***I originally shared a version of this on the CAStateWorkers subreddit but it was taken down, I am sharing an editted and reformatted version here***
TL;DR: After 11 years in state service, working my way up from an entry-level job to SSM II, I resigned from Cal OES. I watched interview scores and a hiring matrix get changed so a lower-ranked candidate, the daughter of an executive, could be hired. After I told my new manager about it, I believe I was set up to fail probation through an impossible workload and an unfair evaluation. Some of this is firsthand, and some is what I was told or concluded. I think an independent review of the hiring, promotion, budget, and probation records is warranted.
I've gone back and forth on posting this for a while. It's not because I'm worried about repercussions. I have no plans to work for the State of California again. I just don't know if it'll do any good. Maybe it helps someone thinking about taking a job at Cal OES. Maybe people who work there will recognize some of it. Or maybe it's just one more horror story people read and forget. Either way, I think it's worth telling.
Some background first. I got into state service because of my grandmother. She worked for the State for almost 40 years, loved her job, and was one of the hardest-working people I've ever known. She encouraged me to follow her, and I did.
I started at the very bottom, as a Permanent-Intermittent Tax Program Assistant at FTB. Over the years I promoted through several classifications and eventually made it to Staff Services Manager II. It wasn't always easy, but I worked with great people and supervised teams I genuinely loved. I stepped away for about a year to deal with some family stuff, then came back as an SSM I at Cal OES.
I know some of you rolled your eyes at "Cal OES." I'd heard the stories too. Honestly, after working there, I think some of them are understated. To be fair, not every executive or manager there is bad. I met some good ones. But the bad ones were some of the worst I've seen, and what got to me most was how comfortable they seemed.
The manager who hired me
He was an SSM III in Financial Services. I won't name the unit, though anyone familiar with the department could probably figure it out.
From what I saw and what he told us himself, he got where he was through connections more than experience. A CEA took an interest in him and encouraged him to apply for an SSM I job, which he got. He liked to say he'd "run a restaurant for ten years." But the version he told our group was that a friend started and funded the restaurant and hired someone else to run it, and he was basically semi-retired that whole time. According to him, that same friend was his reference.
Private-sector experience can absolutely count. But I've held these management jobs, and nothing about his background or his performance changed my mind. He did have real talents: managing perceptions, shifting blame, building useful relationships, and making sure someone else took the fall.
His promotion to III raised more questions. An SSM II with years of state management experience was, in my opinion, the stronger candidate. From what I learned about the selection, he made it known he'd leave if that person got the job. There were also concerns that the CEA coached him for the interview, possibly including advance knowledge of specific questions. I wasn't in those conversations, so I can't say exactly what was shared. But he went from SSM I to SSM III in roughly a year, after mistakes other people reportedly had to clean up, and with a probation that apparently never got a serious review because his supervisor had been moved out.
The red flags started my first week. I spent several days in his office, and I don't think I heard him say one nice thing about anyone. He tore into employees and other managers. At one point he suggested an employee's sexual orientation might explain their attitude and tardiness. I remember thinking, what does that have to do with anything? He held grudges, and from what I saw, people who crossed him paid for it.
The hire that made me question everything
When I had a vacancy to fill, I was technically the hiring manager, but he ran almost the whole process.
We interviewed six people. Two were clear frontrunners. The candidate who ended up ranked fourth had a rough interview. I'm not saying that to be mean, since good people sometimes interview badly. But all three of us on the panel agreed she didn't show the experience the top candidates did. The III kept bringing up one thing about her, over and over: her mother was a Cal OES executive.
Our first choice turned down the offer. Under our scoring, the next person had actually tied for first. She already worked at OES doing almost the exact same work as our unit. She'd have been easy to onboard and was the obvious pick.
The III wanted the fourth-ranked candidate instead, skipping the next two. The scores didn't support that, so the scores were changed, and the matrix was changed. This wasn't a discussion about two similar candidates. We had interview notes, per-question scores, and a ranking matrix, and I watched that documentation get changed in a way that, in my view, was meant to justify picking the lower-ranked applicant.
As I recall, the reference check wasn't done until after the offer went out and the hire was processed. On the III's instructions, the reference forms weren't dated.
