This isn't a one-time thing, let me tell you about my experience. (Throwaway, for obvious reasons.)

But first a little about me: CS degree, straight to engineering at blue-chip tech companies, did full stack development, then moved to product management, with a bit of project management experience jumbled in. I'm probably not the guy you want banging out 20K LoC/day on the Linux kernel, but I am the guy who can sketch out both the UI and the architecture of a new product, hold the big picture in his head on the one hand and still speak intelligently to specialists about minute details on the other hand. Fixing all the broken systems in government sounded like a dream job at the time. I thought I was a good fit from everything I heard.

I initially reached out to you, Brandon, around the second big round of press that USDS got -- summer/fall 2014ish. You helpfully put me in touch with J.

J rescheduled our calls twice. It's fine, shit happens. When we did get on the phone though, after explaining the above (with more evidence), she asked me if I wanted to do web-dev with 18F. No, I did not want to do web-dev with 18F, and there's very little in my background to suggest I'd be a good fit for web development. She flat out told me she didn't think I could hack it at USDS, but when I asked where she thought I wasn't a good fit, she backed down and said she'd get an engineer to interview me.

Next thing I know, I get an email from H @ 18F, who I understand is a manager there, and says that J said I wanted to speak to her. Okay, fine, I figure what's the harm in a conversation? I respond that I'd be happy to chat.

A month goes by, no response to 2-3 emails to J (or H).

Finally J responds, so sorry, got busy, etc. Alright, fine, shit happens I guess. The call with the engineer is set up. The engineer and I speak, technical stuff, no phone-coding though (yay!). Seems to have gone well. I give it a week, no sign of life, so I email: nothing. I let two more weeks go by, email again: nothing. Two months later (by now I was just doing this for the curiosity): nothing.

So. Maybe there's political will. Maybe they're bipartisan support. But I doubt you're hiring the best and brightest. Because hiring the best people is job #1 of any leadership team, and the best and brightest know that if this is the hiring process, run by deputy directors of these organizations, with the deputy CTO of the US cc'd on all these emails, and it's _this_ bad...well, it can only be even worse on the inside. And all the desire to give back and serve your country falls apart when you know that organization is going to hamstring you when it comes to the "giving back" and "serving your country" parts of the job description.

Oh, but what about H/18F, you're wondering? Over the course of 8 months (half of that time radio silence), I've scheduled 5 phone calls with her, and she's missed every single one, most of them without a courtesy email saying she'd have to cancel before the call. It got to the point where I was scheduling them during times I knew I'd be driving or waiting around at places because I didn't want to waste anymore hours sitting by a phone that was unlikely to ring.

So yeah, there was no "bait and switch" here, just the "bait and". Not that I'm irritated by this or anything...

This sounds pretty familiar to me as well. I have the same type of background as you (you don't want me banging out 20k LoC/day either) and when I interviewed with this team I got nowhere fast. I didn't get the run-around like you, but I did get shot down pretty quickly because I didn't know some fancy algorithm straight off the top of my head.

I'm seriously heavy into building systems in AWS, architecting solutions, and was really excited about changing the government for the better. I never even got a chance. :(

Super sad to hear this story and we've circulated some of these comments internally within the USDS. We know the hiring process is backlogged and isn't very transparent.

Please keep in mind we're still operating like a startup that had an engineering mission it's executing on before it had a mission to scale up. We don't trust the existing government hiring process, which means we have to do it ourselves. This means guilting our existing engineers into finding time to review resumes and do interviews instead of fixing something that's on fire. We are trying to hire good people, not just anyone that shoots a resume our way. But we are still a small team. Please don't judge what we're trying to do solely on how well we can get through resumes and interviews. We're working on it, and we have some ideas and plans to do some work to both improve communication and work through the backlog, so don't give up on us yet.

And now the parent is probably blacklisted for life for speaking out about it.

I strongly doubt that, but thanks for your concern. =)

That's cool, Brandon-- I'm super grateful for you helping me out in the first place. =) It wasn't a good experience, but that happens. Figured I'd toss out a data point, in case other folks run into the same.