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