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."

Comments

Government takes control of something

[Oriumpor]

And it becomes slow, unresponsive, and costly. ...
Nope. No Surprises here.

Re:Government takes control of something

[squidfood]

Let me fucking ask you something. What's more slow, unresponsive, and costly for any large company:

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.

Can't wait..

[Majik Sheff]

until these clowns are in charge of my health care. There's nothing bureaucracy can't screw up!

Re:Can't wait..

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yeah, because Cigna, Kaiser and Blue Cross are all known for their tip top efficiency.

Re:Can't wait..

[plover]

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.

Re:Can't wait..

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Queue the negative comments

[ExtremeSupreme]

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...

Does anyone else not care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does anyone else not care?

[RazorSharp]

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.

Why is this flamebait?

[DesScorp]

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.

Re:Why is this flamebait?

[DesScorp]

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 people can't afford houses, cars, etc). You're misleading when you say "rationing", however.

Re:Why work for the fed gov if Republicans hate yo

[Anonymous Coward]

Conservatives run on a platform of government failure, then once elected, set about proving it to be true.

Re:being sad about health care is a pre existing a

[PopeRatzo]

One of the problem with health care in this country is the lack of availability of insurance plans except by what the employers offers.

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:Hmm? TSA or Obamacare?

[monoqlith]

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.

Re:being sad about health care is a pre existing a

[DRJlaw]

Our health care system was a lot better when all hospitals were non-profit and doctors were part of the middle class.

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...