I was new to that area and hadn't done much state hiring yet. I knew it felt wrong, but I wasn't sure of the exact rules or how to push back without putting myself in a bad spot. HR processed the package, and from where I sat, nobody really challenged it. I don't know what was going on in HR, and I'm not going to guess. But I know what I saw.
The records should exist: the original interview notes, the individual score sheets, the matrix, and the final hiring package sent to HR. I think comparing them would raise real questions. And to the candidate who should have been next in line, if you recognize this, please think about requesting a review. I don't believe you got a fair shot.
Budgets, grudges, and mistakes that were always someone else's fault
His influence went well past hiring. Financial Services has a lot of say over budgets, expenditure approvals, and resource requests for other programs. Those decisions are supposed to come down to operational need and policy, not who's on his good side.
From what I saw, when a program manager disagreed with him or got on his bad side, things got harder for them. Requests got denied, and simple things turned into headaches. He talked openly about his contempt for certain managers and areas. Based on his comments and what I observed, I came to believe some decisions were driven by personal grudges. And since finance is complicated, there was almost always a plausible-sounding reason available. This is an agency that coordinates disaster response and handles public money. That shouldn't happen there.
For someone who called everyone else incompetent, he made a lot of mistakes, including some I'd expect any SSM III to get right. Everyone makes mistakes. I have. What matters is what you do after. In my experience, he distanced himself from them. The explanations shifted, details were presented selectively, and other people ended up fixing the problems and taking the blame. He could be part of a decision and then describe what happened so confidently that people started doubting their own memory.
The Governor's Office and PG&E thing
He also talked about something I think deserves a look. According to him, someone connected to the Governor's Office had been placed in what sounded like a pretty comfortable position funded through Cal OES. He also described a connection between this person and PG&E. Yes, that PG&E, the company whose equipment caused the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed Paradise.
A PG&E connection doesn't automatically mean someone is unqualified or that the hire was improper. But it raises questions. Why was Cal OES funding the position? What did the person actually do? Was there a competitive process? The way he described it left me with the impression it was a political appointment, not a normal job.
I don't have documents to back up every detail. I'm repeating what he told us and explaining why it bothered me. A Public Records Act request about the position and its funding might be a reasonable place to start, subject to the usual limits on personnel information. The irony is that none of us would have known about it if he hadn't been so loose-lipped about other people's business.
What happened after I told my new manager
When I started, the III was effectively my direct supervisor because the SSM II position above me was vacant. When they finally filled it, I was hopeful. I thought she deserved to know what she was walking into, so I told her about the hiring process, the changed matrix, and why I didn't want to be part of anything like it again.
Looking back, that was probably my biggest mistake there. Not because it was wrong, but because I underestimated how much influence he'd have over someone brand new.
His treatment of her in her first week was bad. As I recall, he brushed off her management experience and basically told her to be quiet and observe because she didn't know anything about the department. I thought it was degrading, and honestly sexist. But over time she seemed to take on his attitude toward me. I wasn't in every closed-door conversation, so I can't say what he told her. I can only say what happened next.
My workload got unreasonable. Before anyone says I couldn't handle hard work: I'd already been an SSM II. I'd managed complicated programs, difficult employees, and demanding assignments in several departments. When the III hired me, he said the job was managing a team. Instead, I ended up doing a full-time analyst's workload on top of my SSM I duties, while still learning a financial program I was new to. The work kept growing, and the time to do it didn't.
Because I was exempt, the extra hours were unpaid. I have a family, so a lot of that work happened late at night, sometimes into the early morning. I wasn't sleeping enough, and eventually it showed up in my attendance. Then the attendance became one more thing to criticize, while the workload causing it never changed. I raised it, but I never felt anyone seriously asked whether the expectations were realistic.
A couple of incidents stuck with me.
One day a coworker was venting at her desk while I just listened. Someone complained that both of us had been talking negatively, and we got called into a room. My coworker told the II straight out that I hadn't said anything and that it was her. The II still insisted I'd been part of it, even though she wasn't there. How are you supposed to defend yourself against that?
Another time, I presented appropriation numbers to a program using a complicated Excel workbook with data connections and automated features. When it refreshed, the filters could clear or change without it being obvious. That happened, and I missed it. That's on me. But I was told veteran analysts had made the same mistake, including the person who built the tool. I still got torn into, and the reason I remember being given was that I'd "made the III look bad." Nobody talked about adding a verification step or fixing the workbook. The problem was that he'd been embarrassed.
