The City of New York is a remarkably humane employer in many ways. The workforce is diverse in just about every manner you can imagine. We had in our business unit Hispanic folks, Black folks, South Asian people, white people of Irish, Jewish, and South and Central Asian backgrounds. We had an Ivy League graduate, and a majority of people without college educations. There was an individual in the group with only a high school degree, who had a large amount of responsibility, a relatively high salary, and the capacity to draft sophisticated legal documents.

            We found that employees were genuinely caring about each other – particularly when there was family illness – people covered for each other and were very supportive. We celebrated births of grandchildren, birthdays and retirements. Sick days were generous. The City’s health benefits were comprehensive, the retirement benefits were generous – for people who stayed with the City for more than ten years, and particularly for individuals who started their careers in City government decades ago. There were also odd benefits that one had to do a little digging to find out about – like for glasses and for the deductibles under other policies. 

            But the idea floating around (particularly in the pages of Manhattan Institute publications) that City government is full of over compensated, richly benefitted timeservers is so just plain wrong as to be practically libelous. In our experience the unions for non-uniformed employees (and we are writing here entirely about non-uniformed City employees, and those who aren’t classroom teachers) were invisible and toothless. To us, the pension benefits were essentially useless, having come to City government mid-career. They are non-portable and unavailable to those with City government for less than ten years. For those who started their work with the City within the last 25 or thirty years, the pension benefits are far inferior to what they were decades ago. The pension benefits are tiered – and the more recently you became employed, the smaller the percentage of your final salary your defined benefits would be after retirement. There are defined contribution plans available, as in most of the private sector, to which the City does not contribute. 

            There are a wide range of protections for City workers ranging from union membership to civil service. The City has a vast range of identity derived protections and trainings, including from sexual harassment and racial discrimination. It appears to be difficult to fire people – we didn’t see it happen. We did see senior people sent to remote, satellite locations to do non-jobs when new senior management was appointed. Unfortunately, those employment discrimination programs, like the board set up to monitor conflicts of interests of City workers, are more often weaponized by employees against each other, than employed to remedy cases of mistreatment. That is, one employee who has a personal issue with another employee files an, often anonymous, complaint with the relevant investigative authority in order to cause problems for his or her unliked colleague. This unleashes an investigation which has to run its course in order to provide an appropriate process; interviewing the individual about whom the complaint was made, and perhaps their colleagues (damaging the subject of the investigation’s reputation, whatever the outcome) in order to establish the facts of the case. Even if there is no finding of wrongdoing on the part of the employee, a good deal of damage to that person can be done.

            And certainly, City government being a political entity, there are plenty of politics driving personnel decisions, and many managers who misuse their authority and treat their subordinates poorly. We encountered no monitoring of bad treatment of City workers by supervisors and no sanctions for abuse of authority – as long as the supervisor wasn’t using their subordinates to do non-city work or engaging in discrimination based on suspect classifications. Treating everyone equally abusively seemed to be OK. While much lip service is paid to best practices in management, there is little training, and almost no actual execution of those best practices. Our agency had an organizational development function made up of perfectly nice people, who didn’t appear to do very much – other than run the occasional employee awards program. And those awards programs tended to recognize longevity of service, rather than outstanding performance. 

            Also odd was that the human resources function of the agency was primarily an enforcement operation – making sure that employees conformed to rules regarding time keeping, vacations, sick days and such. The human resources staff absolutely refused to assist employees in navigating the complex array of benefits and options given to City workers when they are onboarded and during their tenure with the City. A huge information dump of pages and pages of small type text, often poorly copied material describing benefit options is provided to employees at the time of employment – with no one available to assist the employee in making choices. We assume this is to avoid being blamed for providing incorrect information or poor advice. 

            However, human resources staff are eagle-eyed in hunting down errors made by employees in their domain. They are quick to point out mistakes or incomplete information in complex forms. They will contact you when you have tried to access benefits to which you may not be entitled, or when you have taken too much time off, or not provided the proper documentation to justify paid time off. At one point in our tenure, we were docked a day’s pay for taking two mandatory furlough days (during the COVID pandemic) on Christmas week. In the memo announcing the (minimally) budget reducing mandatory five furlough days, it was stated that two days could not be taken in the same week. When we signed up for our furlough days early in the pandemic no one took the time to point that out to us.

