Oddly enough yesterday I figured out how to get around that problem, more on that later. But earlier today, at 3:09am, I got a github message about it. It seems that someone did in fact look at my article, probably from seeing it posted on LinkedIn, and at least tried it out. Now this brings up the interesting question as to whether the Canadian federal government is outsourcing its IT work to India, because 3am is not considered “working hours” anywhere in Canada, but that’s a question for another day.

Here’s a screenshot of the message I got:

First of all, thanks for confirming it’s a bug. But it’s disappointingly lazy to say “well, it’s not my job” in response. It’s a bug that affects the usability of the site, it shouldn’t just get closed (which it did), and if it’s “not your job” it really should be passed along to the people whose job it is to fix it.

Secondly, it’s not even a difficult bug to figure out, and I know that because I figured it out by myself yesterday. And I’m not even getting paid to do this. Which is even more annoying, speaking as someone who’s been looking for a job in the IT field for 8 months now and will probably have to go work on the shop floor at Costco because the tech job market is absolute shite at the moment in Montreal (mind you, if you do have to work in a retail establishment, Costco is the gold standard there).

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand.

It’s the “candidate registration” page that’s broken. It simply will not work if you didn’t sign in to the CRA careers site before you get to it. If you go to the CRA Careers site you will see this near the top of the page:

Click on the “Sign in or register” link, sign in through your authentication partner (or CRA ID), and THEN click on the “candidate registration” link, and you will be able to fill out your candidate profile. 

The easiest way to fix this would be to disable the fields in the “candidate registration” landing page if the user is not logged in, and inform the user that they must be logged in before continuing.

However, it appears that the web dev teams at the CRA operate in silos, where each team is responsible for small individual parts of the site while remaining blissfully unaware of what the other teams are doing. Those teams are probably offshore, working for different companies, and have no clear way of communicating with one another. I don’t know what happened to the “Canada First” and “Elbows up” attitude that the Prime Minister keeps talking about, but it doesn’t seem to apply to IT work done for the federal government. That’s a shame, because there are thousands of Canadian IT workers currently desperately looking for jobs, running through their EI, and eventually forced to apply for welfare at the provincial level. If I’d been in that same situation 20 years ago I would have just looked for employment in the USA, or somewhere else in the world, but that’s no longer an acceptable (in the case of the USA) or even possible option for a guy my age.

So, CRA, I’ve figured it out for you. Fix your damned web site!

The post A follow-up on my bug report about the CRA careers site first appeared on The Clever Shark.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

The post Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken. first appeared on The Clever Shark.