Will Federal Contractors have to do the same?
Elon Musk says federal employees must fill out (weekly?) productivity reports or resign
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/elon-musk-federal-employees-fill-out-productivity-reports-resign
Elon Musk says federal employees must fill out (weekly?) productivity reports or resign
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/elon-musk-federal-employees-fill-out-productivity-reports-resign
Comments
1. Attended a multi day meeting
2. Completed training courses
3. Filled out several required forms
4. Spent hours trying to get purchasing to order some supplies needed for the lab
5. Attended several 1 to 2 hour required meetings and three days writing a proposal before the government decided to cancel the request
See, this covers about 90% of what we are allowed do here in a 40 hour week. Just modify slightly for your situation.
All you have to do is cut and paste that three times and you switch from a monthly report to a weekly report. Yes, this was at the lab in the 70's. Imagine what a Chatbot can create these days.
Is it that much work for someone to try to list the "work" they did last week? Just sayin
Day 1: Come in at 9am, read email for an hour, do some training on sexual harassment for hour, system down another half hour to figure out it works.
half hour on updating travel reimbursement mess-up. Explain New Mexico is part of the US. Lunch one hour. Group meeting on safety and security one hour. One hour on actual work. Update you work phone app 1/2 hour. Time correction, since the code is suddenly empty due a reorg. Go home at 3.30pm, so you can be in Santa Fe by 5pm
Day 2: Go to Casino to learn about AI all day from a lab sponsored event. It consist of you asking ChatGP if a cat is animal, leave at 2pm, along with every body else.
Day 3, Come in 9.30am, work on late report on what you did last month for the
to program. 3 hour work on report, 1 hour lunch. Meeting with program manager talking about somebody else' work two hour. Coffee for hour. Need to leave at 2pm to get kids and wife to Santa Fe by 3 for track meet.
Day 4, 9am Meeting on working safety group teams for division member meeting. 1.5 hour, play Angry birds why some guy drones on. Lunch, 1 hour. New online training 1/2 hour, cannot put into system call admin, 1/2 late, done. Coffee 1/2 hour, talk with team member 1/2 hour, two hour of actual work. ...oops, you get email that your took wrong training. Go home at 4pm
(5) Friday off, like every Friday. No one works Friday
40 hour work week, is actually more like 5.5 hours four days a week or 22 hours. Meetings ups 4-6 hours, trainings and TE, and paper work 2-3 hours. Coffee breaks 2 hours. Lab activities such as AI training, committee work 4 hours.
Maybe 5 hours are spent on actual work at most. Every other week people will also just work from home for one or two day.
Also I am underestimate the time on weird bureaucracy things. Like you cannot get a training done, because of the screw up on the system, but you can never get hold of the person who is charge of it because they never show up to work. They send you to another person, who makes some temporary change to get trough to next until you can get a hole of person. There is endless stuff like this.
I also sense pattern. Fridays the lab is empty 10-20% or the work force shows up. Monday 2/3 show up because Fridays off means you can a 4 day weekend.
Tues, and Wed have more people. Thur you back down to 2/3% since Friday is
always off. Also no one really stays after 5pm but you few show up before 8am. If you are on the 9/40 none of this makes any sense.
So in essence I think this is just a method to catch these people that "check out" for three months at a time before they check their email. I doubt LANL or LLNL are as big at this kind abuse as some of the Fed agencies are but we have plenty of stuff in the NNSA complex.
The whole 9/80 think is a total joke. At this point everyone puts in 8 hours with every Friday off. And there are a lot of people who come in only a couple days a week for a few hours. The Friday is off the charts the parking lots are totally empty and you cannot get anything done on a Friday. Also Thus a crazy to as you always get, "time is due by Tues noon" because everyone is gone by 3pm Thurs. I cannot tell you the number of times I get "well it is 4.0pm I am headed home and I am off this Friday so I can get this done on Tues" Somehow Monday is also becoming a day off.
Many of these meetings are pushed by some manager trying to move up and these meetings are often utterly useless or on very narrow in scope but the managers try to get as many people to attend to make it look like a success.
"2. Completed training courses "
The issue is often the training is hard to officially complete because the system
is down, you click on complete and nothing happens. You call the office and no one replies and so on. You can also be assigned training that is not for you and you have call to get it removed. No one ever responds to email, only phone or in person if you can catch them. Email in general is a no go, when you need something fixed.
"3. Filled out several required forms"
Many of these forms are unclear, have contradictions, are needed to be signed by multiple people, but several of the people are never around and will never respond to email. You need to scramble to find someone else to sign. It turns out that this is never the right person, so the the whole thing has to start again.
"4. Spent hours trying to get purchasing to order some supplies needed for the lab"
Getting the purchasing order is the only the beginning of very long nightmare like process of being able to get something. It will be many months, and many many hours of frustration and you may or many not get it in the end.
"5. Attended several 1 to 2 hour required meetings and three days writing a proposal before the government decided to cancel the request"
This just happened recently where people have to write proposals for computing time, a project or grant just to have pulled back, or changed in the last second, or the process updated so the whole thing starts again. You lucky if this cost you only a few hours. Also if you make a mistake or need something fixed or clarified, it will be hard to bet help as no one ever responds to email. It is sort of like the before humans had writing, no one reads. You to talk them in person, and the problem many of these people are never onsite, yet they are also also not working from home.
Reporting on one’s weekly work progress and funding justification is already sanctioned and used by LLNS. It is a common EIT requirement. The DOGE weekly report requirement should be a much easier task for programmatically funded lab employees than it is for EITs looking for work. Unless there is fraud and abuse occurring by programmatically funded employees, which is the very point of the DOGE weekly report requirement.
Monday: Work from home, shopping in Santa Fe, hiking, and wood working.
Tues Come in for 9am meeting on program, lunch with some friends, talk
with some buddies for hour. Go home at 1pm for but and hit bar with buddies at 3.30pm.
Wed, work from home, went to Santa Fe to shop and meet some friends.
Thur, work for home a few hours, take old plot and show it with points.
Come in at 11 am and show program head, buddies do some with their data.
Discuss next 2 years funding request, we will ask for more. Buddies cousin
needs job. Put time and effort in, leave at 2pm. At bar early because on Thur after 3pm it is impossible to get in.
Friday, My Friday off, drive to Arizona.
Next Week, back on Monday night. repeat, process.
In luck program head is in DC this week, so I do not have to come in at all.
It is a good question about how efficient the labs could be. In my Division the leader thinks that success is how big the group is and hence how much money it brings in. However if you look at the quality of groups in terms of degrees, awards, accomplishments, placement and so on it is the smaller groups that are much better. These smaller groups the group leaders simply said we only higher at a certain level. Even we had funding we will not hire random people because it is short sighted. These smaller groups are dinged and the managers let go. The groups grew but the quality decreased. It is a weird situation when groups or divisions are only awarded by size. It creates huge inefficiencies. Many groups are now twice the size they were 20 years ago but half as good. Something is seriously wrong and this theme repeats throughout the lab. Hence lab is 2-3 times larger but it seems to do far less than in the past. We have studies "why is this or that is falling" "why is this not working" and so on, yet it is clear. When the motto is "quality of people do not matter" only "number of people matter" this will be the end result. I predict it will get worse over time because the good people are much more mobile.
start rooting through LANL and LLNL personnel files and start telling the Labs who to fire.
The Labs are hobbled by excessive DOE regulations. I see no sign that anyone is willing to take that on, largely because the would-be reformers don't understand the actual risk issues well enough to take the flack for "reducing safety." They've already backed off on NNSA firings. So, the Complex lumbers on.