We learned a great deal about City benefits literally around the office watercolor. We had a very intelligent colleague with over thirty years of City experience who was extremely helpful in advising us about how to make the most of City employee systems and benefits. Once around said cooler, we mentioned having just returned from having an eye-exam and buying glasses. She said to me, “You didn’t PAY for that did you?” It turned out that the City had an eye care program, that paid for the full cost of the glasses and exam that we hadn’t signed up for. In the same conversation, we learned about a dental program and an obscure program for non-union managers that paid for co-pays and deductibles of other health insurance plans (on the theory that union employees received free health insurance, with no deductibles and no co-pays, and managers should be effectively entitled to the same thing). No one made mention of these benefits when we joined the City, and if materials about these programs were provided to us, we missed them. When we asked for guidance from human resources staff, we were referred to the City’s complex website. 

Civil Service

            While civil service protection was originally created early in the 20th Century as a result of civic movements to reform city government to encourage merit-based hiring and promotion, and to protect employees from political or other arbitrary decisions regarding termination, those goals got lost in the mists of time generations ago. We can see no policy goals now being advanced by civil service other than to employ hundreds of people to design and administer tests that measure nothing of use. The tenure protections seem to keep in their jobs the most belligerent employees and the lowest performers. It is civil service protection that makes motivating and managing underperforming employees difficult to impossible.

            In addition, civil service is an obscure, insiders’ game. While there is a (very well written and interesting) weekly newspaper covering civil service, and a complex series of websites providing information on when exams are given and how they work (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dcas/employment/take-an-exam.page), only insiders seem to know about them and how to navigate them. Civil servants throughout the bureaucracy seem to be members of clans with other members of their clan who work in city government. Knowing which tests to take for which positions is far from obvious (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dcas/employment/open-competitive-exam-notice-archive.page). And, once an individual has taken and performed well on a test, using that performance to actually secure a job can take years, and is also labyrinthian. Without a person experienced with the system to advise you, it is nearly impossible to negotiate it effectively. Of course, there is no one either at the City’s centralized personnel agency, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), or within the many agencies, who can or will advise you. You are entirely on your own to figure out how the system works. It is difficult for me to imagine any graduate of a top college or graduate school learning how to access the system, and then using it to secure a position with city government. The system as a result of its obscurity and complexity discourages outsiders for taking advantage of it. I also suspect that most job seekers need a job in the present, and don’t have the resources to wait the years it generally takes to secure a job through the civil service system.

            And what do the tests, test? Beats the merda out of us, actually! Although we were hired as a “provisional” employee, outside of the civil service system (and one can be “provisional” for one’s entire career, and remain outside of the system – something the gorgons of the system actively work to prevent), we took three exams in order to see what it is was like. City jobs have both a civil service title and a “business” title. The civil service title establishes which competitive test one has to take to be eligible for civil service protection in that position. The business title is the one that goes on your business card – but it has nothing to do with anything relating to compensation and tenure. The compensation for any position is related to its civil service title.

One exam, we took, for the highest level positions, administrative business promotion coordinator (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/20200128000.pdf), was taken entirely on-line, and consisted of in-putting your resume into an on-line form, which would then be scored by some poor soul at DCAS for how well your square peg fits into the square hole. Note also that tests are given irregularly and periodically, some as infrequently as one a decade. Which makes it difficult to gain access to some civil service titles. It is generally impossible from the civil service titles for administrative jobs to determine what jobs the test is actually for. Most are pretty specific though. We aspire to take the examination for ferry boat captain. Seems like a cool job – and pretty straightforward as to what the test is for.

 Notable also is that many tests have “selective certifications” associated with them. Qualifying for the selective certification, moves one to the head of the civil service list for certain positions. In our case, our agency had created a certification which was crafted to match our expertise and experience, making it a near certainty that once we had passed this examination and been placed on the requisite civil service list, and once a civil service position matching the title associated with the test became open at our agency (entirely different from an opening for the business title, for which we had already been hired), we would be a lay-up for the position. All of those various conditions could, and generally do, take years. 

Most tests, however, require going to a test center, and entering answers to questions into a computer. The contents of the tests are closely guarded, and one is not supposed to be able to prepare for civil service examinations. You aren’t supposed to know what is going to be on the test, although the unions provide materials to members regarding test preparation, and there is a company that advertises in the civil service newspaper (The Chief-Leader) that sells practice tests. At the first actual test we took, the union for people in that title handed out calculators (that performed only the DCAS permitted functions) to those waiting on-line for the test. 

