things happening - some modest growth is occurring, but a huge demographic of people retiring is another.
6/03/2020 4:50 AM
Wrong! LANL hired close to 2,000 in 2019, and less than 450 retired.
President Biden and the progressive Democrats will dramatically reduce the plans now before the DOE and DOD. Their agenda for universal healthcare and a green new deal will need trillions to fund. This will be ways pickings to reduce the NNSA budget back to pre-Trump levels. And the problem will be exacerbated with the pending economic recession that we currently find ourselves will be made much worse by the Uber-deficit spending that will be necessary to enact the Democrat priorities.
assume they will continue to increase their workforce by double-digits every year indefinitely.
OK....hire 20 a year for every ten that retire then! Sounds ominous!
My 2 cents, Trump was going to overfund the DOD for 2-3 years to modernize after Bush-Obama neglect (and war depletion). I always thought we were being treated the same but not sure?
6/03/2020 10:39 AM wrote "Wrong! LANL hired close to 2,000 in 2019, and less than 450 retired."
First of all, the comment spoke of the weapons complex, not just LANL. While I'm sure it would astonish 10:39, the entire complex is quite a bit larger than the Hill.
Secondly, I'm curious how LANL paid for what you claim is a net +1500 FTE count when the LANL NNSA budget only went up about $20M over FY-19. I doubt WFO exploded. Perhaps, just perhaps, since hiring typically trails departures there may have been some retirements or other voluntary departures like the crit safety group the year before?
Total employees from the LANL website seem to remain about 12K, similar to previous years.
If the FY21 Presidential ask is fully funded, yes you will see a good bit of hiring and contractor expansion as LANL has to finally deliver on plutonuium production missions and a new weapons system (if it can win the design competition). But at the moment that budget build is vapor, as all are prior to appropriations.
6/05/2020 6:49 AM
Well they got rid of 400 highly paid Bechtel people and that is like 1500 normal people in terms of cost. Getting rid of Bechtel suddenly led to a huge overflow of money. Bechtel just too money various ways and gave nothing in return. You can say what you want but everyone agrees thing got better when LANS/Bechtel got the boot.
If the FY21 Presidential ask is fully funded...
6/05/2020 6:49 AM
OK, a nit: When did "ask" become a noun? Is "request" not good enough? Too many letters?
Should we defund the Livermore police?
"everyone agrees thing got better when LANS/Bechtel got the boot."
And yet it didn't. The same Group Leaders, division leaders, ADs, and PADs. The same safety issues, Security issues, machismo sexist attitudes.... Nothing has changes.
BTW, it was about 200 people. Ask an HR rep....
BTW, it was about 200 people. Ask an HR rep....
6/06/2020 9:43 AM
It is 432 to be exact.
"machismo sexist attitudes"
In case you have not been paying attention to current events it is not machismo attitudes it is the internet structural systematic racism that is the problem. LANS, UC and whoever. That is the issue. The silence of the labs is being noted.
Your 432 is a made up number but good try. Less than 200.
“it is the internet structural systematic racism that is the problem. LANS, UC and whoever. That is the issue. The silence of the labs is being noted.“
I think you meant to post on a Yahoo blog or something. We are not susceptible to ridiculous constructs.
Your 432 is a made up number but good try. Less than 200.
6/07/2020 6:59 AM
Funny how a made up number is so exact. I don't know but it is more than 200 and depending on how you count the number of people with multiple positions or part time at LANL and part time
somewhere else in Bechtel could how it is 432. I also personally know several Bechtel people who transferred out of Bechtel to stay at the lab permanently. I am not sure how you would count these people or even how many it is but I am sure there is more of them. These where pretty good people any any event.
it is the internet structural systematic racism that is the problem.
6/06/2020 8:08 PM
I have no idea what you mean by that. I suspect you don't either.
Sadly, LANL continues to hire like the drunken sailors that run parts of the place. And it is not just in support of the programs that have seen significant increases in programmatic funding. It is everywhere. If this year continues like past years, the hiring numbers will exceed 1000. Of that, several hundred will retire, and upwards of 10% of those who were recently hired will leave because the place is poorly managed, or it just fails to keep people. They get a 401k that may be as good as most places, work long hours and the bureaucratic burden just causes people to decide that things must be better elsewhere. If you are really talented and lack a college degree from a top tier university, you are not found in the Weapons Program. Those who come to work in the weapons program have degrees from schools in New Mexico or Texas. That is if your young. If you are older, it is more likely that you were being terminated from your previous employer. I suspect that this is true of most of the other weapons labs if you dig in to the caliber of the recent hires.
6/07/2020 11:01 AM
Being one of those I can tell you for a fact it was less than 200. I think it peaked around 160 and some change due to the CMRR project. Before that it was less than 130. There were no part time Bechtel people. Most were in Capital Projects PAD. Very few in any other PAD.
"Being one of those I can tell you for a fact it was less than 200. I think it peaked around 160 and some change due to the CMRR project. Before that it was less than 130. There were no part time Bechtel people. Most were in Capital Projects PAD. Very few in any other PAD.
6/13/2020 11:50 PM"
I think you may only be looking at your PAD. There are in fact some hard numbers out there and yes there where a number of part time people, you may not know about them because of how they got classified. They where not officially part time or two places at once but as consultants and yes they made very VERY good money, and over the years these people where in the thousands. Personally I think some very shady things happened and I would hope an investigation is in order. Probably much of the stuff was technically legal but I would still hope they look into this. Ask around there are some people in HR and so on that know these things. There are also some other rumors like books being cooked, accident and injury numbers being suppressers or reclassified, all sorts of children, relatives and friends getting summer jobs that made no sense and so on. How true some of this is hard to say but if you look at the incident and injury numbers over the years there are some anomalies in the drops that make no sense. Most of us can also confirm that the summers where increasingly filled with interns and other odd people that are doing nothing of value and I know first hand some of these stories. I was getting worried that some reporter might look into this stuff and all of LANL would suffer.
In any case Bechtel is gone and most people agree some things have gotten better. Sure some of the same mangers are around however there are a number of small things that have gotten much better. (1) Stuff seems to be fixed much faster now, (2) There now seems to be money to help fix things or clean stuff up. (3) If crucial hires need to be made they can happen much faster now. (4) communications are much better now. (5) there does not seem to the odd mid year budget cuts in certain things like fixing a parking lot or fixing something. When Bechtel was around some odd things where going on. There are several books that talk about how Bechtel makes money off what is known as leveraging, in other words to they look their projects as a whole not just the fee and they are masters of this.
I take from your post you are a former Bechtel person. I know several that got out of Bechtel to stay at the lab and they are pretty decent people, they stayed for various reasons. What is odd is everyone one them are very honest on exactly what Bechtel was and how they operated so can only assume you do as well.
This post has reached "unthinkable growth. Time for a rest.
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