What? That was the exact opposite lesson from that debacle:
Instead of being wowed by shiny new technical solutions promising superiority being hawked by "the nerds", stick with tried and true methods, especially when it comes to critical ventures like an election. "Move fast and break things" is the absolute last thing anyone organizing an election should want.
Eh. Outside of using USAJobs I have never gotten, with such clarity and absolute certainty, a comparable sense that I was completely wasting my time. It's a resume black hole to which Taleo pales in comparison. I've applied to probably a thousand federal jobs over the past 8 years, doing all the little skill questionnaires, dutifully updating and tailoring my resume every few months that gets plenty of attention in the private sector, and never have gotten so much as a peep from the federal government - aside from to inform me that a vacancy has been cancelled or filled. I'm a white male and not a combat veteran, so I assume that's the problem and no amount of skill will make the government interested.
Needless to say, it's a real laugh reading these constant claims of a tech shortage in the government.
> I'm a white male and not a combat veteran, so I assume that's the problem and no amount of skill will make the government interested.
That's not helping any, probably. But you may just need someone to coach you through the application process. It's super-weird and you've gotta write everything so that there's no reading between the lines or figuring anything out—if a requirement reads "did X with Y for Z duration" you have to explicitly say that you "did X with Y for Z duration" somewhere in your résumé. That kind of thing. It's a pain in the ass but if you're not doing that and 100% sure you check all the requirement boxes with the document you're sending, you may as well not bother applying.
[EDIT] to be clear, that's the case for pretty much any job with the US government, plus state governments usually. Like most weird stuff about doing business with the government it's probably the result of policies aimed at reducing bias and corruption.
I wonder if being a white male is really holding you back. Might be worth it reading up on the legal obligation to identify yourself demographically. If you had an iota of non-white DNA could you call yourself black? If you felt transgender, could you call yourself a woman?
Personally, I doubt demographics are holding you back. Plenty of white men work for the government. I expect it's just hard to get a job because of the inefficiencies of government and the underlying details of job postings. For example, I used to work at a company where, for some reason, whenever we hired someone we had to first list a job posting for some period of time, but the posting was for the position that would be filled by the guy we just decided to hire, so everyone applying to it would be rejected.
Still, if it's legal to take an expansive view of your own demographics, it might be worth it to try. That way you could tell if it's really your white maleness holding you back.
I get a different feeling of wasting my time. Not because I expect to not get hired (though I well might not), but because I expect the project to be a complete waste of time. I expect it to be mismanaged to the point of either never being completed, or of being completed but completely useless. I expect to be able to make no meaningful difference, and meaningless in my work is not good for my psyche.
Disclaimer: I have no actual experience with working for the government. I probably read more about a higher proportion fo their disasters than I do their successes.
As a remote worker who may not exactly be the best and brightest but for whom the pay for the digital service is close enough to right to be appealing and who'd probably be a real asset to them, aside from getting hired apparently being a months-long process I stopped even looking when it became clear most of the positions are short "term of service" things. If I'm going gov it's for the retirement and bennies. The long haul. A "term of service" that takes a bunch of unusual effort to get and pays just OK holds zero appeal.
Someone posted it in an HN Who's Hiring once so I checked it out, got pretty excited, got a little bummed about the application process and how long it takes but the directions were very clear and I've got a guy who's basically a government bureaucracy expert to read over my stuff for me so I was resigned to dealing with that crap.. but then I realized that it's all (current postings, upcoming postings, the ones the poster had claimed were revolving evergreen posts even if they weren't marked as open) defined-term rather than regular, actual employee, and then got very unexcited.
Not worth the effort if there's a hard expiration date on it, or even the specter of such, when the retirement, healthcare, and stability parts are much of the appeal. Plus what if I finally get to work on something I'm actually kinda proud of, then have to leave? No. Not putting in unusual effort for that.
That sounds like a USDS† position. My understanding is that they do things that way due to unstable budgets, because their pay is out of whack compared to the rest of the government (because pay at an equivalent position outside of the government is much higher).
USDS and 18F make their rounds on HN periodically. The mandatory relocation without relocation stipend, required drug testing, and security clearance all make recruitment difficult.
Fun fact: the reason that USDS applicants (who would work within the Executive Office of the President) have to take a drug test goes to a Clinton-era legal battle that went to the Supreme Court: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-03-mn-24917...
