Your complaint is that people working on difficult problems receive a decent salary and medical coverage? That seems... misplaced.

no actually, many people do work on "difficult problems" and do their work, while the City described, has an army of workers who are well paid, yet do not keep up with basic tasks. It seems that fixing roads is one of the oldest jobs in the civilized world, and that the city workers have found a way to get paid, and also do less and less. Their pay is quite good compared to other forms of work, while "gig work" and other abuses increase. Medical coverage is a massive shortcoming in the current US system and very much in California, so the medical benefits paid to the very same workers are an obvious sore point. What part of that is not clear?

Wait until you hear what people think about programmers. Bunch of lazy entitled #$#@$ADF getting paid 6 figures to make yet another social media website or regulatory arbitrage play. And they get health care, free food, and unlimited vacation on top of that, even though their app is buggy most of the time! The nerve of those guys, who do they think they are!?

Fixing roads isn't as easy as you think it is. Oakland's roads are heavily used, which means that a pothole fix isn't just a matter of pouring some asphalt into the pothole. That's a temporary fix that will only last a few weeks before the patch fails. You need to clean the pothole and surrounding surface, lay in tack, lay in and roll the asphalt to make a clean patch, and you need to keep the asphalt blocked off for a day for it to cure. Oh, and you need to use the proper type of asphalt to handle the level of road traffic, and you can't get this type of asphalt at Lowes or Home Depot.

When I hear about a job function that used to be good, but are now crap, and are embedded in a bureaucracy... I wonder what it is about the system that has changed to incentivize worse work.

Unless you have some inside knowledge that these individuals are to blame, it seems to me that approaching it as a systems problem, with curiosity, would result in being closer to the root cause.

Workers being well paid and having health care should be the norm. Gig workers being exploited doesn't mean we should spit vitriol at workers who aren't exploited - even if they are exploiting the system (which is not clear in this case).

> approaching it as a systems problem, with curiosity, would result in ....

yes, agree

> has an army of workers who are well paid, yet do not keep up with basic tasks.

has it occured to you that despite this "army of workers", it might not actually be enough people to keep up with the basic tasks? We've had 40 years of the dominant American cultural message being that government is the problem, and in such a climate it would hardly be surprising if government is fundamentally underfunded and understaffed.

How would you appraise the correct level of resources to "keep up with basic tasks" ?

I think that the reality of city-based finance in the USA is quite mixed, and that failed, failing and increasingly failed city administration, in cities of more than 100,000 people say, is widespread. I talked to some go-getter Code-for-America type consultants, and they said it was common to get retained to show numbers on the city budget, and that the depth and clarity of dot-com style numbers, overviews and flow analysis, would stun the city administrators, and not-a-few cases, cause an immediate cease-work order when embarassing or egregious budget allocations came to obvious light. My overall, gut reaction is that it is highly variable on a case-by-case basis, the amount money passing through city hall. In the case that started my rant, there is plenty of money. Yet maintenance not only does not grow with city growth, but falls behind further. Not always, but common now.