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On the first day of 2010, I woke up thinking about how awesome the previous decade was. It is not often that we can reflect back on an entire decade, but 1999 to 2009 was a significant time for me.

I met my future wife, went to prom, travelled around Europe and Russia, finished high school, moved back to the United States, graduated college, moved to Virginia, got my first post-school job, moved into my first apartment, married my wife, visited San Francisco, moved into my first house, rode across Wisconsin, lost my father-in-law, changed jobs a couple of times, started working in IT, bought my own domain, bought my first car on my own, went to my first professional conference, found a new religion, had a babynot me personally…, got pregnant again, lost my grandfather and learned more about life because of all of this.

I can honestly say it was the best decade ever.

And I hope each decade continues to be better than the previous.

As an employee in the Virginia state government system, my coworkers and I bandy about the phrase “Good enough for government work”, which is essentially a euphemism for how we do not want to work any harder on a project, or that perfection is eluding us. Remember that phrase: “Good enough for government work.”

Every 6 months, I conduct a fairly comprehensive overview of the job market, local private industry as well as state and federal job opportunities. In my latest scan, I have decided that USAjobs.gov is completely broken. In fact all federal government job application systems are broken.

1. Search / Meta data = keyword-bombing

   
   Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

   I understand that there are multiple locations for the same job classification, but these keyword-bombed listings destroy the integrity of searches. What is to stop a job lister from simply copying their entire operation’s locations and pasting them into the field? Why can’t each job be broken out in the USAjob.gov system and then be routed to the same person without them having to create and manage multiple job listings? This has to possible to do in code.

2. Writing for the Web 101

   I realize that the “duties” and “qualifications and evaluation” sections are written and wordsmithed by faceless, nameless bureaucrats, but “Important information for applicants with family members with special medical or educational needs” is weird qualification.

   What am I actually going to do? What do I need to know to get the job? Also, half of the duties are taken up notes about how the current / past system is being phased out and click a link to a new DOD regulation to read more. Yeah… duties vs. regulations.. See NOTE. Really is that a duty?

   Also, has no one ever thought that people apply to jobs in the government may not know all of the acronyms that any particular organization might use? How many directives and § sections need to be referenced before one applies to a job? Can’t this be put on its own tab, or at the very least standardized? Also, <acronym>

3. The little things that kill

   This is not a criticism of USAjobs.gov, but of nearly every other system that I came across today.

   • If you are going to have embedded frames, which all of them do, make sure you have your SSL certificates sorted. I should not have Chrome telling me that your application system doesn’t have a proper certificate and then shows me the “brick red frame of doom”.I was instructed: click this link, then scroll down, search for this term and then scroll down again, then click the link… and this is what I got.
   • If you are going to hold me accountable for spelling, then make sure your system is effing bullet proof. Make sure there is not a single typo, on a single page… anywhere… ever.
   • Along similar lines — Do not confuse people by telling them that an acceptable file format to upload their resume as GIM. It is a GIF. The federal agency that made that mistake spends more than $2.415 billion in 2006, FYI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dea

All of these things are a good enough for the phrase “good enough for government work”, but there may be a silver lining.

The Million Dollar idea

I took a look at the application process on a few jobs I found interesting. This process was so frustrating that I am almost completely turned off from ever applying to jobs in specific federal agencies or military branches.

So here is the big idea: All of these jobs have the exact same requirements: Name. DOB. Previous employment. USAjobs.gov lets you input a “resume”. Why isn’t every one who lists a job required to use the USAjobs.gov application system?

If everyone in the government, literally everyone, from the State Department to the Department of the Interior to the FBI to the Navy all had to use their same system,
do you know how much money that could save?

Don’t get me started about how stupid the Navy’s civilian job application system is. Who in their right mind designs a system that required me the job applicant to, before filling out the important information, select my pay band and pay system classification. I don’t know, hmm, shouldn’t they pick that?

I know there have been a fair number of developers who have made a pretty good system in-house, I know they did their darnedest.

Besides those idiots who built the Navy’s system—that was a contracted, low-bid cock up.

And I know there are plenty of third-party people who are supposed to know now what they are doing in creating an application system.

On a side note, have you ever tried to apply for a job with the DEA—talk about an outsourced nightmare of an application. Slick on the surface, but horrible to use.

Back to my point, the million dollar idea: Build a common system and centralize. There is no single federal government job application requires such unique detail that can’t be left to a later portion of the job application process.

This is literally a million dollar idea, or more likely a billion dollar idea.

Update: Added some links to my issues and corrected the DEA’s budget… I was shy a few zeros.