Sometimes fixing what’s broken matters more

Public service is a weird gambit. The trade for some is getting stability in exchange for less money than you’d make in a private-sector job. In a world where nerds have conspired that it’s way better to be a greedy asshole and rule the planet, than to care about your neighbors, it might seem quaint to consider a world where you’d do “more” work without the guarantee of “more benefits.” After all, what’s being the boss if you’d get paid more.

When I give talks overseas, specifically about service design I have to contextualize for my audience that here in the US we have a relatively broad antipathy for public services because we aren’t able to properly exclude those we think are “undeserving” from access to the systems they pay for. This of course horrifies folks when I explain it, but providing this context as a service designer helps me to better articulate what about public service appeals to me.

When I taught about service design last year and we talked about mapping, artifacts like service blueprints presuppose that everyone walking through the door of a service is getting the same service experience when in reality that’s just not true for lots of reasons.

One of the most rewarding things about working with mostly competent people, is how much you learn from them. Sure, you share your smarts back too. But there’s something really wild about working with people that you can learn from like you’re back in school, because you can assemble a motley group of do-gooders who actually have done stuff in the world, and then decided for lots of complicated reasons that it’d be great to use those skills and put them to use making stuff work a bit better and more resilient for their neighbors.

When I first got into management, people I knew on the outside would congratulate me, assuming that my newfangled title came with a raise. I always had to explain it didn’t. When I took over my division — at my peak I’ve had 11 direct reports — with around 40ish people, folks were super confused when I mentioned this new role always didn’t come with any fancy new benefits or check. Just more meetings, different responsibilities and the added bonus of atrophying my design skills because these roles had different needs.

Why would you do that? What’s the incentive, then?

Depending on how spunky I was feeling that day, I’d usually say “nothing, you shouldn’t do it, it’s mostly not worth it.” The payoff for me was largely about seeing how things worked and thinking I could use my skills to make things a bit better for the people I work with. One of the things I’ve grown to appreciate about life is discovering there are the types of people that see a problem and decide to fix it because they don’t want the problem to exist anymore, and the sorts of people who see a problem and think “that’s not my problem” and just leave it for someone else to deal with.

There are lots of these kinds of decisions happening in the world every day, especially if you live in a city. I don’t always pick up every piece of trash on the ground, I don’t give money to every person on the street who asks. So I’m not even writing this as some kind of do-gooder. But more often than not, I see problems both large and small that surface in my orbit and I make the decision to deal with it because I’d rather tackle it than leave it for someone else. My reasoning has less to do with service — though there’s a component of that — and more to do with my own understanding of problem-solving and believing “I would solve this better than someone I don’t know or trust to solve it just as well.”

A lot of the boring work is just administrative debt that gets bottled up in organizations large and small. But here’s the thing about that debt - it’s not just paperwork and processes. It’s the accumulated weight of decisions not made, problems not solved, and improvements left waiting. In the private sector, this debt often gets “resolved” through acquisition or platform consolidation - trading long-term institutional knowledge for short-term efficiency gains.

But in public service, you can’t just throw money at the problem or buy your way out. You have to roll up your sleeves and actually fix things. Sometimes that means spending hours untangling byzantine processes that no one’s touched in years. Other times it means building bridges between departments that have operated in silos since before you were born. It’s unsexy work, but it’s what keeps communities functioning.

The real kicker? The satisfaction isn’t in the title or the paycheck - it’s in knowing that somewhere, someone’s day got a little easier because you decided to tackle that mountain of administrative debt instead of passing it along. It’s about maintaining those human connections and institutional knowledge that keep our public systems resilient, even as private platforms try to convince us they can do it better, faster, cheaper.

So yeah, maybe I’m the sucker who took on more responsibility without more pay. But I’d rather be that sucker than the one who saw the problems and walked away. Because at the end of the day, someone has to care about making things work better - not just more profitable.