Data.gov job posting for "IT Specialist" | Hacker News Reader

Data.gov job posting for "IT Specialist"

usajobs.gov

11 pointsdanso20 comments

"Males born after December 31, 1959 must have registered with the Selective Service."

This caught my eye. So does it exclude US citizens who have never registered with Selective Service ? For example, what if someone is a naturalized citizen but got the citizenship at the age of 30 ?

As a non american, what is the "Selective Service"?

A service to draft males for the US Military.

It means you've registered with the military (required at age 18). If we go to war and there are not enough volunteers, you may be "drafted" to join the military. This has not happened since the Vietnam war however.

https://www.sss.gov/what.htm

Basically, if you are under 26, you can be drafted. Think "Vietnam War"

It's pretty much unenforced conscription and a way to track the current body of what constitutes a US "militia".

Registration is mandatory and failure to do so is punishable by jail time and/ or fines. If we had another draft in the US, this would be the list used.

Selective Service means registering with the US government. Giving them your name and contact information so if there was ever the need to draft people into the armed forces in times of war, they have your info.

They need to sign up for the selective service. It's a requirement for federal jobs.

Not quite, it says you have had to have. Meaning if you're past the age where it is required, and you did not to it, you're out of luck.

If it was an issue, they would have brought it up in the naturalization process. You're probably fine to apply.

Non-citizen males between 18 and 25 years of age in the United States, who are permanent residents, seasonal agricultural workers not holding an H-2A Visa, refugees, parolees, asylees, and illegal immigrants, are required to register with the Selective Service System.

If you unlawfully failed to register with the Selective Service system, then you would be excluded from employment with the federal government (and be subject to other penalties and exclusions).

What's interesting about this? Am I missing something?

I think it's interesting because it's a position for ostensibly advancing the U.S. government's open data initiatives, and the skills they foresee as being necessary (Python, Postgres, PHP, among others). Besides that, I'm kind of curious as to what it's like to be in a non-traditional tech role in the government, and one that almost seems likely to cross into political territory.

It's just a software engineering job to work on their CKAN+Drupal stack (Python and PHP, respectively). Basically there's nothing political about it.

Source: I work in a similar team on data.gov.uk.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one wondering the same thing.

[clicks on "flag"]

Note: I wasn't trying to be snarky with the "scare quotes"...I saw this job posting on a mailing list, in which it was described as "technical lead", which seems more inviting and seems closer to the actual role and responsibilities, even if the official bureaucratic title is "IT Specialist" (which, maybe it's just me, seems inextricable from the connotation of "person who fixes the fax machine")

Edit: In the email, the sender says this:

> I think this position will be incredibly important in moving open data to the next level, you'd get to work with one of the creators of the open 311 standard, and you'd get to open untold amounts of information to the public.

As a former "IT Specialist" in the federal government I can tell you that every single IT position is called this, from programmers to sysadmins. The difference is only the little part in parenthesis. For example I was a IT Specialist (Database). INET just means it works with something vaguely associated with web programming.

Correct! 95% of job postings in gov tech are called "technical specialist," no matter what you actually do. To see the actual site stack: https://github.com/GSA/data.gov

Thanks, that's flattering. I'm happy to try to answer any questions about this position as best as I can. You'd be working with me.

I also try to stay in #data.gov on irc.freenode.net, but haven't really promoted it so it's usually just me.

IT Generalist wanted.

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