On the office of the future:
When you need to work in a “think tank” you often need some quiet in order to engage in creative thought. Open office planning gives anything BUT a quiet work environment. There are plenty of places that OOP makes sense, such as places where the work is repetitive and doesn’t take a lot of inventiveness, etc. Where you need to have a quiet environment without interruptions, I’d be as well served to go out to the corner of our golf course and set up a lawn chair and a laptop. At least there, I could work in peace.
—Spaceman Spiff
On resources versus results:
One could argue that the reason the highest performers excel is because they get the most funding, and the reason the underperformers can’t do better is because they don’t have enough resources to do the job. If you falter in performance, you enter a downward spiral that you can’t get out of. I’ve always thought that the answer is to do actual program analysis and figure out why the underperformers are not doing as well as the A-players, implement corrections, then resource them all appropriately. Using funding as a carrot or stick is not the answer.
— LongTermFed
On OPM’s HR Services office:
OPM needs to stop the money-making operations and go back to basics. They should clean up the CFR and seek to create coherent HR policies. As it works now, the grades of the jobs are determined by the amount of pay that the supervisor wants the person to receive and staffing is a jumble of regulations, executive orders, court rulings [and] OPM guidance that often conflict with
one another.
—flyoverland
On cyber arms control:
It’s not “illegal cyber weapons trade” until laws are passed to make it illegal. Language like “may be used as a cyber weapon,” will be difficult to contend with. Every piece of software will fit that description. Prosecution will more likely resemble persecution, as those targeted by that will differ from those not targeted only by political alignment, I predict.
— Juan Two
On the Navy’s stealth destroyer:
This is a destroyer, right? The weaponry described appears to be designed primarily to execute missions against land-based targets, whereas the destroyer
mission has traditionally focused
primarily against potential enemy sea-based assets. As such, the vessel is really in a hybrid category of its own, and referring to it as a destroyer is problematic.
— msgrowan
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