Post #3120 J

• My Experience As an FAA Contractor Applicant. During my decade of living in Maryland (during the contiguous administrations of Bush and Obama), I went on a number of unsuccessful contractor candidate qualifications or interviews as an Oracle DBA, including, but not restricted to the Departments of Education, Energy, Treasury, Homeland Security, USPS and/or Social Security Administration. (What many people don't realize is that most of these positions require tedious paperwork, including detailed contact, location information, etc., for various background investigations. If you have multiple assignments in a year, which I've often had, it can be a sinkhole of time. And none of this stuff even guarantees you an interview. The federal government, for all practical purposes, knows my entire detailed work history since 1997.) Now to make things worse, I've worked for at least 3 companies (one on a bridge contract to a perm offer) which went bankrupt around the time of the early 2000's (after I had left them), others which got acquired, relocated, etc., supervisors or references who have moved, etc., and of course I don't get notified on any of these facts.

To give a typical complication, back in  2014, I was contacted by an investigation bureaucrat who raised a red flag about an employer in 2009-2010. I had given company location (which in fact I had verified by a Google search during paperwork and included in 2013 clearance paperwork), and the investigator had shown up at the location and found the premises vacated. Never mind the fact that I had copies of my W-2's, offer letter, etc. It turned out my former employer had almost all revenue based on its long-term, expiring contract with the USPTO. It had lost the award of its recompete, none of which I had been aware. You would think if anyone knew what had happened to my former employer, it would be the government. I eventually ran across a blurb on Google that my former employer had lost its appeal on the recompete decision. I finally ran across my former CEO's resume on LinkedIn which implied that the company had folded in 2012. But I resented that my integrity had been questioned in the process. What the hell was the background investigator getting paid to do? I was forced to do his job for him; he had done no due diligence. Was I the first person whose former employer had gone through a change?

 The time I went through the process for an SSA contract  (this was around 2012) was even worse. To provide background, the government maintains an online repository, eQIP, for SOME background checks (e.g., public trust). But for the SSA, I had to file physical paperwork, duplicating years of data the government already had on me on file; you might think it's trivial, but in my case we are talking about 60 pages printed out. And that was just to get my foot in the door. The vendor, working with the actual contractor, then told me it had merely a 90-minute typing exercise for me to do on my resume to facilitate its submission process to the client: it had promised my resume in a certain preferred format. In essence, they had promised the client that I would provide them detailed background data, equivalent to federal government paperwork, for years before 1997--way beyond the 7-10 year period for contractor or government candidates. I didn't even have that level of detail in my records, and it really doesn't make sense from an employer perspective, especially in the rapidly changing technology industry. I tried to bargain with them to just provide the detail for the most recent 5-7 years, like for the typical background check. The vendor refused to discuss it. They pulled my application. The time and effort I spent on 60 pages of largely redundant background information? All for nothing.

All of this is to provide background for an interview I did with an FAA contractor. I recently wrote a  tweet on a clip pointing out how Canada's privatized air control system was seen as reform prototype for long-overdue FAA reform. Now I can't verify what the contractor interviewer said to me, and of course you are never given feedback on why you weren't selected, but I did get the impression the interviewer was uncomfortable with the kinds of questions I was asking. What I do recall was that I had to jump through ridiculous hoops just to interview on site--far beyond the TSA-like hassles I normally went through in most government facilities just to do a job interview.

I don't want to get into a tedious discussion of a DBA's taskload. Suffice it to say that we often have to administer multiple production databases, not mention related test, development, QA, and other variants of production databases, refreshed from production copies. And in production databases, we often deal with redundancy built into design, whether we are talking about RAID storage, load balanced application servers, clustered high-availability database servers, etc. We talk about things like user administration, security patches, database upgrades, integrated COTS software (e.g., ERP; Business Objects, middleware), data warehousing, Big Data, etc. In some cases, you have to wear multiple hats, e.g., do Unix or Windows system administration or development on related servers; in other environments there's a separation of duties level. So a DBA candidate is not only there to answer questions but to ask about prospective job responsibilities like backups,  infrastructure, maintenance windows (typically outside of business hours), etc. And sometimes there are contractually based separation of duties: for example, on one assignment, I was limited to operational duties, while another company held the contract to do patching on production servers. When I worked for IBM for an Apps-hosting subsidiary, they had a separate group of DBA's dedicated to backups.