I wonder if it would be possible to model work for the USDS in terms of side projects. I would not want to take a leave of absence from work to serve in the USDS, but I would definitely love to put 10-20 hours a week on the side for a really meaningful side project.
I don't know if that model would be tenable, but I think it would attract many people who already spend that kind of time on side projects.
One thing I have observed about software and organizations is that big, intractable problems in code are often rooted in big, intractable problems in the organization that produced it. If you look at a codebase and find that choices in one half are half-incompatible with the choices in the other, the likely explanation is that the organization itself has factions, each of which insists on doing things its own way, and management can't or won't step in to resolve the deadlock.
In short, working for dysfunctional organizations means all your time as a programmer is spent catering to the dysfunction.
Now, is it possible for an organization to be functional when all its priorities have been set by congress? Or the president? This president? Or worse, whose priorities have been set by this president and the congress that is diametrically opposed to him?
> One thing I have observed about software and organizations is that big, intractable problems in code are often rooted in big, intractable problems in the organization that produced it.
I appreciated the allusion to Conway's Law here. I will say that in a government of 2M+ people, there's a ton of problems that are completely non-partisan that everyone would like to solve where technical expertise can make a real difference.
I spent a little over 3 years in USDS and it changed my life. If you are interested in working on high impact projects that affects hundreds of millions of Americans, I would strongly recommend that you give it a try.
24 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadInstead of being wowed by shiny new technical solutions promising superiority being hawked by "the nerds", stick with tried and true methods, especially when it comes to critical ventures like an election. "Move fast and break things" is the absolute last thing anyone organizing an election should want.
Needless to say, it's a real laugh reading these constant claims of a tech shortage in the government.
That's not helping any, probably. But you may just need someone to coach you through the application process. It's super-weird and you've gotta write everything so that there's no reading between the lines or figuring anything out—if a requirement reads "did X with Y for Z duration" you have to explicitly say that you "did X with Y for Z duration" somewhere in your résumé. That kind of thing. It's a pain in the ass but if you're not doing that and 100% sure you check all the requirement boxes with the document you're sending, you may as well not bother applying.
[EDIT] to be clear, that's the case for pretty much any job with the US government, plus state governments usually. Like most weird stuff about doing business with the government it's probably the result of policies aimed at reducing bias and corruption.
Personally, I doubt demographics are holding you back. Plenty of white men work for the government. I expect it's just hard to get a job because of the inefficiencies of government and the underlying details of job postings. For example, I used to work at a company where, for some reason, whenever we hired someone we had to first list a job posting for some period of time, but the posting was for the position that would be filled by the guy we just decided to hire, so everyone applying to it would be rejected.
Still, if it's legal to take an expansive view of your own demographics, it might be worth it to try. That way you could tell if it's really your white maleness holding you back.
Disclaimer: I have no actual experience with working for the government. I probably read more about a higher proportion fo their disasters than I do their successes.
Someone posted it in an HN Who's Hiring once so I checked it out, got pretty excited, got a little bummed about the application process and how long it takes but the directions were very clear and I've got a guy who's basically a government bureaucracy expert to read over my stuff for me so I was resigned to dealing with that crap.. but then I realized that it's all (current postings, upcoming postings, the ones the poster had claimed were revolving evergreen posts even if they weren't marked as open) defined-term rather than regular, actual employee, and then got very unexcited.
Not worth the effort if there's a hard expiration date on it, or even the specter of such, when the retirement, healthcare, and stability parts are much of the appeal. Plus what if I finally get to work on something I'm actually kinda proud of, then have to leave? No. Not putting in unusual effort for that.
† https://www.usds.gov/faq
Edit: Oh yeah, the short terms hurt as well.
https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=...
Senior ops gig, exempt from civil service rules which means essentially a three-year at-will gig. Below average pay, below average benefits.
I don't know if that model would be tenable, but I think it would attract many people who already spend that kind of time on side projects.
In short, working for dysfunctional organizations means all your time as a programmer is spent catering to the dysfunction.
Now, is it possible for an organization to be functional when all its priorities have been set by congress? Or the president? This president? Or worse, whose priorities have been set by this president and the congress that is diametrically opposed to him?
Count me out.
You've paraphrased (intentionally or not) Conway's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."