I agree with this, but you have to accompany that with making it just as easy to fire a public servant as it is to fire a programmer.

The bigger problem is with elected offices. We as a society aren’t wired to desire change. We generally prefer incumbents and people who maintain the status quo over anyone “radical” which is a dirty word in politics.

This leads to extreme aversion to any risk taking and creates bureaucracy.

This is opposed to the classic stories about junior engineers who lose their companies money, go into the bosses office expecting to be fired, and the boss says "why would we fire you? we just spent $X training you".

The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...

In San Francisco there are plenty of government workers making well over $300K/year for a safe secure job that you can coast in. That is part of the problem.

As of 2018, about 90 people making 300k or more in SF County, probably over 100 by now.

For government you have to factor in job security, generous pension and benefits, and guaranteed annual pay raises.

Engineers have none of those things.

How about employees making $200K or over? That's 1790, or just about 4%. $100K or over? 15997 employees, or around 39%. So over 60% of SF city employees make under $100K. The median salary, in fact, is just under $86K.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that's lower than Facebook's median salary.

My anecdata is from a different police force elsewhere in the country. There, your pension is based on the average of your last 2 years of service. When you reach retirement age, it is orchestrated for you to get a promotion and as much overtime (at time and a half) as you're able to work. So people double or triple their last years' salary and then retire making more than they legitimately made before the scheme. Millions and millions of dollars are stolen from the people just through this one law enforcement pension program.

My understanding is that's not really true. They do ask a few high-achieving students to join, but those people tend to not be very active in the Party. They accept a lot more based on personal connections (first) and bribery (second).