What It’s Like to Interview for a Job at DOGE
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.
The interviewee knew several federal workers who had already been laid off as part of the DOGE’s incursion into federal agencies, and though it was “top of the top of mind,” they say they were still “excited about getting an interview.”
During the initial 15-minute call, the recruiter outlined some of the possible projects DOGE might undertake. These included, the interviewee says, “leveraging AI to improve medical services for veterans,” “streamlining federal aid applications from Americans who experience natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes,” and “improving the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and expanding Americans’ access to financial assistance for higher education.”
These details about possible projects were also laid out in an email the interviewee received before the phone call, inviting them to speak to the recruiter. The interviewee, who had applied to USDS multiple times both before and shortly after the new Trump administration, says they weren’t sure how or why their application had caught the eye of the new DOGE Service. “Maybe they were just looking for a coder,” they say.
Seeing USDS referred to as the “US DOGE Service,” the interviewee says, made them “want to barf” because “it represented the hollowing out of the organization I appreciated. I didn’t know what to make of it, since I applied on a lark and hated what DOGE was doing. But I was ready to learn what they wanted and to explore what impact I could have.”