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Delorence Fickle posted:I wonder how long before we see mass hiring drives at various agencies that are short staffed? I would assume this is contingent on projected budgets and if there ain't money, there ain't hiring
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Jan 28, 2021 21:51
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Dr. Quarex posted:Huh, I did not see any of those in my search. Though I guess I have GS-9 as my low end currently, which could be why? I'm looking at their internal site: https://ssai.usajobs.gov/
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Jan 28, 2021 22:10
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GD_American posted:There are 115 announcements for SSA positions nationwide, and a dozen of those are just general submission keep-on-file poo poo for specific populations like vets or disabled. The training is so dismal right now, this cartoon crap. I'm a T2 TE and so burned out and am having a hard enough time sharing duties with another T2 TE during WFH. I have 3 years and 11 months left and everyday finds me praying for an early out. SSA is a dumpster fire right now. And yes, when the pandemic unemployment runs out the disability claims with skyrocket.
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Jan 29, 2021 04:34
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GD_American posted:I'm looking at their internal site:
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Jan 29, 2021 08:09
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Nutella posted:The training is so dismal right now, this cartoon crap. I'm a T2 TE and so burned out and am having a hard enough time sharing duties with another T2 TE during WFH. I have 3 years and 11 months left and everyday finds me praying for an early out. SSA is a dumpster fire right now. And yes, when the pandemic unemployment runs out the disability claims with skyrocket. My burnout level is creeping up but as I'm Seasonal, we're gonna get a temporary furlough (originally for February, but now bumped to March) and it honestly can't come any sooner. These sorts of front line positions are way too understaffed and undertrained, but the actual training is just way too much and, at least for IRS, way too opaque to get people to know what they need to know quickly.
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Jan 29, 2021 10:08
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Nutella posted:The training is so dismal right now, this cartoon crap. I'm a T2 TE and so burned out and am having a hard enough time sharing duties with another T2 TE during WFH. I have 3 years and 11 months left and everyday finds me praying for an early out. SSA is a dumpster fire right now. And yes, when the pandemic unemployment runs out the disability claims with skyrocket. I feel you. Retirements have devastated our T16 unit (the ones that are still here are pretty lovely too), and they've shifted a lot of responsibilities around. Our CSR unit is creaking under the workload, and in T2 we're expected to man phones and do appointments simultaneously, and the backlog is getting way worse. Thankfully we have two really excellent T2 TEs (and one sorry rear end one, but that's government).
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Jan 29, 2021 14:06
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OK, I'm guessing T2 is Tier 2 like at a call center or helpdesk, but what's T16?
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Jan 29, 2021 17:27
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Spacewolf posted:OK, I'm guessing T2 is Tier 2 like at a call center or helpdesk, but what's T16? Title 2 or Title 16 refer to the different programs SSA administers, each of which are vastly different and require different specialists (Claim Specialists like me, and their next step, Technical Experts). The name comes from the section of the Social Security Act that covers them. Title 2- OASDI (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance)- takes disability, retirement, and survivor claims. Earnings-based benefit based on FICA taxes paid into the system. What most people think of when they think of Social Security. Title 16- SSI (Supplemental Security Income). Needs-based benefit. Basically, welfare. Paid to either disabled kids, disabled adults, or anyone over 65+ who meets the (ridiculously draconian, not updated in 30 years) income and resource requirements. I work on the Title 2 side. I told them I'd rather stay as a service rep then take a promotion to the Title 16 side.
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Jan 29, 2021 19:00
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it's wild how much of that information my mind just erased after leaving SSA
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Jan 29, 2021 22:14
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Thesaurus posted:it's wild how much of that information my mind just erased after leaving SSA I'm looking at GS-12 contract jobs in the Corps of Engineers, and look forward to braindumping. 80% of my job is the stupid bullshit workarounds we need to do because our IT sucks so loving bad. I'll pry the F3 and F7 keys out of the keyboard at my next job.
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Jan 30, 2021 02:32
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All of Government IT is a mess, but it would likely take hundreds to thousands of people and millions of workhours to get it updates to at least a stable and functioning level. God help any effort to get above that afterwards.
