Feds Take USAjobs.gov Back From Monster, Performance Tanks 175
dcblogs writes "Complaints about the performance of USAjobs.gov, the government's central website for job applicants, are piling up after the U.S. took control this month of the site from Monster.com. The government's official Facebook page has seen nothing but negative comments from users about lag time, search engine failures, and other problems since the U.S. Office of Personnel Management built a new site. The government employs more than 2.6 million people. Linda Rix, the co-CEO of Avue Technologies Corp., a federal contractor who has tested the site, said this about the federal effort: 'They are a personnel management agency, they are not a technology company, and this clearly demonstrates that they don't have the technology skills to be able to do this.'" They're working on it, though — one of their recent Facebook updates says, "Quick update: The three new blade servers have increased our capacity and the system is running smoothly."
meaning of three new blades... (Score:1)
Does that mean three racks of blade servers, or three blade units into a single enclosure?
By comparison, how many servers does Slashdot run on? I remember that something like twelve years ago it was only two...
Re:meaning of three new blades... (Score:5, Funny)
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Then it's safe to say that Slashdot is very efficient...
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Well when Taco left he took everything but the commordore 64s so he could run his 'services'.
Maybe but we are squeezing every last drop of compute power out of that commodore 64. :-)
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But they're really nice C64 blades.
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That explains the lack of an edit button!
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It read pretty clearly to me, 3 blades - 3 blades should serve quite a few job seekers.
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In this day and age, you need at least 5 blades to get close....
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It read pretty clearly to me, 3 blades - 3 blades should serve quite a few job seekers.
Maybe, maybe not.
If the system had 30 blades running it with the crappy performance, then 3 more won't do much. If it had 3 blades before, then maybe 3 more will help, unless, of course, the poor performance is not caused by lack of CPU resources. If it's because of disk or network issues, throwing more CPUs at it will probably make it worse. Or, perhaps the individual blades are underpowered.
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For the last 3 years I've been working in environments where 3 blades would fall under "rounding error" so when they say +3, I go... WHA?
On the other hand..
This is a government job search site we're talking about, not something popular like LOLCATS.
Government takes control of something (Score:3, Insightful)
And it becomes slow, unresponsive, and costly. ...
Nope. No Surprises here.
Re:Government takes control of something (Score:4, Interesting)
Just so we're clear:
1) If Government 'outsources' its IT costs to a cloud service they're idiots wasting money who got conned into an unreliable and insecure buzzword.
2) If the Government brings tech back in house and doesn't use a cloud service they're slow, unresponsive and stupid.
I'm sorry, is there a third option that we're thinking they should adopt?
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Oursourcing is not the same as cloud. It can be, but not always.
Cloud is not the same as insecure, or unreliable. It can be, but not always.
In house is not the same as cheap and responsive. It can be, but not always.
Hope that clarifies things.
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It's simple... the biggest difference between a cushy consulting gig and a government job is the job security and the money. The combination of job security and lower money for government jobs means it's where skilled people go to die...
They need to do two things:
1) remove the job security
2) pay market wages for the same work
But it'll only work if they do both at once...
Re:Government takes control of something (Score:5, Insightful)
1. A single, unified intranet with various services and uniform oversight.
2. A patchwork of outsourced-to-the-lowest-bidder Daily-WTF worthy enterprisy "commerical" websites for every separate service (HR, Payroll, Benefits, travel, documents, petty cash etc. etc.). Because that's my reality in the system. Uniform interface? Uniform security policy? Uniform uptime? Try three-times daily outage notices from one-system-or-other, weekly password resets (every one with different rules), piss-poor interface design, etc.
It's not about size-of-government or any other libertarian bullshit fantasy; even a government shrunk by 90% would still need these services. It's the constant drive to privatize these functions driven by the "ooh, the private market is magic and never does anything wrong" mantra that leads to this ugly, wasteful, and inefficient patchwork. Inefficient government? No, it's a government that only gets exactly what this idiot-driven free-market religion allows it to pay for.
