From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside of such a time of crisis (since this lab seem dedicated solely to outbreaks, not research), which is when the parent entity should temporarily allocate more people.
From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside of such a time of crisis (since this lab seem dedicated solely to outbreaks, not research), which is when the parent entity should temporarily allocate more people.
> From 11 to 3 employees. Doesn't seem that outrageous outside
I hope I never have you as my manager If you think a ~70% reduction in head count isn't outrageous.
I've worked along scientists a few times, many twiddling their thumbs and coasting along on the back of their PhD. No idea if this applies here, mind you, but I don't see an innate need for that many people, even if this disease has major outbreaks (let's say > 50 cases) every few years.
3 does seem a bit low, though.
Impressive judgment from someone who presumably has no knowledge of the types of problems the lab was addressing, the scope of research, the actual individuals employed, or the prior and anticipated impact of their work. This was the whole problem with DOGE: cuts were indiscriminate and based more on feels than factual data. I won't posit that those cuts were all downside - but we will be paying to discover which were really needed for years to come.
> many twiddling their thumbs
Do you think some of them were wasting their time, by posting on various online forums only slightly related to their jobs?
> I've worked along scientists a few times
You should have mentioned this up front so we all knew you were fully qualified to understand the staffing needs of critical governmental health organizations.
We've discovered that ambulance drivers are only driving people to hospital for 5% of the week. As such we've cut the 20 staff that used to give 120% coverage to 5. The 4 days of coverage is still more than 8x more than needed to cover working 5% of the week, so obviously we don't expect any deaths on the days we don't have any ambulance drivers working.
In the unlikely event excess ambulance drivers are needed we'll temporarily hire them on an ad hoc basis at double the normal rate. They will obviously happily jump on this opportunity, working less than 5% of the year at double pay is much better for just those hours than being paid 60% of what you'd get as an ambulance driver in another career all year round and actually being able to afford your mortgage.
The thing about crises is by the time you’re in them, they’re gonna cost way more to clean up than just not getting there in the first place.
Sounds like the lag time between going from 11 to 3 employees and having an outbreak was ~a year, so unless this is wrapped up fast enough and cheaply enough to cost less than 8 FTEs, we didn’t save a whole lot of money and we caused a whole lot of distress, so it’s hard to really call this a win.
That ignores that point that this department only activates after the outbreak has started, so if it was increased to 100 people it wouldn’t have prevented the crisis.
The article indicates that the department responds to crises, it did not indicate that was its only function.
Astroturfing still paying good?
While you're at it, give AI to the 3 employees and they will do the work of 30 /s