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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."
And it becomes slow, unresponsive, and costly. ...
Nope. No Surprises here.
Well when Taco left he took everything but the commordore 64s so he could run his 'services'.
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.
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...
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?
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.
Hey, it's better than the one blade server they were using. I bet they were creating VMs on it to act as redundant nodes.
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. :-)
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.).
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
In this day and age, you need at least 5 blades to get close....
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!
To be fair, USAJobs.gov's performance also sucked when monster ran it.
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
That explains the lack of an edit button!
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.
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).
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.
Skip the racing stripes, speed holes are where it's at.
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."
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Figures.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.
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...
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 and then you praise the 'free market' for how great company Y is.
Meanwhile anything the gov does must always be awful...save for the actual military. They are great...except when they come home and maybe want some health care...screw em then right?
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!