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You mean a big one size fits all ram a square peg through a round hole, b/c no one can change anything. Lot's of companies have stuff like that it's called SAP and it is why shit always takes twice as long as it should.
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It's the constant drive to privatize these functions driven by the "ooh, the private market is magic and never does anything wrong" mantra that leads to this ugly, wasteful, and inefficient patchwork. Inefficient government? No, it's a government that only gets exactly what this idiot-driven free-market religion allows it to pay for.
When you look at the cluster-f**k of contractors in just Iraq...just goes to show if anything businesses will bend you over every time they get the chance. For instance...the Pentagon has no idea where billions disappeared to in these war zones...except knowing it was paid out to government contractors. When you have Halliburton built buildings electrocuting soldiers while taking showers and professional/over-priced thugs killing civilians this nation "claims" to be helping in the name of who can steal mor
Can't wait.. (Score:3, Insightful)
until these clowns are in charge of my health care. There's nothing bureaucracy can't screw up!
being sad about health care is a pre existing at l (Score:2)
being sad about health care is a pre existing at lest there plan does not have any of that BS and give you choice or you want the McDonalds mini med that costs like $1000 year for a max pay out of $2000.
One of the problem with health care in this country is the lack of availability of insurance plans except by what the employers offers.
Re:being sad about health care is a pre existing a (Score:5, Insightful)
You're partially right.
The problem with health care in this country definitely involves insurance.
Why do we still use "insurance" for health care, anyway? Does any other developed country base distribution of health care on "insurance"?
Nobody in the US goes through life without using health care at some point. It's silly to have a system where every single dollar spent on health care has 20% taken off the top for "insurance".
And I certainly agree that getting health care should not have anything to do with your job, because when employers are involved with health care, because your employer really doesn't give a fuck about you, unless you work for your father. They wouldn't hesitate to watch you suffer in excruciating pain or die of mesothelioma at age 66 if it meant an additional .004% in profits. It's just not the way they're made.
Our health care system was a lot better when all hospitals were non-profit and doctors were part of the middle class. That's not to say that there have not been technological advances. But the system itself will only get worse to the extent that profit becomes the primary driving force behind supply.
Re:being sad about health care is a pre existing a (Score:5, Insightful)
Doctors are not part of the middle class?
My wife started college at 16, didn't fool around, and managed to graduate from medical school at 24 with around $130K in student loan debt. She then worked 80+ hours per week in an internal medicine residency for 3 years earning 45-50K/yr. She then took a fellowship for 2 years working 70+ hours per week earning $50K/yr. At age 29, she began a split fellowship/academic instructor position that finally began to pay a salary approaching reality for the level of training involved - $100K. Student loan debt is still around $120K due to deferments.
If you ignore all the investment to get there, she's "rich" in the eyes of left wing extremists like yourself. However, considering that she's had to accumulate more debt, dive into a hardcore and extensive higher education, work far longer hours for a merely median wage, and do that for 9 years longer than the typical BA, you're not going to get any sympathy from me.
Doctor's income is not wealth until sometime in their mid 40s. Doctor's income is DEBT SERVICE in their 30s, starting a family in their late 30s or early 40s, and only then becomes something that puts them above middle class.
It's also stupid to argue that some of the most highly trained people in our society (0.3% [nationmaster.com]) ought to be compensated as "the middle class." If you want more family practitioners, pay them for God's sake. Otherwise, there's simply not enough altruists to go around, and you cannot command for there to be more...
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I agree with the grandparent that healthcare shouldn't be (exclusively) private, so I'm probably a "left wing extremist" in your eyes (which would be a hysterical description to anyone who knew me). But $100k is not "rich" (depending largely on where you live, it certainly isn't around here) and your wife should be both applauded and compensated for her dedication (as should teachers, like my wife). She also shouldn't have to share the money spent on healthcare with the insurance companies. They're nothing
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Re:Can't wait.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, because Cigna, Kaiser and Blue Cross are all known for their tip top efficiency.
