As a side note: that is very similar to how a consulting team would operate. Very young (inexperienced) team on the ground + senior people flying in from time to time.
Not going to defend the cult of the consulting MBA, but when I was running strategy work, my consultant-level kids had been recruited from a small number of MBA programs, undergone six-month intensives, and then spent 2-3 years as entry-level spreadsheet jockeys and task trackers before they were given any actual responsibilities, and we would have had a partner or up-for-partner management overseeing every identifiable tranche of work (plus federal work usually requires additional oversight layers and sometimes totally separate resource silos). Worlds different than parachuting in a handful of teenage or barely post-undergrad interns and letting them run riot through the most sensitive areas of the federal government without so much as an MSA or SOW, let alone security clearance investigations.
> letting them run riot through the most sensitive areas of the federal government
This is an overstatement. These are not the most sensitive areas of gov't. Surely, that would be anything with national secrets: military planning, CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.
You could say it's the most sensitive area that affects the day-to-day life of everyday people. Especially medicaid and co. for the older voterbase (AKA the one that actually votes). Those Intelligence agency data wouldn't have made as big a public outcry in comparison.
dunno, I've seen some of the McKinsey, Deloitte, PwC, and Bane work... I'm skeptical anyone senior ever looks an anything. McKinsey specifically feels like the Jim Cramer of consulting with every blog post they write. Maybe your experience is different, but it feels like the consultants do the same as DOGE is doing.
most of the NASA engineers that took us to the moon were very young. Young people accomplished major feats of achievement, and continue to do so.
considering that knowledge decays (often rapidly) as a function of time since the last instruction, "experience" seems like it might be of far less value than temporal proximity to a previous college education.
Consulting is a sales job where senior partners need to hit numbers which affect their compensation, so they will sell anything and everything in terms of the projects that they leverage their (balkanised, aggressively dysfunctional internal politics) firm’s weight to achieve credibility to perform a massive turnaround or implementation or some other such project, and then sic a bunch of people ranging from fuck all experience to just learning to play the game onto delivery.
The partner will appear at key points to ensure that the executives who approved the contract are happy and hopefully sell the next round of work.
If they shit the bed, which they do frequently, no worries, they’ve already sold the next deal elsewhere and now their firm may be out from that organisation for a year or two and one of the others will come in and screw up for a few years and then they’ll be back.
Incidentally and because this should be a basic competency of government, the Australian government, owing to a huge number of significant scandals including one in which PwC used the information in crafting taxation law and then sold it to international corporations to fucking obliterate any sense of Chinese walls (in which no one has gone to jail and most careers have emerged semi intact, if with a bunch of egg that any self respecting person would go and take a long hard look in the mirror at themselves for having been involved in) - the last 3 years has seen a modest relocation of these basic functions of government internally.
Which one of our political party leaders is now campaigning on removing, in order to bring back the gravy train to the incompetent consulting fucks. (Both our primary party leadership need to have a stern talking to because one side is actively trying to channel MAGA energy, and the other seems unwilling to do anything useful.
So turns out I had a bit to get off my chest, I hope no one found that too boring