In this case, I can't speak for the entire FAA IT infrastructure. Many government clients often use different types of databases, e.g., SQL Server as well as Oracle. In this case from my recollection of the interview, the client was only interested in coverage of the current week system. They had no use for historical data collection. I'm finding all this incredulous; for example, DBA's normally test out patches in test environments because you would never gamble on a show-stopping rogue patch in production (all vendors, of course, claim they do regression testing on patching and so there is little to no operational risk). I'm asking "is the emperor wearing clothes?" questions. The irritated, defensive interviewer responded that he knows all that and said that the client civil servant managers' stock response was to the effect: "Well, all that new hardware and other stuff sounds great. I'll tell you what: we're paying you a shitload of money. We don't have any budget for new hardware. So you buy the hardware out of your allocated funds, we'll stamp 'Property of the US Government' on it, set policies on its use, and everybody's happy." The vendor, of course, immediately backs off, because he did not bid the contract for new hardware acquisition.

I didn't get the gig. You never know the reason, of course. Maybe the position got frozen, it got filled internally, they didn't like my aftershave, obesity or personality, but I got the feeling they didn't want to risk someone questioning operational policies. I will say that this is not the first time I've heard the government telling a vendor that they had to eat certain unexpected costs; in 2010 I did a subcontract for a CMS (Medicare/Medicaid) vendor, and they told me that they couldn't make a perm offer at the end of the contract because the budget for my position had been eaten up by costs for extra services demanded by CMS without reimbursement.

• Trump's Boeing Plant Speech.  When I joined work colleagues at a Mexican food restaurant Friday, the last thing I expected was for a Trump speech in North Charleston blaring overhead. I immediately knew where he was speaking because a year ago I was living in the immediate area, about a 20-minute drive away from the Charleston airport. I only took one trip out of the airport (to visit my mom in Texas over the holidays) during my stay, but I had initially looked at airport parking and noticed that I had to pass the Boeing plant on the way to the airport. (I eventually decided taxis were cheaper than parking, a decision I later regretted because the plane got in 2 hours late, and it look nearly 2 hours for me to get a taxi home by 4AM.)

I really don't discuss politics with my work colleagues. I suspect most of them probably voted for Trump but it had more to do with their dislike for Clinton. (If they've seen my blog or tweets, I don't know about it.) Trump has gone out of his way to attack a technology we deal with, so suffice it to say that any Trumpkin sympathies are tempered. (If you own company shares, and your shares dive when the POTUS bashes your company, you aren't happy about it.)

Trump gave a rather derivative stump speech, jobs, jobs, jobs, great Boeing war machines (Trump name drops a litany of models), American steel, lots of people winning, blah, blah, blah. Curiously enough, Trump dodged mention of "Boeing's bank"--the Export-Import Bank. which implicitly subsidizes foreign purchases of Boeing aircraft. You never know how much of Trump's policies the typical Trumpkin buys into; Trump routinely dodged policies during the debates. Trump seems to relish the pushback against him, knowing his cultists side with him against the leftist attack dogs. I myself found myself constantly attacked as a "liberal" (I don't hide from the term; I call myself a "classical liberal", but I am far from the Big Government-loving American social liberal most people think of) from alt-right cultists.

Jobs are not widgets. You cannot compel companies to hire. Employees are expensive. A company needs for a employee to contribute enough to offset his own costs. Government by labor mandates adds to company labor costs, often offsetting pay.increases. Trump's autarkic economic isolationism is an economy-crushing delusion; protectionism is not a new theme in American history; it often was in the foreground of nineteenth century politics. I don't know if Trump actually believes the crap he is spouting; sometimes I think he's just doing it as faux-populist snake oil because he knows most people don't understand economics and he knows people confuse his dubious business success with knowledge of the economy.

I will not repeat here what I've already written in numerous posts and tweets about Trump's flawed economic notions and heresies: I will simply point the interested reader to Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek, who has written patiently, comprehensively on the topics of trade and the free market and has refuted Trumponomics in detail.