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As far as I know, my whole family (including grandparents on both sides, and aunts, uncles, cousins, etc) are all on Kaiser and I haven't heard a single awful story about them. My grandfather had 3 heart attacks in 3 years and Kaiser helped him get better every time... then he had a massive stroke and Kaiser helped him learn to talk again (at age 84) until Alzheimer's and more strokes got the best of him and he died early this year.
I'm on Cigna because my employer is retarded (you can choose Cigna or Kaiser
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Son of a friend was in the same position except at 6 weeks old. They tried medicine first as well but it didn't work (problems were too big). So he had surgery. This is the Netherlands btw so you get surgery when you need it (but mandatory insurance here). Anyway they had licensed surgeons (academic hospital) and still they tried medication first, because that was what would be the best for the child.
Heart surgery for kids under 2 years of ages is a high-risk game. We were told the kid had an 80% survival c
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Kaiser is considered one of the better health insurance companies in the US (this from people who deal with health plans for a living) and their plans in fact cost less than those of competitors. So yes, they're very efficient.
Plus they actually give a damn about preventive care.
Re:Can't wait.. (Score:4, Informative)
Which is why their competition does well. Who competes with the government?
You are aware that the "competition" just resells packages through those companies, right?
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So you prefer no-medicare to the two year delayed treatment?
Re:Can't wait.. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because you were in a system that was built by committee and driven by the motive to not compete with private insurance companies. What you experienced is not the experience of the first world countries where all health care is simply paid for by the government.
Imagine if the courts ordered Microsoft to take over development of Open Office, with the contractual promise of keeping it open and free. Now imagine exactly what "features and fixes" Ballmer would add. You'd have to use the mouse to click the arrow buttons to move the cursor. Every third time you type the letter W, it would spit out a pair of Vs. He would have the number 1 removed from the character set. And it would install a dancing chair-throwing monkey screen saver that you couldn't disable. He'd do everything in his power to make sure that it was as awful as possible while still meeting the court-ordered requirements.
Replace Ballmer with Congress, and Open Office with Medicaid, and that's exactly what you got.
Now, take the private insurance companies away completely, and have all health care directly paid by the government. You get adequate care and treatment. You won't get the three-CAT-scan overkill that your current doctors love to bill to your insurers, but adequate and appropriate care. The only drawback is the hit to the economy when you stop shoveling truckloads of money into the insurance company vaults, and they have to fire their soon-to-be-outsourced-anyway data entry people. And the country clubs will have fewer paying members.
So stop bitching about the Republican scare-ware version of government run health care. Real government run health care is a hell of a lot better than the current insurance scams, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
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excellent post
"The key thing to remember, always, is what the federal government does: it is basically an insurance company for old people that also has an army." - Krugman
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One can hope so.
Of course, some agency like NICE [nice.org.uk] will decide for you what is cost effective. They decided that a "quality adjusted life year" was worth something like $45,500 [nytimes.com] in 2008 (the quality adjustment is to place less value on a year of life which is diminished by pain or the like). Attempts to do this in the US are met with screams of protest. Although, government agencies in the US, such as the EPA and state highway agencies, do regularly put a financial value
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For example, a middle class person in the US who would benefit from hip replacement to reduce pain would expect to have the surgery (assuming they are in a condition to have it) in weeks while it's typical to wait for many months in Canada -- few middle class Americans I know would find this acceptable. When talking to someone from Canada not too long ago, I was quite surprised they were fine with the notion of living in unnecessary pain for six extra months.
We're not really "fine with it" and we've been trying to improve the wait times situation for awhile now. It's just that any correction to the main problem (a shortage of the appropriate doctors and surgeons) takes a long damn time to have any effect.
We are making progress here in Saskatchewan (Previously, we were the 2nd worst province for surgical wait times). The plan is to get joint replacement wait times down to 3 months maximum by 2014.
