Keeping the Stations Online

Jomo works on the network every processing station in the country runs on. Every one of them needs to be up before the first applicant arrives, which in practice means before five in the morning local time, across every time zone the country has.

"Federal IT has a reputation. Slow, old, nothing ever gets replaced. Some of that is fair and some of it is people repeating something they heard."

His own experience has been the opposite of the reputation. "I have replaced more infrastructure in two years here than in six at my last job. Not because there is more money. Because when a station goes down the whole day stops and everybody in the building knows it, so the case for fixing something properly makes itself."

The estate is national and the team is not large, which he describes as the actual selling point. "You own real ground. There is no layer of contractors between me and the thing that broke, and there is nobody to hand it to. That is either the appeal or it is not, depending on who you are."

The failure mode he thinks about is specific. "If a testing room goes down in Portland, that is a hundred people who took a day off work, arranged childcare, and drove in for nothing. You cannot give them that day back."

He came from commercial work and had no federal experience. "Nobody asked me to have worked for the government before. They asked whether I had run a network. The certification requirements are real and the agency will pay for the ones you are missing."