To wonder why people dislike Civil Servants?

[tequilasunrises]

Disclaimer: I am one.

I’ve only worked in one Government department but it’s mostly filled with people who work incredibly hard and are passionate about what they do. In spite of the fact that they aren’t paid as well as they could be in other industries, have shoddy infrastructure and IT, are understaffed and overworked etc.

Yet many people seem to think we are on some sort of gravy train and just sit around smoking cigars and ripping up taxpayers fivers.

I just wonder why really.

Oh, and civil servants, in MOD at least, range from your own pusher to translators, nuclear engineers, medical staff, and many other professions and skills in between.

Own pusher = pen pusher

The civil service is such a broad organisation. 'People' don't like civil servants because they haven't really thought about who they are or what they do. If they had they would realise what a ridiculous thing it is to say.

@BuzzShitbagBobbly

I have worked in the private sector and in my experience the infrastructure and IT is a LOT better. Obviously I can’t speak for everywhere but I’ve never had any issues with lack of space/constant IT outtages etc like I have where I am now.

I stay public because I genuinely enjoy what I do and I think it’s inportant. Like a lot of people I imagine.

My leave allowance is the same as my DH who works in private but I do very much appreciate the flexible working.

The pension and family friendliness I think are excellent ‘perks’ but I think it would be good if more companies aspired to offer them rather than tearing down the CS for having them. It’s enabled more women to stay in work which is a great thing.

*important

I'm a civil servant and people tend to think my job is

a) secure (it is relatively, many yrs service)

and b) fancy and important (it is not fancy, and whether it's important or not is entirely subjective!)

Pretty much everyone I work with works very hard. There was a drive to deal with the piss takers a few years ago, that definitely made a difference.

Having worked in both I think the "civil servant" you find in Whitehall and in Operational departments like the DWP/HMRC are very different. Whitehall is very white, tends to be younger and very enthusiastic. You get more of your "lifers" in regional ops department.

I think you will always get bad press if you're the person on the front line delivering bad news (eg universal credit) but it's unfair - people are just doing their job. I used to work in a "bad news" ops dept, it was always bad hear from us. Almost without exception we got compliments on how professional we were and how we made a hard time as painless as possible for them, complaints were very low.

Would also echo everything @SophiaLarsen has said. (And this is also very very typical of BBC staffers. I haven’t got time or inclination to list the multitude of problems with the culture at the BBC but I am thrilled it’s about to be made more accountable.)
A friend of mine was pretty high up in the civil service until recently and while I respect them enormously I have been constantly amazed at just how intransigent and stubborn they are in their thinking and their refusal to entertain - never mind embrace - change. It makes sense that the civil service would require some serious change in order to implement something like Brexit, it’s going to be interesting to see how that all pans out...

I know someone that works for the civil service and freely admits they get easy targets. He can hit his day target in the morning then dicks about on the internet the rest of the time.
I know someone else who frequently runs out of things to do.
I work for the nhs In a clinical role and don’t really consider it to be civil service especially as it’s clinical. It wouldn’t be in any other country and I definitely don’t ever run out of work to do.
Sometime is feel like working for the nhs is all the worst bits of being a civil servant without any of the good bits. We don’t get a day off on the queens birthday for one thing!

I left HMRC after just 7 weeks because after 20yrs in banking, the culture shock was too much for me to tolerate.

I don't hate civil servants, but the ones I worked with were jobsworths, lacking in commercial judgement, completely hostile to change and governed by bureaucracy to such an extent that the actual job was impossible to do. I ran straight back to banking as fast as I could with the overarching view that things in the civil service are desperately inefficient, which is possibly unfair given I was there for such a short time.

Two close friends of mine are in the civil service. They are both hard working and diligent. However, they have complained about various reports they have had to manage over the years. A poster above mentioned the appraisal system. I think that is part of the issue. She had a dreadful bloke working for her - lazy and shit at his job. But if she had given him a poor appraisal she would have been stuck with him forever. So she gave him a half decent review, he moved on at the next rotation to become someone else's problem and the cycle begins again.

Many years ago my flatmate worked for HMRC, the thing that always sticks in my mind was her sick days allowance.

Her boss used to tell her how many sick days she had left, in that same way other places remind you to take your holiday. I remember on one occasion we had a big night out planned and she had
pre-booked the next day as sick leave.
At the time I worked in a job where your leg would have to be hanging off before you could go home 30 minutes early!
I am sure it's all changed now as this was a long time ago.

My DH is one too.
He often gets shouted and sworn at if people don’t get what they want or don’t get it fast enough whilst he is trying his utterly best to help them but has to follow the rules.

I think people act out their frustrations on them which is unfair.

I worked with the civil service when I was employed by an IT company.

The internal hiring structure meant a lot of the staff were incompetent and clearly didn't have the skills required to do a good job. I was exasperated on a daily basis by the lack of knowledge and mistakes that were made.