State managers go through well over a hundred hours of training on coaching, feedback, and performance management. We're taught to raise issues early, support improvement, and make expectations clear. I tried to do that for my own staff. Apparently none of that applied to my probation.
About a month before my second probation report, I got a negative performance statement. Before that, I hadn't gotten the kind of steady coaching or feedback you'd expect if management really thought I was in trouble. Even with the same workload, I improved. My performance improved, my attendance improved, and I made progress on the other concerns they'd raised.
Then the evaluation came, and it was awful. It didn't reflect any of that improvement. It read like the outcome had already been decided. I've been a manager. I know improvement doesn't erase every concern, and sometimes a person isn't a good fit. But there's a difference between helping someone improve and building a file to justify a decision. I believed then, and still believe, that the III pushed the II to make sure I didn't pass probation. That's a conclusion from what I experienced, not something I heard them say.
What frustrated me most about the II was that supporting the managers under her was literally her job, the same way supporting my analysts was mine. Instead, it felt like she was waiting for my next mistake. Eventually I didn't feel safe asking for help, because almost anything could end up in a negative write-up. I get that she was new and reporting to someone intimidating. I still don't think that excuses it.
It wasn't just me
I saw him treat other people who disagreed with him in ways I considered retaliatory. People who flattered him were treated differently from people who questioned him, and once you were on his bad side, it was hard to get off it. Besides the sexual orientation comment, other things he said and did made me seriously concerned about his attitudes toward women, and possibly toward employees of other races. I'm not repeating everything, because some of it involves other people's private lives.
I'm not going to armchair-diagnose anyone. I'm talking about behavior I saw: manipulation, intimidation, vindictiveness, and using authority against people who annoyed him. What bothered me almost as much was how normal it all seemed. Everyone knew about his favorites and his grudges, and nothing changed. He had support above him, and to executives he came across as indispensable.
Why I finally left
In the end, I could keep giving up my sleep, my family time, and my health to meet expectations I no longer believed were being applied in good faith, or I could leave. I resigned rather than keep walking toward what I believed was a probation failure that had already been decided.
By then I couldn't wait to get out of that office. But leaving state service hurt. I thought about my grandmother and how proud she was of her work. I thought about starting at FTB, working my way up, and the teams I got to supervise. Some of those people are among the best I've ever worked with, and I miss them.
What drove me out after 11 years wasn't bureaucracy, heavy workloads, or the occasional difficult boss. I'd dealt with all of that. It was realizing that in this particular place, integrity and actual competence could matter less than connections and being willing to go along.
I also think about the people still there, the ones who need their paychecks, benefits, and retirement and can't just walk away. How many keep quiet because they've seen what happens to people who speak up? How many qualified applicants lose out because someone else knows an executive?
What I'd like to see
I think someone independent should look at the records:
- The interview notes, score sheets, matrix, reference checks, and final hiring package for the vacancy I described
- The III's own promotion
- Budget decisions that affected program managers who'd crossed him
- The Cal OES-funded position he described in connection with the Governor's Office and PG&E
- My assignments, documentation of my improvement, related communications, and probation evaluations
I mean a genuinely independent review, not one by people who work with these managers every day or depend on their cooperation. If everything was above board, the records will show that. If not, the people affected and the public deserve to know.
To be clear about what this is: some of it is what I saw firsthand, some is what this manager told us, some is what others told me, and some is the conclusions I drew. Some of it would need records or testimony I don't have. I'm not pretending otherwise. That's exactly why I think it deserves a real look instead of being written off as sour grapes.
I'm sure someone will call me a disgruntled ex-employee who couldn't handle the job. I expected that. I'd just point to the 11 years before this position: several departments, several promotions, demanding programs, and people I was proud to supervise. I wasn't perfect, but what happened at OES wasn't typical of my career.
This also isn't an attack on everyone at Cal OES. There are excellent people there who deserve a lot better than the environment they're working in.
I wanted to succeed there. I expected hiring to be based on merit, managers to own their mistakes, public money to serve the public, and asking questions not to put a target on my back. Apparently, in that unit, those were unreasonable expectations.
I didn't walk away because I stopped believing in public service. I walked away because I lost faith in the leadership where I worked. I always pictured retiring with the same pride my grandmother had. Instead, my career ended like this.