nacin

Degrees are not required. The salary is a hard ceiling, based on federal law pay scales (and is currently $166,500). A lot of people who have come through USDS are motivated that a tour of duty can truly make a difference on the lives of millions of Americans. It isn't easy work, but it's exceptionally rewarding.

USDS hires into a few different agencies. Most of them do require an SF-86, but some others only require public trust (SF-85P).

USDS cannot hire permanent residents, but 18F can (https://18f.gsa.gov/join/).

18F can hire legal permanent residents. https://18f.gsa.gov/

Nope!

Yeah, this is hard. I worked from home for five years before joining USDS, and I wish we could support remote work, but we're grafted onto agency projects that are so often based in D.C. that it's just not possible.

The "term-limited" positions are actually quite nice. Generally, you can serve for up to four years. USDS is almost 3 years old, and anecdotally it feels like people tend to leave by the end of their first two-year term because, well, it's hard and it can be exhausting. You lose effectiveness over time, and returning to the private sector is important to re-strengthen your skills and knowledge.

As it happens, the excellent career civil servants we work with also appreciate knowing we're there to help them, not take their jobs. :-)

This sounds incredibly frustrating! Almost all of my USDS projects have involved moving data across agencies, including quite a few with USCIS. It's definitely one of our most common challenges, and USDS is often called into help because we are uniquely positioned to work across departments.

As you probably realized when going through the process, USCIS has historically been 98% paper [1] (I've been to the underground limestone cave where they store a lot of it), and we've been working hard to help them modernize the entire agency, including an online application for naturalization [2] and the corresponding backend processing systems.

There are a lot of reasons why it's so hard to get agencies to work together, but making it better starts with modernizing individual systems and processes, especially when we're starting with paper that, obviously, can't be transferred seamlessly. For the most part, USCIS doesn't store your entire case file digitally (yet), and even the metadata is stored in a bunch of different systems, which includes (of course) an actual mainframe. (I've seen the mainframe too; it has pretty sweet green LED strips, and not much else going for it.)

I'm actually not familiar with how USCIS triggers SSA cards, but I'm going to ask. As it happens, USCIS and SSA do interact electronically in some situations. USCIS runs the E-Verify program, which talks with SSA, as described in this dense but refreshingly public privacy document: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy.... We've also helped USCIS introduce and improve data exchanges with State, including an early engagement on modernizing the immigrant visa process [3], which you went through, and work on refugee admissions [4].

One of the things I love most about my time at USDS is how many civil servants have embraced and championed best practices for building digital services to best serve the American people. The former director of USCIS, in particular, intuitively understood how technology can improve the immigration process and continued to push us and the agency until their final day in office. As USCIS makes more benefits applications available online, they'll have more data in a readily accessible digital format. They'll be able to streamline the user experience as you progress through the process over the years, and by the end of it, they shouldn't need to ask you a whole lot. It's been great to see human-centered design being championed over and over.

Congratulations on becoming a citizen! Want to help us continue to improve the immigration system? We could use the help: https://www.usds.gov/join

[1] https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/technology-is-hel...

[2] https://my.uscis.gov/exploremyoptions/us_citizen_through_nat...

[3] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/07/15/bringin...

[4] https://www.usds.gov/report-to-congress/2016/refugee-admissi...

Thank you for your service!

There's a ton happening here. From http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/dod-start-its-own-dig...: "The new team is already working to transfer electronic health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs from DOD."

18F uses the same hiring pipeline -- applying through https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... will get you considered for both!

There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.

Yep. 18F is great, and the teams work together on a lot. Here's more on why it works that way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9802888.

It depends on a few different factors, but your salary can be matched up to $158K. That includes DC's locality adjustment.[1]

[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Conceptually, I think everyone at the U.S. Digital Service would be comfortable with working on a remote team. Many of us have done it, and since we're scattered across agencies, the group itself operates in a fairly distributed fashion on a day-to-day basis.

Remote work does work at 18F, where they are often shipping projects that are self-contained and executed in-house. It's also a lot easier to build a remote-friendly culture if you start on day one, which 18F did. It's really just about the nature of the work we do, embedded on these agency projects, that necessitates being in D.C. The role of USDS HQ is simply different -- we're often grafted onto existing 'culture' elsewhere (I work on a floor with more than a hundred of product and engineering folks who were here years before we arrived), and are then tasked with helping to advise/fix/transform those projects as quickly and effectively as possible. (I'd also read https://blog.newrelic.com/2014/03/26/depth-look-team-saved-h..., which was a precursor effort.)

If you're interested in serving in the U.S. Digital Service but are in a position to be only able to work remotely, 18F is a pretty great option.

18F can hire legal permanent residents.

I'd argue it's mostly a carrot. The hiring authority is either one year or two, with option to renew. Most taking a leave of absence commit to six months at the onset.

The goal is to get to 500 by the end of next year. [1]

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

We're embedded directly in project teams at agencies. I spent five years working remotely and running a major open source project before joining the U.S. Digital Service in January. I love remote work and enjoy extolling its virtues, but very simply, we could not do this job remotely, at least not for the time being.

Our friends at 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) have a lot of people working remotely, as well as offices in SF, Chicago, and New York. The nature of their work is simply different (and just as awesome).

Well said, thank you.

WordPress works great sharded and/or replicated across databases, servers, even datacenters. This is what WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and pretty much any major WordPress site uses: https://wordpress.org/plugins/hyperdb/.

Yes, it is confusing to talk about how blogs get paginated, in general. But if you're curious about WordPress internals: "page" is for archives, like the second page of blog posts categorized as news. "paged" is used when a single post (and page, or any other single item of content) is paginated. You know, like reading multiple pages of a news article.

Yup, I realized the typo this morning. Hanging my head in shame. In fairness, this message was written at 4am after working for 18 hours straight (and 63 of the previous 84 hours, according to rescuetime).

I write good commit messages that are serious, too. Only a few hours earlier: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/23083

Our commitment to backwards compatibility simply forces us to make smarter, more deliberate decisions.

Because we talk so much about our back compat efforts, it is certainly understandable that people might think that is where almost all of our development effort goes. But that isn't actually the case.

We heavily emphasize our philosophies because it makes adopting and updating WordPress easier, and we want users to know that. But in practice, the way we build software doesn't hamstring us. We've introduced new features and rewritten entire APIs without needlessly breaking plugins or sites. And we do sometimes drop stuff -- we are just careful about it. We do whatever is necessary to make WordPress evolve. In the end, we've simply become really good at following through.

Some core developers, including me, as well as the vast majority of core contributors, are not employees of Automattic.

To reply to your PS: Something tells me that if WordPress.com uses GoDaddy, they have a bit of leverage there.

We plan to be around for a while. :)

As far as I know, WordPress has never been named after a living jazzer.

Three plugins were compromised through author accounts, which we caught pretty quickly. New versions were quickly pushed out. We're still investigating what happened, and reset passwords in an abundance of caution.