I really can't stand this language.
"Tour of duty" means fighting in combat, for years, at low pay. Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."
[1] http://fcw.com/articles/2014/10/27/red-tape-holding-back-hir...
No it doesn't. If the army started paying better would it mean soldiers aren't taking tours of duty any more?
Historically it has been a term associated with the army because it was one of very few ways a person could serve their country. I actually think it's a great repurposing of the term - despite the fact that it is a relative well-paid desk job I'd wager that a lot of people could get more money going to Google/Facebook/whatever. It's still a form of public service.
Great, then just say, "I did two years of service. For pay." Like, is a Senator doing a "tour of duty?"
A long time ago, senators had to take significant time away from their estates / jobs to 1) travel and 2) sit and talk about crap. It was a real burden.
These days none of them are more than a ~12 hour flight away, they can fly in and vote on something and fly out, if they choose. It's less of a burden these days. Congress has also over the years found innumerable ways of enriching themselves during their terms.
I would bet that a DMV employee would appreciate a thank you, though.
And the only way anyone would be making $130K is if they landed at the top step of the GS-15 scale. I know most offers are made around the GS-13 level.
I'm somewhat turned off by the idea that people shouldn't be paid ~$130K/year for their service. You're asking them to pick up and move to DC, covering none of their moving, travel, or new living expenses.
So then they pitch this as the only way people can help make things better offering below market pay along with all these trade offs?
Good luck with that.
But that's a pretty low bar.
I have no idea why you're commenting to me about HTTPS Everywhere. So unfortunately I've missed whatever point you were trying to make there. Want to enlighten me?
Well, I like it. =)
The problem we have with our project is that we're dealing with a ton of subdomains and not a lot of data I would consider "sensitive" enough to really necessitate encryption. While I appreciate the sentiment of the project, and value your commitment to privacy, for our use case it's definitely a bit of a pain in the butt.
That, and I know getting IT departments to move to install certs on their old infrastructure for things that might not require encryption is definitely painful. And the errors generated by expired certificates and "insecure content warnings" are confusing, and don't add value to projects that don't benefit from encrypted connections. We've been hearing all about it.
It's not important whether you consider the data sensitive enough to bother doing your job. It's actually your users, which, if they've installed HTTPS Everywhere, they do.
So get your shit together! :)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-...
That obviously doesn't resonate with you, but it does with some. Which is fine- you don't have to be interested.
(Sure, a no-bullshit government to work in would be great, but we don't have that yet)
If you're asking people for help, you need to treat them like professionals and not children. That means don't get in the way them doing their jobs, don't impose bullshit requirements like literally asking people for their urine and don't do many of the other counter-productive things that government agencies have etched in stone as essential policy.
If you can't do that, your system is broken, and won't get as good of people as it ought to and that's the problem of the people who created it, not the people who are interested in doing you a fucking solid.
1) Work for it.
2) Don't work for it.
I bet at Cheltenham the BT staff on secondment are told don't mention sharesave to the Civil Servants :-)
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
No, it doesn't. The term throughout its entire existence has been applied to government (particularly foreign) service assignments of limited duration, not exclusively low-paid combat assignments in the military.
> Getting $130k/yr [1] to pad your resume isn't a "tour of duty."
Actually, resume-padding, sometimes well-compensated, foreign-service assignments for upper-crust elites for whom such assignments were a key route to high office are one of the oldest uses of the term.
It's a limited period of service at an outpost.
I think they also try to have foreign service officers do different types of jobs (aside from technical jobs like communications specialists, who always do the same thing) for instance, I think most of the foreign service officers have to do a consular rotation where they're working with people on passport or immigration or travel issues rather than on political or economic issues.