WHILE ELON MUSK’S so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken an axe to the federal workforce, the group itself is hiring.
The US DOGE Service, formerly the US Digital Service (USDS), has been interviewing potential candidates in recent weeks and months, even offering salaries on the highest end of the government pay scale. WIRED spoke with one person who made it through part of the DOGE interview process about what it was like.
According to the interviewee, there appear to be five phases to the DOGE hiring process, all executed quickly over a two- to three-week period. The first step in the process is a short 15-minute screening call with a recruiter, followed by a tech assessment that applicants have three days to complete. If applicants pass this screening, they’ll be asked to participate in two different technical interviews with DOGE staff. The fifth and final interview is a placement interview, where applicants would learn more about what kinds of work they would be assigned if hired.
“I think it’s fair to call it a dream job,” the interviewee, who asked not to be named in order to protect their privacy, says of the USDS in its pre-Trump administration form. The interviewee says they were “impressed” by a December 2023 interview with Mina Hsiang, then the administrator of the USDS, on The Verge’s Decoder podcast. She described how the department, since its creation in 2014 by former president Barack Obama, brought a small group of technologists together to improve tech services across the federal government. The interviewee had applied to work at USDS in previous years, and relistening to Hsiang’s interview “was the inspiration to apply again,” they say.