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Jan 30, 2021 04:49
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I essentially do COBOL programming inputs to change addresses and bank accounts of Social Security claimants. Then I pray that the input doesn't hang up, require Payment Center involvement (2-3 months), while the person's checks keep going to the old bank account. At least 40-50% of my claims can't run through the automated process which balks at such things as "wife and husband are both on Medicare and now Social Security? CANNOT COMPUTE", requiring manual involvement and computations. The saddest parody of a process is EXRs- Expedited Reinstatements. Essentially, if someone is on disability and works their way out of the program (finding a job they can hang in there at), we give them 9 free months to also draw benefits and then terminate the benefit. But, since we realize that it's hard for disabled folks to stay employed full-time, we leave the door open for them to get back onto benefits easier. Instead of 2-3 months for a yes/no decision on the medical side, we will start paying them provisional payments instantly for up to six months while a new medical decision comes down. Except it takes longer than six months plenty of times. Because it's a completely paper workload. Our systems can't handle them. So I have to print and manually fill out anywhere from 6-10 forms, over 100 pages of paperwork, put it in a paper folder, and manually mail it off to the loving place that makes medical decisions like it's 1978 and I'm still allowed to smoke at my desk. So at six months, they call saying "my check got cut off", and yep we can't pay you any more until we get a decision back. What's the status? No idea! It's a loving paper workload! I know they came to a decision when it arrives on my desk! (If it didn't get lost in the dozen or so steps from that person's desk to mine). If the bluehairs ever saw how the sausage was made, they wouldn't be storming the Capitol. They'd be assaulting SSA HQ in Baltimore.
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Jan 30, 2021 06:44
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GD_American posted:
There's definitely a somewhat deliberate decision to obfuscate the decision making process in the various arms and legs of the US bureaucracy as possible. Too high up and you don't see the ground work. Too far down and you don't see all the gears to make sense of things. Too in deep and there's not a drive to change things and ultimately, every individual who does want to change things and has enough knowledge and leverage to do so has a vision that's wildly different than the person next to them. Industrial/Quality engineers are HR adjacent weirdoes where 90% of their job is figuring out what corners can be cut profitably and how to squeeze more work out of people, but I'm perversely interested to see what an assessment on gov't processes by them would look like as they try and merely diagram the entire gordian knot of processes in the government.
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Jan 30, 2021 07:28
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I had a huge aha moment talking to an automations guy when I complained about horribly designed our software was, and he took offense to it. He said "PCOM (Personal Communicator, our IBM-designed mainframe interface) is an incredibly well-designed program. It did exactly what it needed to at the time." See, as he pointed out, back in the day the largest expense by far was memory and computer run-time. You programmed inputs to require a minimum of calculations and run-time, as the human element was cheaper than adding hardware. Just have your drones type more and longer inputs. Now, as memory is past dirt cheap and adding multiples of capacity is essentially plug and play, the human element is by far more expensive. That's why interfaces got so much simpler; so Trained Human can double click on something, the computer can do its millions of operations behind the casing, and the same work gets done. The problem is that SSA is using software perfectly designed for 1988 hardware, in 2021. So don't blame the software. Blame the idiots trying to make espresso with a 40 year old coffeemaker.
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Jan 30, 2021 08:45
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drat. Are there any positions in SSA that *won't* drive you up the wall with madness?
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Jan 30, 2021 10:34
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GD_American posted:Blame the idiots trying to make espresso with a 40 year old coffeemaker. I don't have a dog in this fight, but I just wanna say, my Europiccola still makes excellent espresso, thank you very much. tbf, maybe SSA's system would work better if they modded it with a PID controller like I did to my coffee machine a few years back.
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Jan 30, 2021 15:15
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Delorence Fickle posted:drat. Are there any positions in SSA that *won't* drive you up the wall with madness? I'm venting. Much like most jobs (especially the military), how good your local leadership and office is will mostly determine how you like your job. Everything on a national scale is somewhat of a wreck. I have a suspicion their model of centralized Payment Centers, far from customer contact (literally, firewalled off from all customer contact and even most front office employee contact), which causes serious accountability problems, is not just intended as an efficiency measure but as an anti-fraud one. See, I put in the claim and all the information, but it takes a Benefits Authorizer or Claims Authorizer (both Payment Center positions) to actually build the payment record and authorize payment. Every now and then, a BA or CA will get a compassionate transfer to a field office if they have a family issue, and do their work from there. Every single person I've talked to that was in an office with one loves it; instead of sending off an electronic memo (note- I did not misspeak. It is not an e-mail. It is somehow slower and less accountable even than that as a from of communication) to the Payment Center and waiting weeks on an answer or response, you can trudge over to their desk and ask. I asked our (freshly promoted) state director about doing this in the level 1 (bigger) field offices, and his answer was, essentially, yeah it works great but it's too much of an HR headache. It was hilarious how he spent 45 minutes pep rallying us up, and this one turd of an answer essentially made the whole office go "ah, gently caress this guy. No better than the last one." Circling back to the anti-fraud point, I think the answer he didn't want to give is "I don't want you buddying up with one and making fictional claims and stealing six figures." In all fairness, though, SSA does have flexibility for employees you just won't find in other agencies. Time flexbands (from 7-9AM), easy leave planning, and incredibly easy to geographically transfer (since they have the same dozen or so job positions available all across the country). They also have a promotion schedule that's hard to beat- join as a Customer Service Rep as a GS-5, jump a grade every year until you hit GS-8. Then a Lead CSR slot (GS9) is available after a year, and you become eligible for promotion to Claims Specialist (GS9), which goes to GS11 after a year. I hired in early 2015 as a GS5 and I made GS11 within six years. I couldn't find that anywhere else.
