Kate Yemelyanov

Oh, why I am next generation? Let me try again. (Ahem.)

Hired at 21.
That was 19 years ago.
I still like it here.

A meeting expands
To fill available time.
Summer. My office.

I blame the patriarchy.

The “technical things” are the things that have a day-to-day impact on whether jobs get announced and people get paid. My agency is in the midst of paying out a lot of money to staff who were excluded from OT pay because of a technical error. As I tell our customers, HR regs are written in a language like legalese that uses English words but is…[Read more]

We’re having the same conversations now about the impact of “social media” that we used to have about “the world-wide web” and “electronic bulletin boards” 15 years ago. I think trying to reach out to multiple strata of multiple societies for multiple purposes is just an inherently messy business.

Government “mission support” or admin staff work under regulatory and operational constraints that our private sector counterparts do not. I was on TV overseas once explaining the U.S. electoral college – in a foreign language – and that was a cakewalk compared to the effort I have to put into making USG procurement and HR policies comprehensible…[Read more]

I once had a senior leader in my bureau ask me in a full staff meeting who was looking after my newly born third child after I returned to work. I told him she was in a basket in a closet where she would be safe until I got home. People do make the darnedest assumptions about what’s appropriate to ask of moms – don’t get me started on strangers…[Read more]

I can’t answer to the “good” part since I haven’t experienced it myself, but I think some State Department people in Vienna have developed one …