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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

"When a new hire joins the federal government, existing employees complete over 60 tasks to bring them on board."

"This is particularly useful in government, because we need to complete quite a few training sessions and pieces of paperwork."

I can see the value in building a tool to track all of the moving pieces in what appears to be a bureaucratic, inefficient system ... but I would love to see more work put into resolving those inefficiencies.

Can any of those tasks be automated?

Is there any way to reduce the amount of paperwork required?

Can the training sessions be replaced with online tutorials?

Etc.

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We're automating what we can - i.e. accounts and stuff.

But a lot of the tasks are training related i.e. "You have to learn about this or that."

You can see the work we've put into onboarding here: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/12/01/how-we-dramatically-improved-...

The biggest efficiency, I think, is creating a Slackbot that trickles out a lot of this information to new hires: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/12/15/how-bot-named-dolores-landing...

We've also rolled out a handbook and classes — the checklist is basically to make sure people have seen what they need to and so they're not overwhelmed the first day. (Something like learning how to travel is something you need to learn, but maybe not until week two...)

You're doing government contracting but allowed to use Slack...?

We're federal government employees (and are allowed to use Slack).

You don't have data confidentiality issues? Perhaps working for the Federal government directly is quite different than the DoD.

You can see our negotiated ToS here: https://slack.com/terms-of-service/government

> Can the training sessions be replaced with online tutorials?

In many cases they have. And generally speaking, I doubt they communicate with any central checklist system, likely because one didn't exist. Until now. And pretty much every department has its own checklist. Hell, I worked for a university and I'm pretty sure the automation processes I wrote for new account creation didn't absolve departmental IT from additional work for hires specific to their department.

The other fun thing is the process that constructed the current system. Something bad happens, and another annual training is added to the list. Over time, a lot of bad stuff happens. This leads to scenarios where military officers literally have more training requirements than hours, and cut all kinds of corners and lie about it: http://www.armytimes.com/story/military/careers/army/2015/02...

The problem isn't moving paperwork or tutorials online that's already happened. The problem is one arm of the administration imposing requirements on another without regard any sort of budgetary analysis.

Also legislatures, the federal government, etc. Requirements have many sources, and only some are self-imposed, unfortunately.

This tool makes those inefficiencies more visible to everyone, so I think this looks like a good first step.

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