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Feds Take USAjobs.gov Back From Monster, Performance Tanks
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."
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...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And it becomes slow, unresponsive, and costly. ...
Nope. No Surprises here.
until these clowns are in charge of my health care. There's nothing bureaucracy can't screw up!
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
personnel management agency = HR
And HR does not get IT that much and hiring based on key words does not help.
Oh look at those idiots in govt.... with their job security, and their benefits, and their pension... clearly only the stupid people are the ones that apply to govt jobs! there's no way it's the most clever of us who work in govt...
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.
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?
THREE!?
everything our Gov't tried to do tanks dong.
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.
sounds like the PHB cheeped out and it blown in there face.
To be fair, USAJobs.gov's performance also sucked when monster ran it.
I'm guessing the government taught you to spell...
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".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
We're Doing Five Blades
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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
There was once a show called "Benson" where the governor's teleprompter died just before the cameras went live, so he sat there for a long time just staring at the camera. One of the characters expressed concern that the sound was broken to which Benson replied that the sound was secondary, he was worried about the picture because the gov's lips were not moving. In this case, all the words in the post are spelled correctly but they are organized in such a manner that there does not appear to be a cogent argument. This is an excellent example of how proper use of spellcheck does not let you communicate clearly.
'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.' Pure FUD. If the problem was that all the toilets were always blocked up, you wouldn't accept an excuse that the company is clearly not a plumbing company, and doesn't have the skills to manage basic plumbing. That could be resolved with a simple phone call to folks that do actually have some experience with that field. Now, if you want to say that the management is too drooling stupid to figure that out... well, it's the Government, so that's not entirely implausible, but that's an entirely different statement than what has been made.
Conservatives run on a platform of government failure, then once elected, set about proving it to be true.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Link?
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 that's the pet project of a couple VCs (and will require many hours) or a government job that pays half as much? I would guess that an unrooted bachelor would be inclined to go with the startup whereas a family man would lean towards the government job. A lot of times if you break it down to dollars per hour the government job will pay as much or more.
I do agree that the GOP's agenda of slashing government pay/benefits can only be detrimental, but I do think the government can get away with paying less provided the benefits balance it out.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/11/gop_wins_could_mean_cuts_in_pa.html
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I work as a contractor doing work for OPM (I won't specify which company, don't ask). I'll say right now that their entire IT team needs to be canned given how much downtime we see. They do unforgivable things such as live and on the fly updates to major systems with little to no testing. The internal applications and intranet sites are more broken than the external ones.
I just wanted to see how far I could get modded down.
The commies come out in force when government bureaucracy is proven inefficient!
As a federal employee, our internal websites are HORRIBLE for speed, search, lag time, etc. While I don't work for OPM, I experience errors multiple times a day trying to load websites on my work computer. IT for the federal government is a joke.
Gov't outsourced federal student loan processing to private company, and that didn't work well either. Auto-pay didn't work for days, so many had "payment late" notices. site was unusable for a week.
http://consumerist.com/2011/10/dept-of-educations-new-site-giving-headaches-to-folks-with-student-loans.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Conservatives run on a platform of government failure, then once elected, set about proving it to be true.
If only (Dem primary) voters realized back in 2008 that Obama was a conservative...
People are turning into ostriches?
The Department of Labor has turned this over to Facebook - http://www.myskillsmyfuture.org/
See http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/facebook-labor-department-job-seekers.html for the details.
I think this site has no future.
And everything is working now.
wow really? "competitive pay" means whatever pay is listed for a job is what the applicant is worth. That's a new one.
Just FYI, "competitive pay" actually means the salaries are set based on what a similar job in the private industry would pay.
But it's nice to see government employees being so innovative with how they spend our money.
Figures.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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."
It clashes with my narrative of "Government can't do anything right"! Stupid cognitive dissonance.
I used the site when it was monster and did get hired. Just went back to check my account and it seems to work EXACTLY the same as before.