The tests we took were for administrative staff analyst (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/201909058000.pdf) and associate staff analyst (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/201909061000.pdf). What those jobs do, and which one is more senior to the other, we can’t recall. What I do remember is that the exam for the lower level title was more difficult. In each case we reported to a DCAS testing center to sit for the exam. We were allowed pencils and a simple calculator. We were not permitted water or snacks. The tests were four hours long. The first test I took was in the middle of the winter. We arrived at the test site a half hour early. We stood on various lines in over-heated hallways for over an hour after the announced time for the test to begin. Eventually, after proving our identity and demonstrating that we had properly registered for the test and had paid the requisite (non-refundable) fees, we were seated at a desk with a computer, and panels on either side, to take the test. The four-hour, multiple choice, test was strictly timed, and it was after 7PM and dark when we completed the test. If one needed to pee, the time came out of your four hours. 

We were already exhausted from the long period of hall standing before the test and were totally wasted when we completed the test. We were given a “provisional” score when exiting the test center. We barely passed. We have eight years of higher education, including in law, statistics, finance and general management. We barely passed. What in God’s name were they testing for? We couldn’t tell you. The questions on both tests seems entirely unrelated to any job in city government we might think of. None of them involved functions we had ever performed in decades of work, including in senior management in very large organizations. Some of the questions had to do with performing statistical analysis involving long strings of numbers, and much work with scratch pad and calculator. Some had to do with highly qualitative personnel decisions. We suspect we got most of the mathematical questions right (which we had the opportunity to check over carefully) and some of the more qualitative decisions (which called for guessing what the conventional wisdom about the decision was). But the exam clearly tested nothing that had to do with any real job in City government. So what was the point? Testing endurance?

Making matters more arbitrary and capricious, after many years we have not received the final results of ANY of the examinations we paid for (and paying for the tests seems like a big deal to DCAS, given what is written in its materials) and took. In the case of the resume-based exam, this likely has to do with DCAS’ not getting around to scoring it – despite the fact that during the pandemic we can’t imagine what else the DCAS staff had to do. The two multiple choice tests are likely the subject to an extensive process of challenges to the answers. Test takers have the right to challenge answers they got wrong, and to argue that the response deemed “correct” by DCAS, was actually incorrect. This is essentially a complex appellate process within DCAS. At the conclusion of the multiple-choice tests, we were given extensive materials explaining this appellate process, and invited us to sessions where the answers would be provided and explained, giving the test taker with an opportunity to evaluate and challenge the “correct” answers. So, we continue to sit and wait. We are certain we will have left government service before there is any chance that we will become eligible for civil service protection. 

What civil service would have provided to me in my senior management position would be job security. While we could be removed from our position, another job would have to be found for us, for which the highest level test we passed qualified us. Likely, such a job would offer a lower salary, but we would be guaranteed that income, and the accompanying benefits, for life – as long as we didn’t do something that clearly violated the rules.

Once a test is scored, a list is created of successful test takers in order of their scores. When positions become open in the appropriate civil service title, agencies are provided with the names of the top three scoring individuals from the list to interview for the open position. The agency is able to hire for those positions only from the civil service list. Once a candidate is selected for a position, they must successfully complete a one-year provisional period before they obtain civil service protection.

 Tests appear erratically. It takes years for the tests to be scored. It takes years for the civil service lists to be created. It may take years for a person’s name to advance on a list to the point where they are considered for an agency position, and then the person must wait a year before gaining civil service status. Franz Kafka could not have devised a more dysfunctional, useless system. The tests evaluate irrelevant knowledge and skills and the process takes years. What highly trained, experienced person would subject themselves to such a hiring process? 

As a result, we have come to the conclusion that process is useless. It does not attract and retain top talent for the City. It does not protect highly skilled, mobile employees from arbitrary treatment. The system makes it nearly impossible to manage low performing long-serving staff. It simply rewards patience and longevity for those who don’t have alternative employment opportunities. We are not sure what useful purpose it serves. That being said, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, almost all of our colleagues in the business unit that we managed were dedicated and highly skilled. So, there must be something to it. But it also protects the two or three out of those thirty who are gaming the system, low performing, belligerent or clueless.