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Comment by hlieberman | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently a USDS employee, and I can tell you that you will never find another job that has impact anywhere near this scale. From killing literally billions in dollars of government waste, to saving soldier's lives in Afghanistan, and helping refugees get into America, the work is so important. Join us!

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I recently needed to trawl through CFPB HMDA data and it was an absolute pleasure to do so. Everything was straightforward and documented in GitHub. I assumed this project was a result of USDS

The CFPB HMDA products were built by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's dev team. They've been working on government open source and open data platforms since (I think?) ~2012. (https://github.com/cfpb)

While CFPB is definitely a separate thing from USDS, I'd imagine their end goals are the same: building things that help government better serve citizens. The more dedicated people that take up this mission in public service, the better!

That wasn't us, but I'm glad that it was a good experience for you! Lots of tech in government is getting better these days, and we'd love to have more folks helping up push the state of the art forward.

do you hire international students for entry level?

We're typically looking for folks who have experience setting up large-scale systems. When doing this job, it helps to have a few scars (or at least the resilience that comes from pushing for change in difficult situations). And we can only hire US citizens.

This strikes me as a bit hyperbolic, considering that America contains fewer than 5% of the human beings.

Scale is not just about number of users, it’s also about level of impact. USDS works on projects that help people renew green cards, get disaster recovery grants, receive disability benefits, find jobs and access their medical data. These programs make a big difference in the lives of millions of people.

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