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Jan 30, 2021 18:24
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Seems like a majority of people who join USCIS also go from GS-5 (or 7/9 depending on their starting qualifications) to GS-11/12 in fairly short order, though this is perhaps precisely for the same reasons you tout for your agency; USCIS has tens of thousands of positions at around 100 different offices nationwide, and at least half of the jobs are basically indistinguishable from each other in terms of general job duties (sometimes even precise job duties). I know from my incoming group of 16 people I was the only person who was still stuck at 9 after three years, let alone the four before I eventually transferred to another office. This is actually why I was excited to try to get into the SSA, because it seemed like I would already kind of know what to expect from spending all my time figuring out how/whether to issue benefits to immigrants (though presumably Americans are a lot more demanding about their benefits). But I have only ever seen three postings in the Chicago area over the years I have been looking, and it really is kind of confusing given how many jobs it sounds like they have to fill. Though I did start looking at only GS-9/GS-11 jobs about a year ago which could have impacted the search in that regard.
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Jan 30, 2021 23:38
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Chicago has a big regional office a few blocks from the lakefront (wife and I looked at it as a destination 2 years ago). If you have a disability or veteran’s preference, they have separate catchall announcements for those with no specific job; those fall under separate hiring authorities so sometimes a slot will open out of nowhere and they hire off the list they already have
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Jan 31, 2021 00:03
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GD_American posted:Chicago has a big regional office a few blocks from the lakefront (wife and I looked at it as a destination 2 years ago). If you have a disability or veteran’s preference, they have separate catchall announcements for those with no specific job; those fall under separate hiring authorities so sometimes a slot will open out of nowhere and they hire off the list they already have I was the only person in my aforementioned incoming group of 16 at USCIS who was not a veteran or a lawyer, which should have been my first indication that I was not really going to fit in (well, besides the usual having not yet actually fit in anywhere in life). But fortunately making it three years in federal service has at least seemingly kept me vaguely of interest for federal hiring. C'mooooon 2021!
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Jan 31, 2021 00:15
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GD_American posted:The saddest parody of a process is EXRs- Expedited Reinstatements. Essentially, if someone is on disability and works their way out of the program (finding a job they can hang in there at), we give them 9 free months to also draw benefits and then terminate the benefit. But, since we realize that it's hard for disabled folks to stay employed full-time, we leave the door open for them to get back onto benefits easier. Instead of 2-3 months for a yes/no decision on the medical side, we will start paying them provisional payments instantly for up to six months while a new medical decision comes down. I was a BA (and a PETE, and a CA, some in PITAG in the PC) and yeah it was incredibly rare to be doing an EXR anytime near the 6 month people. The cases would always come to us from DPB way after the fact, I think they were the bottleneck. I liked some of the technical work at SSA, there was some good puzzle solving in how to make all inputs on the ancient complicated systems work in concert to fix a totally messed up record, and it was great to know you could end months of suffering for a person really in need of help. It really was a matter of management and coworkers, some are great and some are terrible. It's always frustrating to fix someone else's dumb mistakes from them clearly not giving a poo poo, but worse when management has no ability to make them clean up their own mess. I found it fairly easy to move around in the PC over my 10 years there, but I understand that's a lot harder in field offices.
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Jan 31, 2021 03:56
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GD_American posted:I have a suspicion their model of centralized Payment Centers, far from customer contact (literally, firewalled off from all customer contact and even most front office employee contact), which causes serious accountability problems, is not just intended as an efficiency measure but as an anti-fraud one. See, I put in the claim and all the information, but it takes a Benefits Authorizer or Claims Authorizer (both Payment Center positions) to actually build the payment record and authorize payment. Yeah this is pretty common and is a source of a lot of the headaches I have. Like I can see what's wrong, I know what needs to be done to fix it, but I have to fill out a form and have my manager send it to someone to get the problem fixed.