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In Canadian healthcare:
Monopoly -> Prince Increase
Price Increase -> Rationing
Rationing -> Shortages
Shortage -> Price increase
In short, all profits go to private producers sucking out as much money out of the government system as they can. Drug companies, medical equipment companies, etc. For a little while, doctors too, but since government cares about their corporate buddies first, they're getting rationed as well (in quantity, not salary which I'm sure is not a situation they entirely mind i
Re:Can't wait.. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a foreigner now living in U.S., I have to admit that you guys really got some pretty crappy government services - they're almost as bureaucratized and inefficient as my home country (Russia) in many respects, and it's definitely not what I expected from a first world country. I really thought most of American rants about government inefficiency is just that, rants, but now I see that there is a grain of truth to it. I'm not just talking about medicare here (no personal experience with that, in any case) but pretty much anything that involves seeing a government official.
That said, I also had a chance to compare it with some other first world countries, notably Canada and New Zealand - and, yes, it's possible to do this kind of thing right, or at least much better. Case in point: in Canada, it took me exactly one day - or, to be more specific, about 2 hours in the queue and then about 15 minutes of filling in the forms - to get SIN, the local SSN equivalent. That was, IIRC, on my third day there. In U.S., it took them almost a month to give me SSN, and I only found out after waiting in a line for quite a while that they "don't have the immigration data from CBP in our database yet - you should try again in two or three weeks" (and second time I tried, they still didn't have it). Two government services have distinct databases that only sync monthly - WTF? And why do I have to regularly come see them in person to hear that, no, they still can't help me?
It seems to me that the situation in U.S. resembles vicious circle quite a lot - people pretty much expect government to suck at everything (other than possibly defense) by default, and that mentality is so pervasive that it effectively sets the standard under which government services operate. Furthermore, a lot of people use it as an excuse to further cut funding to existing programs, or even scrap them altogether, since "private is better" - which further lowers the standards.
Ultimately, you get what you 1) ask for, and 2) pay for. With respect to your government, #1 means that you have to stop assuming that it always sucks at whatever it does, and treat every case of government inefficiency as a bug in the system that needs a specific fix - not a reason to abandon that system altogether. #2 means that you have to give it decent funding, proportionate to expected (per #1, rather than the current state of affairs) efficiency and usefulness.
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Excuse me while I call bullshit on you. Here's a recent example of an event that is very similar to what is happening now:
Look at the push a few years ago to stop NOAA from publishing weather forecasts or providing a live weather forecasting web service for free. They wanted to shut down weather.gov. The honest, publicly stated reason that someone was trying to shut them down was that they weren't supposed to compete with the private sector. Totally coincidentally, Rick Santorum, the Republican senator
Re:Can't wait.. (Score:5, Informative)
my dad was in the Airforce, we had TriCare, and I got medical coverage on base.
Government healthcare also can kick ass sometimes when they're tasked to do it right.
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So when I was a kid with medicaid, I could not go see a specialist unless I had a referral from a GP. The GP followed medicaid procedures, and had to get their own xrays (attempt diagnoses, treatment, etc) before he could make a referral (since specialist are expensive).
Now that you're grown up, you do realize that half the insurance companies out there work exactly the same way, don't you? The government doesn't have a monopoly on corner-cutters.
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It sucks that you went through this, especially as a child with no control over the situation, but would you have preferred no care at all, which is what you would have gotten if medicaid didn't exist?
Why is this flamebait? (Score:3, Insightful)
The poster has a valid point. In America, health care is a consumer service. For all of our complaints, were health care to be turned over to a federal bureaucracy, it would almost certainly get worse.
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It's flamebait because there isn't an "I disagree" option. I accepted the karma burn when I posted it. Sometimes the truth hurts. In this case it's gonna hurt a lot when people find out just how screwed we are when the realities of rationed health care hit home.
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It's ALREADY rationed, there are plenty of people out there who can't get the care they need. Making the provision of healthcare dependent on need rather than how much you can afford is such an incredibly obvious thing to do that I simply can't understand those who are against it. I've lived under both systems and it's no contest which is better.
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It's ALREADY rationed, there are plenty of people out there who can't get the care they need.
By that definition, everything from food to housing to cars are"rationed".
Which is to say, it's not. Your definition is false. Rationing occurs by a central government authority who decides to distribute a good or service based on a criteria. Medical care... like food, housing, and cars... is a combination of goods and services in a market. It's not rationing when someone can't afford something.
