Working for the man

Talked to someone the other day who works for the feds at the Bureau of Economic Analysis. She talked about life working for the government and made the following observations:

* It's easy to get comfortable at the job. You generally get a good salary and benefits such as tuition assistance for graduate school. You get cost of living allowances and regular raises to account for inflation.

* If that isn't enough every few years you get bumped up to the next GS pay grade level.

* While that's nice, basically everyone gets a raise and promotion unless they are thoroughly incompetent. So you don't get a lot of satisfaction out of the promotion.

* Because seniority, rather than merit, is the overriding factor in determining advancement ambitious people tend to leave.

* The result is that unambitious/minimally competent people stay and get promoted. So you end up working for idiots which further quashes individual initiative.

And that seems to be as good an explanation as anything I have heard for how our government operates.