I had to make a formal complaint about a member of staff who worked for the DVA and was entirely useless. He actually put learner drivers in danger. It took ages for him to be eventually sacked. There are of course some great workers but the incompetent employees I have seen have been down right dangerous.

Partly because of pious attitudes like that. If the private sector is so amazing, why are you all staying public and working in such a terrible place?

This, from @BuzzShitbagBobbly

I’m an ex-senior civil servant, recruited from the real world (ie the private sector). I left because, amongst other things, I couldn’t face the whinging from mediocre colleagues.

They all thought that if they moved to the private sector they would earn twice as much and get big bonuses. Rubbish. I worked with lazy people at relatively junior levels, earning £35k for avoiding work.

I asked why they didn’t just move to the private sector then: £70k plus bonuses, according to their reasoning. Strangely, none of them did!

My ex-colleague used to work in IT for the council, he said he can't bear it because there was not much to do! The pay is about the same but you often get better pension deal. I wouldn't mine working as one.

I'm not a civil servant (and don't hate them) but I have worked with a lot and find many extraordinarily frustrating.

Many don't have a he expertise needed to guide particular projects, it's not their fault, they often get moved around departments climbing the ladder so don't always have the experience. The problem is they often don't accept this and think they know better how to implement projects than the people on the ground. This generally results in a massively bureaucratic and time wasting process to get a mediocre result. If you are in the private sector where time is a business cost this can be very irksome. This process is amplified if you are in the Regions and trying to deal with London based civil servants.

I worked for HMRC for 33 years, from 1975.
I used to have people say "How do you sleep at night" and "It's alright for you, you don't have to pay Income Tax as it's a perk of your job" (certainly is NOT) and "I pay your wages"
I think the Public generally despised us.

On the other hand, I worked with a LOT of staff who truly didn't give a damn whether they gave good service or not, were incompetent and/or bone idle to boot. It was incredibly difficult to get them dismissed as the bloody Union would back them to the hlit irrespective of overwhelming evidence of their shite-ness and piss-poor attitudes. They were usually the one's who would whinge about the poor pay and how much more they could earn outside CS, yet never ever made any move towards getting out! Infuriating!

Disclaimer: I am one too! The Civil Service covers a very broad spectrum of jobs and I'm not sure people dislike all of them
But, I work in a generally disliked department, by it's very nature we often give people news they are upset with - although we also help hundreds and hundreds too - that doesn't often hit the newspapers strangely!

I read on another MN thread once a remark that was quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard along the lines of how could people doing my job sleep at night?! If that poster truly thought that the hard working people who I work alongside, who deliver an excellent service despite its budget cuts, staff shortages, lack of training..have anything to do with policy making or changing laws or regulations then they are seriously naive or deluded. We do our best with what we are given and I for one am proud to give the service I do.

I love my civil service job. It’s policy and has a lot of intellectual challenge. I work extremely hard - well over my contracted hours. most people I meet seem to think my job is very important and glamorous but it’s often quite mundane. Proof/sense reading my team’s letters to the public for example.

I spend an inordinate amount of time doing battle with pointless internal bureaucracy and clunky out of date systems tho. I think the civil service is just to big and yet fragmented to be efficient. HR are so useless that it’s practically impossible to successfully fire (or indeed hire or move) someone. I’ve done this twice and I sure not sure I have the emotional resources to do it again when your main battle is the people who are supposed to be on your side. I can see why people let poor performance slide tbh.

It's like anything, I think, there are good and bad in all fields.

A lot of people's experience of civil servants is bound to be negative.
It'll be a civil servant who tells you you must pay this amount of tax/aren't entitled to this benefit/have failed to comply with this or that regulation/pay a penalty for being late with your vat returns and so on. They hardly ever get to deliver a positive message, the poor sods.

I was hugely impressed when a friend who was a senior bod in the Inland Revenue (it was that long ago!) managed to establish a legal principle to do with tax paid by UK banks on something to do with currency trades. It meant that all the banks ended up paying tens of millions more in tax, which was probably enough to build a hospital in those days.

I think a lot of civil servants are unsung heroes in a lot of ways.

I think that most people don’t realise how underpaid the civil service is these days and are envious. Others just look down on civil servants for Not doing very well in life.

A Civil Servant friend of mine had to work with a poster of her Government Minister grinning down at her all day long.

She deserved every penny she was paid for enduring that alone!

I have no issues with civil servants... however those who work for DWP I do. Simply because most of them are unhelpful arseholes who don’t want to educate themselves to help others.

I worked as an external for one of the big departments.

The majority of civil servants were nice, intelligent and hardworking. Two of the bosses were awful bullies. They made me so stressed I had to leave the job. I genuinely wonder if they were psychopaths. The one who I worked most with was also bad at his job and he had tens of people working for him!

The not enough work/ sick day / department being chocka full of inept people things aren’t things I recognise but perhaps I’ve just been lucky so far.

My thread was inspired by an article I read yesterday in the DM about Dominic Cummings attacking the MoD and there were so many comments bashing civil servants and their ‘gravy train’.