You would have been accurate had you said "plenty of people can't afford to pay for medical care" (just as many pe
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And yet instead it spawned a pretty reasonable conversation. I don't see any name calling or other ad hominem in the ensuing thread (with the exception of my "clowns" comment). I see people on both sides making their points in a civil discourse of reasoning and anecdotes.
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Are the majority of government supplied services in the USA really so bad that it is a common opinion among non-radical anti-government people that the government can do nothing right?
I live in BC, Canada, and most government services are supplied very effectively, and generally without much waste. There are issues with bonuses that are not deserved (a whole large service related to group homes for disabled people just had all their bonuses removed due to perceived abuse), cushy pensions, the occasional
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Though if you don't like McDonalds... You still have a choice of eating at a good burger restaurant. McDonalds isn't yet pushing for regulations that force patties to be exactly 1/4" thick, etc. That's what you get in the insurance business.
personnel management agency = HR (Score:2)
personnel management agency = HR
And HR does not get IT that much and hiring based on key words does not help.
Re:personnel management agency = HR (Score:4)
Don't forget the requirement to have 20+ years of Java experience (or whatever that number was back when they were just pulling numbers out of their asses.).
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From the quote above, it sounds like they actually had the HR people building the website.
It really doesn't matter what kind of company it is. It could be a furniture, clothing, or car company. They can all have good websites. You hire the people to do the job for you.
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Depends entirely on which department they're in. DHHS people will be bluer than 15 year-old teenager's balls on homecoming, DOD and DOE people will frequently be bible thumping fundamentalists (based on my personal experiences at LANL anyway).
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Care to provide some citations? I remember the DoJ under W having something of a scandal when some of the people doing the hiring were caught using political litmus tests.
Queue the negative comments (Score:3, Insightful)
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Grammer Natzi sez: It's Cue, not Queue.
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And you would be wrong. Queue is a perfectly acceptable English word, derived from the French word for "tail".
And you would be wrong. The idiom is "cue", not "queue", though both happen to work depending on how flexible one is on the meaning.
Given this is supposedly (though rarely actually) a technology discussion site, I think "queue" in this context could be clever. I doubt it was meant as such, however.
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Sure it's an acceptable English word. It's just the wrong one.
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Unless he is rather cleverly suggesting that he expects a great many negative comments and would like the process to be orderly.
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I considered that, but there was nothing in the post to suggest anything other than a simple phonetic transposition of the word "Cue" which he likely learned verbally in context, with the word Queue which he likely learned written on a programming exam.
How to suggest a pun was intended (Score:2)
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So what should one write in order to invoke this pun in a way that even grammar national socialists will recognize? Would this work: "Cue the negative comments. In fact, queue them because there'll be so many."
If that was the desired pun, then, yes, that would work... except that /. stores comments in a tree instead of a queue...
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Im not going to deny that there are some clever people in the government-- the NSA, for example-- but large swaths of government are NOT those people, and it doesnt tend to encourage efficiency. My experience-- even at a local level-- has been that the tendency is far more to throw money at a problem than to actually try to do things properly.
Scaling is hard (Score:2)
No surprise. Everyone always thinks that scaling is easy, and then spends months dealing with a long series of choke points and cache overflows. This is bearable if you can scale slowly, but not if all the traffic Is dumped on you from day one.
The question is, will it still suck in three months? Will their IT folks learn?
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No surprise. Everyone always thinks that scaling is easy, and then spends months dealing with a long series of choke points and cache overflows. This is bearable if you can scale slowly, but not if all the traffic Is dumped on you from day one.
The question is, will it still suck in three months? Will their IT folks learn?
The scaling part was easy. They slapped in some blades and expanded the cluster.
What they goofed on was capacity planning. The Navy stopped using their CHART system and shifted over to using USAJobs. I think some other agencies standardized on using USAJobs at the same time as well. So the shear number of job listing went way up. Double the listing translates into much more than double the site visits.
Three? (Score:1)
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They should skip the VMs and just paint racing stripes on their server racks... I hear that will increase clock speeds by up to 10MHz!
