Avoid Boston DQB - Disability Examiner Social Security Administration Employee Review

Not for serious careers, especially on the disability side. The disability program has a much lower career ceiling because the agency treats the former field office workers like they can oversee both the retirement and disability programs. Disability people can’t manage retirement workloads though. Bad work environment with lazy managers, no director to oversee them and a lot of crazy workers who need medication to function. No one really took the work seriously except for Patrick (good man!) Just because you’re hired to do quality assurance work doesn’t mean you will. Was essentially demoted to developing and determining cases when they didn’t have enough people to do it. The decision wasn’t based on the quality of my work but purely on seniority with newer people reassigned to the DDS case management work. Office is management heavy. There were 3 branch chiefs, multiple “program quality analysts” (pleasant but often clueless souls for GS-13s), and quite a few program leaders. Other DQBs with more employees operate well with less supervisors and managers. Not a good sign when you need so much for one location. The managers were a mess – didn’t really manage and generally showed no concern other than for themselves when it came to most employees. Managers often decide to distribute overtime funds among themselves instead of offering OT hours to employees. Often got the feeling that they were at home on telework days playing with themselves most of the time instead of working. My annual evals were always generic and seemed like 90 seconds of consideration went into writing them. Lacked good critiques of my work with solid pros and cons. They were borderline fictitious due to the low effort put into analyzing my work and stats. The effort was likely consistent with their intellect levels. Annual reviews aside, zero feedback from management most of the time because that would mean they would actually have to manage – aka work and something they avoid. Management looked the other way when certain people committed very serious infractions and nailed others to the cross for small ones. You can stay under the radar and maintain a meager paycheck but this is not an office where hard work will actually get you noticed, awarded or promoted.