[steven777400]

I wonder if the environment of experience is significant? USDS positions itself like a startup (even their page has a section on "dress code" which mentions being like "any other startup"). Someone whose experience is primarily enterprise or BigCo might be less appealing. It would be interesting to see a roster of current USDS FTEs and their backgrounds (I didn't see a "Who's Who" on their page, but didn't look extensively).

[noir_lord]

I think that startup mentality might bite them in the arse.

I saw "React on Ruby" and winced.

There is nothing wrong with that platform as a "We are in a market where things will change radically in two years" but for the VA? Where things might change once a decade, that's a recipe for pain.

Look at where the Web was 5 years ago (hell React didn't exist) never mind 10.

Angular is 7 years old, KnockoutJS is 7, jQuery is the grandaddy at 11, React is 4.

Not a criticism (they are clearly doing important impactful work) more a concern.

If someone said to me "You will have to support this for at least 10 years" the choices I made would be extremely conservative.

[commandar]

To me, this looks like the bigger potential problem:

>U.S. Digital Service members join us for what we call a tour of duty. We are seeking candidates interested in joining the U.S. Digital Service fulltime, ideally for at least 12 months. In some cases, we can accommodate candidates who can only commit to a shorter amount of time. Three months is the minimum time commitment we can accommodate. All members of the U.S. Digital Service hold "term-limited" positions, which means that at the end of a prescribed term, the candidate's employment with that agency must end.

You have to move to DC -- without relocation assistance -- knowing that you're only going to work for USDS with an expiration date? Seems like that'd really shrink the net of candidates to me. I know it kind of kills my interest, personally.

[askldjd]

Our team is very careful at choosing technology that is stable and well proven. In fact, it took a lot of debate for us to move from Rails static pages to React SPA.

As for government being slow and only change once a decade, you might be underestimating engineers in the government.

Here's the disability claim processing project I worked on when I was on SSA Digital Service. https://federalnewsradio.com/ask-the-cio/2017/01/ssa-turns-c...

The team I worked with managed to pull off React/Node.js/Redis/Zookeeper microservice framework over AWS using Jenkins as CI/CD pipeline. And most of the team came from an older enterprise stack using Java and IBM WebSphere. They were able to adapt to the new framework.

Be conservative, yes. But being overly conservative is part of the reasons why government is so far behind today.

[nostrademons]

I think that much of the reason for the existence of USDS is that government agencies like the VA should not be stuck with 10-year-old [1] technology. The idea is that U.S. citizens should be able to expect the same level of technology from their government that they get from Facebook, Twitter, Apple, or Google. They're explicitly trying to change the culture where you do things once for hundreds of millions of dollars and then it's never revisited because the first time was such a clusterfuck.

[1] Actually more like 50 year old technology, if my friends at the USDS are to be believed. In some cases, they're replacing systems where SOP is to manually type in data, print it out, fax it over to another department, and then type it in again to a different system.

[mquander]

There's nothing that would prohibit maintaining a Backbone or Knockout app (or just one written with a bunch of non-spaghetti-code jQuery) today, and it's hard to say that any other choice for writing a piece of software with a GUI would have fared better. Why do you think that using React will have a worse result than that?

I think that of the kinds of tools people are using to make web applications in 2017, React and Rails are probably in the more conservative, most likely to be maintainable in 10 years category. (I wouldn't believe this about Rails except it's been so popular for the past 10 years.)

[barkimedes]

Hey, I'm the current director of engineering, so I'll toss in my 2 cents because I want to make sure this is really, really clear.

I could not care less about what which company/non-profit/agency/whatever you worked for. I just care about what you have stepped up and done in that environment. We will gladly consider a BigCo person, as long as they can demonstrate how they managed to get awesome stuff done at BigCo (e.g. ported a legacy system to a modern stack) because that is relevant to what we do. We have also passed on folks from FancyStartup.com because they show signs that they would struggle in an environment this complex.

Fundamentally, who we look for are people who can go into just about any situation and figure out a reasonable way to deal with it so that we can get services working for the people who need them. And we look for this in our designers, engineers, talent team, procurement specialists, and product and strat ops folks. See mbellotti's comment for great info on some engineering-specific tips.

The Federal government is a giant bureaucracy. I would actually love to see more BigCo applicants with experience succeeding in tough environments because that's what we do here. We need a good balance of people who know how to deal with things the way they are and people who know how to build things the way they should be. The best candidates are folks who can do both. We make the best decisions we can based on resumes and interviews, and it sucks when we may miss out on a super swell person. But it's bound to happen sometimes.

To be clear: I don't care how old you are, what company you worked for, what part of the country you're from, what school you went to (or if you didn't go to school at all), or any other artificial criteria. In fact, I'm really not interested in hiring the same profile over and over again. That's ineffective and honestly, boring. All I care about is finding people who demonstrate that they can creatively and scrappily solve the types of problems we tend to see in the types of environments/situations in which we tend to land. Period.

So if any of this sounds like you, consider applying. This country and it's citizens could really use your help. And make sure your resume shows us that this sounds like you. :)