Re:Three? (Score:4, Funny)
Skip the racing stripes, speed holes are where it's at.
Does anyone else not care? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like Monster was butt-hurt when Uncle Sam ditched them, so they had a stooge write a sob story for Computer World.
What I read: Organization ditches outsourced vendor, launches redesign, massive traffic, servers strained, iron and squids are added, site is back.
Wake me when /. has some real news.
"Some organization" (Score:1)
Sounds like Monster was butt-hurt when Uncle Sam ditched them, so they had a stooge write a sob story for Computer World.
What I read: Organization ditches outsourced vendor, launches redesign, massive traffic, servers strained, iron and squids are added, site is back.
Wake me when /. has some real news.
Except that it wasn't just "some organization". It was the government. The only butt-hurt here seems to be your anger at people pointing out the obvious and saying "after the government took it over, it sucked".
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The only butt-hurt here seems to be your anger at people pointing out the obvious and saying "after the government took it over, it sucked".
The problem comes in when, and you have not said but you very likely are, people who hate the idea that the gov can do anything right would just gloss over when...
X company is doing something for the gov and then loses the contract for lets say cost issues and it goes over to company Y. Company Y has some issues getting everything back to the level of functionality that was provided by a company that had been doing the job for a while. And for less money! But company Y eventually gets everything all set
Re:Does anyone else not care? (Score:5, Informative)
I agree.
I typically browse usajobs.gov and the site was terrible before. You couldn't press your back button, it would nag you to use IE6, the search sucked, selecting options was futile and the performance was terrible.
The new site is ten times better. Anyone that thinks the old site was better is delusional or being paid by Monster.
Sour Grapes - The GRAVY TRAIN IS OVER for Monster. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like Monster was butt-hurt when Uncle Sam ditched them, so they had a stooge write a sob story for Computer World.
Yes indeed. And, the Monster site was a serious piece of shit itself.
Here's the thing: Uncle Sam *just recently* took it back, we should EXPECT some bumps in the process. This is to be expected.
Most people here, not being gov employees probably haven't experienced what USA Jobs replaced. Essentially, each arm of the government had their own site for job seekers.
I can only tell you about about the Air Force site that Monster's USA Jobs replaced... The Air Force site was easy to navigate and easy to apply for jobs. Tracking your progress in the process was very straight forward.
Before I accepted my current Air Force position, I applied for perhaps a dozen different jobs, was called back for telephone interviews on perhaps half, and was able to track my progress with all - such as the reason for being passed over (important information for a job seeker).
The Monster experience was beyond convoluted to the point that I simply gave up trying to find and apply for jobs. Out of the 30 or 40 I applied for, I never got any call-backs, and it was impossible to track progress or determine reasons for for being passed over. It was just a huge waste of time.
Seriously folks, we all KNOW how Monster works. This "story" is just sour grapes from Monster for losing a fucking GRAVY TRAIN of a contract.
DISCLAIMER: I am a career Civil Servant with the Department of Defense.
Avoiding discrimination lawsuits (Score:2)
it was impossible to track progress or determine reasons for for being passed over.
Maybe that's on purpose. Some human resource departments have been burned by discrimination lawsuits in the past. So I guess some companies' legal counsel have advised HR to say nothing more detailed to candidates than "you were not qualified" or "you were qualified but we chose a different candidate".
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That's not how civil service job hunting works. By various regulations based on law, you have exactly a right to know why they passed you over. Most of the process is automated right up to the point where the "hiring official" gets a list of candidates and decides how to proceed.
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reddit / hacker news exist.
Re:Does anyone else not care? (Score:5, Insightful)
When will /. have a like/+1 button on posts.
Hopefully never. One of the best things about /. is its willingness to abstain from such silly trends.
There is no God. . . 153,678 people liked this post.
Microsoft is cool. . . 0 people liked this post.
We don't need those buttons, popular opinions on /. are well known to anyone who has visited here more than a couple times.
Incomplete Article (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, USAJobs.gov's performance also sucked when monster ran it.
