A taste of government work in the south - Engineer ERDC Employee Review

Employee retention problem: Since ERDC’s primary mission is to provide employment to MS and LA residents, it is plagued by nepotism and favoritism. Therefore the best and the brightest are usually not considered, and hiring is based on perceived loyalty. Managers are hesitant to hire out-of-state candidates as federal employees, because they are worried they will leave after a few years. When out-of-state employees are hired, they are treated with mistrust and not given access to career growing opportunities because they might leave. These reasons, along with others outlined below, lead to extremely high employee turnover. Location: The main ERDC campus is located in a highly undesirable location, which affects recruiting and retention of competent personnel. If you are not from MS, or the south, there is no incentive to stick around because there are better and nicer places elsewhere. Simmering racial tensions lie just below the surface, even in the workplace. Since MS public education is atrocious, most ERDC employees with children, either move to Clinton, which has a better school district, or send them to private school. Restaurant and dining options are limited, with high occurrences of food poisoning. Quality healthcare is lacking and often requires driving to bigger cities like Jackson. The climate is not conducive to outdoor physical activities for at least half the year. Managers: To appear successful one must become a manager. Starting from lowly team leaders, the selection criteria boil down to time in federal service or blatant favoritism. Naturally, team leaders aim to ascend to better paid management positions. This is usually achieved by bringing in large dollar amount projects. These projects are often technically unsound and doomed to failure. Therefore a common strategy is for the original proposing managers to take credit for bringing a large pot of money but when the project starts, to distance themselves by moving to other (management) positions. Newer employees, who are tasked to work on such projects, are thrown under the bus. Also, when everyone aspires or is heavily encouraged to become a manager, not that many people are left to do sound technical work and ensure knowledge continuity. Other cons: Lots of red tape due to government restrictions, but it is manageable. Cliques based on race, religion and place of upbringing. To a large extent, authorship in publications is politically driven in order to sugar up people in positions of power. Lifers tend to be threatened by new hires, and often exhibit irrational likes and dislikes. Usually there is only one subject matter expert, because of fear for internal “competition.” Nothing happens to incompetent employees, and they know it. Contractors are sometimes treated like garbage. Long-term training (Masters, PhD degrees) is conducted as a part-time effort that does not truly benefit employees; in fact, it puts them in a disadvantage over “regular” graduate students: they work in isolation and away from their research group, and they are at the bottom of their adviser’s priority list. This results in spending an awful long time trying to graduate with minimal learning.