Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
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In short there is no way that will work at NNSA labs. The number of managers and there compensation has just grown.
Yes, most notably in 2008, when LLNS laid off over a 100 FTEs so LLNS could bring in more outside Bechtel managers.
Look I have no issue if you can work offsite and do a good job. I know a few people that do this and if they can do this even better offsite great. However this is less than 10 percent of the people that work offsite. Most do a subpar job and I bet 25 percent do absolutely nothing. We have some people that show up 2 days a month and I think that is the only days they work. No one says anything.
Over the years the lab has just gotten much slower, weirder and less efficient. It comes in waves, the first jump up was WHL in 2000. The next was with Nanos 2005. After that was Bechtel which had two periods one right when they got in and another around 2014. It was steady for some time and in 2000 we had Covid. Again 2023 with mass hire, and now in 2025 with Trump and push for AI. I am not alone in this all sorts of staff are now saying they simply cannot get much done anymore due to the crazy paper work, team members not being onsite, managers and staff not responding, issues with maintenance, and charge codes not going far enough any more so huge amounts of time are spent on chasing small bits of money. I get why so many staff are so mentally checked out and will be happy just to stay home.
FYI: Prior to the UC/LLNL to LLNS change, the powers at be, considered keeping the Science and Engineering departments under UC management, and subcontracting all other areas, including HR, security, etc.
8/11/2025 5:03 AM"
This may explain a lot of other things. We had some external contracts which in the past was reasonably smooth with the LANL paper work. This past 4 months it has turned into a horrific nightmare where they inset on on these crazy checks, redo the checks, repeat, bring in lab legal, and add another oversight group and so on and it never gets done. We have never experienced anything like it before. One of the team members said it may be them trying to say how important the are and creating more work to say how busy. I thought this was bit far fetched but I keep hearing this from other people in other parts of the lab. I think you may be on to something, and could explain the sudden slow down and barrage or weird procedures that appeared out nowhere.
It all kind of makes sense now.