I joined the Census Bureau!
This week, I started at an experimental data team in the Census Bureau called, appropriately, xD (“ex-dee”).

The long version
Hiring is hard. On top of all the normal reasons, government layers on a lot of bureaucracy, which makes hiring take 6–18 months.
I was previously working at 18F. 18F made a decision early on that it would mostly hire using Schedule A(r), also known as “excepted service”. Schedule A(r) allows jumping through fewer hoops than traditional “career” government hiring, with the tradeoff that these positions can only be held for a maximum of four years. This makes sense, because otherwise government would be committing money for that employee indefinitely, until and past when they retire. Schedule A(r) can get the hiring time down to two months. Big improvement!
Anyway, I left 18F because I was about to hit four years and turn into a pumpkin.

I loved the people, the projects, and really, just about everything about it. The job was hard, but in the way it’s supposed to be hard: working to make government work better. I knew the term limit I signed up for, but it was sad to see it end nonetheless.
Moving on
Despite having to leave 18F, the great news is: I found something very similar! xD’s mission is to “build experimental data products for the public good.” It is like 18F in a bunch of ways:
- Named a vague acronym
- Mission-driven
- Formed by current and former Presidential Innovation Fellows
- Acts as a consultancy in and for government
- Works across agencies, who pay for the projects
- Has a bunch of projects going on at once
- Is distributed, and I’ll still be working from NYC
- Recruits technologists who wouldn’t have necessarily considered working in government
but relative to 18F, xD is:
- Data-focused
- More experimental, using things like artificial intelligence (AI)
- New — only a year old
- Tiny — I’m the sixth person
Those differences aren’t inherently better, but I’m excited to bring my experience to help shape a small, new team, while getting to play with new technology. I was hired as a Backend Web Developer, but the team’s so small, it seems I will have a lot of self-direction and will get my hands in everything. One of the first things on my docket is to review and level up the security, compliance, and software development practices of the team. More than half of xD’s other projects are with 18F and other teams around it, so I really didn’t go far!
Given that xD isn’t limited to Census projects, I asked the team “does it even matter that xD is in the Census?” While xD could theoretically live elsewhere, Census is the largest of the statistical agencies, and comes with a ton of data and data expertise. Moreover, the White House is proposing consolidating other statistical agencies with Census, which would increase those characteristics. (Worth noting: the Census Bureau already does a lot more than the decennial census for which it’s known.)
xD is so fresh that we don’t even have a custom domain yet, but you can check out the in-progress homepage here and follow us on Twitter. We will be hiring, so if xD (or government work in general) sounds interesting to you, please do reach out to aidan.l.feldman@census.gov. Thanks!