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Jan 31, 2021 04:28
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I wish they would have rotated people between the PC and the field more, but I definitely would have been driven insane working in the field after the PC, having cases that I know just need a MACADE input that takes 20 seconds but that won't get seen for months if they get sent to the PC. Anyways I left for the USDA and things are better!
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Jan 31, 2021 17:59
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GD_American posted:The problem is that SSA is using software perfectly designed for 1988 hardware, in 2021. So don't blame the software. Blame the idiots trying to make espresso with a 40 year old coffeemaker. I seem to remember pcom displaying "WELCOME TO THE FUTURE" at the top of the 80s era log in page. I trust that's still the case!
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Jan 31, 2021 22:41
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Man_of_Teflon posted:Anyways I left for the USDA and things are better! h’ell yeah cousin, usda rules.
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Feb 2, 2021 05:31
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Woo! USCIS network is down nationwide! I’m still expected to be working but can’t access any systems I need!
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Feb 3, 2021 20:23
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Beerdeer posted:Woo! USCIS network is down nationwide! I’m still expected to be working but can’t access any systems I need! Sounds about right for gov't. When the IRS systems went down for maintenance over the new year, we were still expected to take calls and just tell people everything was down while answering general questions. And then some of the website systems were down for an additional week, lmao.
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Feb 3, 2021 21:52
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In case you get tired of repeating yourself: https://youtu.be/JwZwkk7q25I
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Feb 3, 2021 22:19
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Any of you guys deal with contractor woes? I've been documenting and sharing lack of performance on one of my direct support contractors. It's so draining. I don't even blame the guy really, I think his management doesn't hire the right people. I don't know if it's because they underbid on the contract and as a result has to offer less to hire employees or some other reason.
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Feb 3, 2021 23:07
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Howard Phillips posted:Any of you guys deal with contractor woes? I've been documenting and sharing lack of performance on one of my direct support contractors. It's so draining. I don't even blame the guy really, I think his management doesn't hire the right people. I don't know if it's because they underbid on the contract and as a result has to offer less to hire employees or some other reason. I’ve been a COR and really that’s who you need to speak to. They can recommend changes to the KO, but they won’t know if it wasn’t brought up. I had it the other way and the contractors brought something up about their travel pay through my people and we resolved it pretty painlessly. But yeah, find the COR
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Feb 4, 2021 07:55
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White Chocolate posted:I’ve been a COR and really that’s who you need to speak to. They can recommend changes to the KO, but they won’t know if it wasn’t brought up. I had it the other way and the contractors brought something up about their travel pay through my people and we resolved it pretty painlessly. But yeah, find the COR It has always bugged me that they made contracting officer KO to avoid conflicting with commanding officer, but went with COR for contacting officer representative instead of KOR.
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Feb 5, 2021 15:53
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Don't even get started on COTR
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Feb 6, 2021 07:52
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FEMA Reservist life is not for the faint of heart, as I have accepted three "deployment opportunity alerts" in the last two weeks and subsequently had all three cancelled. This is like the USAJobs application experience, but potentially worse! Maybe all those newspaper articles about how Diamond Joe is going to get a huge federal hiring push underway will come true! Any day now. C'mon, how hard can it possibly be to simultaneously fix 25,000 problems caused by the previous administration
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Feb 8, 2021 04:23
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I can say the agency I work at just got word from on high, that they want to hire 1600 peeps in the next 6 months, and are putting off all merit promotions and internal posting for the near future, to try to make that happen, and refocusing many HR positions to primarily preemployment screening and prlim clearances etc.
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Feb 8, 2021 05:09
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I accept Please tell me where I will be moving, what agency I am working for is irrelevant
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Feb 8, 2021 05:37
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Please give me a position where I don't have to answer external calls. I can work Excel
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Feb 8, 2021 07:25
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I gotta find something that wont leave my mind a burning husk at the end of the day. I'm dying to find a KISS job now.
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Feb 8, 2021 14:47
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Delorence Fickle posted:I gotta find something that wont leave my mind a burning husk at the end of the day. I'm dying to find a KISS job now. I mean it’s a pretty small band, I don’t know how often they bring new guys in.
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Feb 8, 2021 16:40
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REMEMBER SPONGE MONKEYS posted:I mean it’s a pretty small band, I don’t know how often they bring new guys in. I might as well shoot for the moon with my dreams out here.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:39
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Dr. Quarex posted:I accept Well lucky for you we have ~150 locations, https://www.bop.gov/locations/ some are waaaay worse than others so pick your number out of a hat carefully. If they have a 10-25% salary incentive for taking a job at that location, there is a very good reason for that...
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Feb 8, 2021 22:21
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