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.
I tried to set up a notification for jobs in my area, and I was getting emails about jobs two hours away. There are federal jobs 20 minutes away, which is what I was interested in, yet they never got it right. Zip code radius fail. Hope the new site works better.
It's karma - anyone who WANTS to work for the government should be forced to endure such a crappy experience.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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".
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%) 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...
Just about any end-user service currently under contract is likely to be pulled back to see if the agency can do it cheaper. So then you get management, unsure what hardware and personnel are required, but with a strong motivation to under budget.
Support SETI@home
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 more than middlemen and they don't provide any value whatsoever - take them out of the loop.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
As a "left wing extremist" I would say your wife is part of the working poor, not middle class at all.
You mean teachers? Firefighters? Tool and die makers?
And length of training has never been a measure of expected income. I've got a PhD in Literary Theory and taught for about 20 years. Should I be paid more than a physician? And how would you explain a CEO, who maybe was part of a 2-year MBA program, expecting to be paid $20 million dollars after 11 months, regardless of performance plus $6million for "relocation costs" and an instantly vested stock option program? And that's if he sucks at his job. If he actually does reasonably well, he'll expect a $5million bonus and a $15million golden parachute when he's fired for bringing the company to ruin. (yes, that's a real example).
Yes, I believe doctors should be part of the middle class, and they should live in the communities they serve. That was the model for most of U.S. history. See, there was a time when the middle class was actually pretty prosperous. A doctor might have owned the nicest house in town, but he still lived in the town that he served. He was still part of the middle class. Then "supply-side" economics hit and that went all to hell.
You are welcome on my lawn.
2.6 Million employees? Are you telling me the US government employs nearly 1% of the US population? That's mind bottling.
Government destroys everything it touches, and can never be the best at doing anything. People who can't get jobs in the private sector get jobs with the government, so it follows naturally that the government can't possibly do anything right.
In 1969, we put a man on the moon. Our technical prowess has only declined since then, and now we have to beg for rides on Russian rockets since we don't have the technical capability to build our own any longer.
With that income it shouldn't take long to pay off 120k. I worked in the bay area, made 90k (before tax), had a modest apartment, went out to clubs 3 to 4 nights a week and ate at decent restaurants and I was able to save 25k per year. If she's making 100k (and I'm guessing you don't have children) she *should* be able to pay that off in less than 5 years.
Well stated, the silence of reply is deafening. Please give your wife a hug and tell her there are at least two people who respect her work and are grateful for her dedication to the profession
CRNA
N
MSgt Ret
I'm a programmer for the Federal government. I suspect one major snafu is all the regulations the system has surrounding extreme security and which sorts of hardware and software you have to buy. Once some group of knowitalls stick their nose into the architectural decisions, nothing good will happen. This is true whether you are in private industry or in government. The systems I do work because we ignore all that stuff (by using all the various memos to build us a defensive paperwork moat around the system).
The GOP's stated policy is that anyone working for the federal government is shit and deserves pay cuts.
The thing is that, once they get elected, those anti-government Republicans quickly realize that their own pay scales, health insurance, pension, TSP (Thrift Saving Plan, the 401k for federal employees), travel regulations, etc., are all the same policies as what career government employees have. So, they have to really be careful about cutting benefits for the federal workforce lest they end up cutting their own benefits.
FWIW, I'm a decade-plus federal employee. The Bush II administration did more for my pay and benefits than either the Clinton or Obama administrations have.
No IT resource worth hiring would waste their time on the "new improved" site! Imagine the people that approved this approving your health care needs.
Fundamentally, doctors are and should be middle class. That's the point of having one. Anyone who's not an unskilled labourer and not wealthy enough to personally fund new company formation while living off passive income is middle class. It should be between 30 and 80% of society. You may if you wish substitute communism or similar, just be prepared to eliminate everyone who doesn't have the work ethic of an ant.