Fuck Everything... (Score:5, Funny)
We're Doing Five Blades
USAJobs filter (Score:4, Interesting)
Their job filter sucks. I know someone that was a government contractor and the people he worked for wanted to hire him as a federal employee. So they set up a listing that was well defined to fit his skills. He submitted his application but couldn't make it through the filter so he couldn't be hired.
I saw an opening for a job and I knew the people that put the request in. I just copied and pasted the entire job requirement and description under other information and I sailed past the filter. When I was interviewed they thought it was a computer errror that caused the ad to print at the end of my application. I told them the truth and they laughed and I got the job.
Why work for the fed gov if Republicans hate you? (Score:3)
The GOP's stated policy is that anyone working for the federal government is shit and deserves pay cuts. .. and therefore you'd get competitive applicants who are worth that much. If I offered a job that pays 1 million, presumably I'd get applicants who are worth around that .. yes sure along with people worth $10K .. but the point is the fed gov salaries are advertised and people who are working in only slightly less paying jobs looking for an upgrade will switch to it .. meaning if they paid less .. they'll get less qualified/competent applicants.
The GOP thinks that federal government employee salaries are not based on competitive pay. I mean, normally if a job pays a certain amount you will get applicants who would be willing to work for that pay
Re:Why work for the fed gov if Republicans hate yo (Score:5, Insightful)
Conservatives run on a platform of government failure, then once elected, set about proving it to be true.
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I don't think the GOP is really against government, they're just against functional government. If someone brought a bill to congress that proposed slashing all those pointless "Homeland Security" positions that were created post-9/11 the GOP would be quick to oppose (and unfortunately so would most Dems).
Regarding the less pay part: there are perks that government employees get that can make it worth it. Vacation, pension, holidays, job security. Would you rather a high salary job with some tech startup th
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Everybody in DC does breathe a guilty sigh of relief when Republicans win. Not because they'll do a better job (from the point of view of the GS-10s, it's all kind of the same), but because the level of whiny wailing drops somewhat.
The ringing in your ears usually begins to decrease by midterms, just in time for the GOVERNMENT BAD! screeching to start up again.
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/11/gop_wins_could_mean_cuts_in_pa.html [washingtonpost.com]
There is no one else on this planet (Score:2)
Monster isn't doing it anymore! Yay! (Score:5, Informative)
The old site was one of the worst job sites on the internet. I'm not sure if it's any better, but I don't think it could have gotten worse.
Facebook page? (Score:3)
Aside from my bafflement that the government leased one of its domains out to monster.com, the thing that stuck me as most odd about this is that the government has a Facebook page. Why?
It's getting to the point where abstaining from Facebook ostracizes one from society. It's like the internet's turning into AOL all over again, but worse.
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Aside from my bafflement that the government leased one of its domains out to monster.com,
Outsourcing a hiring website to the largest, most popular, most experienced job-finding website to run it? Yeah, I'm amazed the government would do something that smart. Usually, on a project like that, they spend millions on reinventing the wheel (poorly.)
New and Improved (Score:2)
See http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/facebook-labor-department-job-seekers.html [latimes.com] for the details.
I think this site has no future.
Runs on Window (Score:3)
Figures. [netcraft.com]
This is what budget cuts buy you... (Score:2)
Re:Hmm? TSA or Obamacare? (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government will never be put in charge of the US health care system. That was the whole take-away from the debate over health care law, remember? The bill that actually passed sets up a MARKETPLACE for PRIVATE INSURERS to SELL INSURANCE PRIVATELY to PEOPLE . That sounds like a conservative, market-based approach to me. That's probably because, oh wait, it is one - it's nearly identical to the system that Mitt Romney, a conservative Republican, put in place in Massachusetts, which, being identical, was also a conservative, market-based approach to universal health care. Mittens is now running away from his own law because 1) Obama passed a similar law 2) the crazy people who have taken over the Republican party can't even understand that, if they actually knew what their own principles were, THEY WOULD AGREE WITH IT. But for now their overriding, unthinking principle seems to be: We hate Obama, and if Obama did something, we hate that too.
I'm tired of know-nothing tea partiers trolling on this site. If you know nothing about something, try not to comment on it.