Pros
Telework, for now. (Always under threat. Even the President doesn't like it.)
Cons
Terrible management in ARO and its OQR subcomponent is the main problem. Comments like "when I started, I never would have guessed that I would be a senior leader" are telling. Weirdest job ever with most of management leading with trauma stories. They tell stories during all hands meetings with hundreds of people on the call about growing up in a car with a mentally disabled parent, having a bunch of genetic conditions and organ transplants, their alcoholism, etc. I am not making this up. Not the way to instill confidence in your workforce. These are not bad things but they should be irrelevant to your leadership. Also, management can't make up their minds about whether promotions are based on who you know (yes) or what you can do (not in the least). Management has denied the "who you know" part in the past but then acknowledged during our last meeting that relationships are the most important factor for advancement in the agency. It's resulted in a very lackluster management clique leading the agency and component. Relationships also matter for your telework arrangement. DQB jobs are 100% telework but with strings. Generally, you must live within two hours of an SSA regional office with a DQB. However, the component will open a satellite office in a completely new city like Los Angeles or Birmingham to accommodate some folks for no good reason but they also told several excellent long time employees when the months long COVID evacuation order ended that they needed to move back within two hours of their regional office or be terminated. Union did nothing. So, I would say that "relationships" and political power mediate a lot in OQR - entirely too much if we are being honest. DQB jobs are also terrible in the sense that management controls your stats by prescreening and moving cases into and out of your queue. They will then gaslight you about your responsibility for your stats. Liked employees and/or those less capable are given easy assignments and fast tracked out of examiner jobs. People who have the knowledge and ability to perform the job have all of the office's crap dumped into their queues and will still get mediocre evals and an inequitable bonus. I've also seen managers reserve the best medical consultants for employees who they want to have the best stats (because many of the consultants are lazy, don't look at the cases, and won't go along with the all important group I deficiencies because that would mean having to look at the cases). It's likely managers don't realize the harm they cause with non-randomized assignments because none of the managers in our office actually takes the time to seriously review an employee's work before writing a performance eval. They just look at numbers. Sometimes, their narratives won't even be based on your numbers but whatever promotion outcomes they want in the office. Every part of the assignment process needs to be randomized with a manager rationale for anything otherwise but that's not the way things are done, which makes DQB jobs terrible. Race in Federal agencies is handled as weird as it is everywhere else in America. I feel like African Americans are used as the poster children for affirmative action when everyone but them gets to walk through that door. A descendant of North American enslavement of Africans (ADOS) is usually the last person in my office to get a diversity hiring preference despite good work performance or excellent credentials. However, white women, Hispanic people, non-ADOS blacks, etc., are all used to check that box. That may be more of an issue in my region though and not handled the same in every office. Also, an appointee of the current acting commissioner decided to flag claims with regarding to race, like someone's Native American tribe. This information is completely irrelevant to a disability determination. There are zero Native American jurisdictional issues that impact a disability determination. Such an indicator could only serve to disadvantage flagged populations under, say, the different policy guidance of another administration. Some very amateur policy decisions have been made regarding race under current leadership. HR also has serious leadership and retention problems. They won't answer your questions for months sometimes and when they do, a fifth grader could do a better job. Combination of being overworked, undersupported, and fear of saying something that already inflamed employees may use to sue.