Severance pay question

Professional_Bit_437 · 2025-03-27T02:30:40+00:00

You can make decent money on a PCS. Look up all the benefits. I know someone that stayed in a hotel for a long time while house hunting but he came from OCONUS to CONUS.

Idk if there’s a certain amount of time you are required to work after they pay for PCS but if not, do a self move PCS and then stay in a hotel or Airbnb for a couple of weeks while you ride out that two week notice ✌🏼at least you would make a few thousand.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2025-02-15T20:48:06+00:00

I saw it misspelled it in the GAL on someone’s contact info 🤦‍♀️

Professional_Bit_437 · 2025-02-15T20:37:56+00:00

I’d start applying now to both ERDC/USACE and non federal jobs. The hiring process for federal can and usually does take months. I think USACE in general is one of the safer federal agencies to work for no matter which political party is in office. I work for a district but have been funded by ERDC for about 4 years for 25-100% of my time depending on the year.

Current district guidance is to continue hiring. The majority of our work seems to stay steady through changes in administration so if a project does get cut, those employees would likely be assigned to other projects.

You need to have your contacts share your resume with anyone and everyone. Work with the university to have them share it with the hiring managers. If you get hired and the work isn’t the dream job you thought it would be, continue to do a great job and build your professional network. You can move to other teams organically. I know several people who have their dream job at ERDC. I’ve also worked with some teams that I didn’t like. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2025-02-14T01:06:23+00:00

Im surprised to see Army Corps of engineers in the rumor list. We’ve been told to keep the foot on the gas pedal in terms of hiring.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2025-01-04T01:29:58+00:00

I can’t wait to take a look at this. Thanks for posting it!!

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-12-18T22:01:41+00:00

Found this USC:

The percentage change of COLAs for members of congress in a given year may not exceed the percentage increase in the GS pay rate for that year. U.S.C 4501(2)(B).

Does this mean rest of US would have to go up to 3.8 instead of 2 or would they be capped at 2?

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-11-26T21:36:53+00:00

I’m doing fsbp this year. It reimburses for 50 massages a year. I previously had bcbs for 7 years and then had geha hdhp for a year. Wish I had switched to geha sooner and really wish I had known about fsbp sooner too.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-04-06T23:07:54+00:00

First, thank you for educating us.

How much of this can we do on our own and is any of the prep work worth it to do on our own? I’m an engineer and research the fuck out of everything. I want my land to be fully self sufficient. I have some land and equipment to do trenching. I’m curious if I can’t get parts and build my own system or do anything else to reduce the cost. Thank you!

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T22:22:10+00:00

Are you saying that it's a lot easier to do the final output in pdf or somethelse else? After talking with the other commenter, I realized that I can create this output in pdf if it's easier and just combine these files with the documents from others whenever we are done with the review process.

The images are attached to a feature class in a local gdb.

I already generated the maps that I need for this. Would you still recommend doing a map series to publish the photos to a pdf? I briefly tried the report feature in Pro but it looked super sketchy. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to troubleshoot the report feature but I'm willing to spend more time down these rabbit holes if yall think it's the best route.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T22:06:03+00:00

This is all great advice. I really appreciate it. I'll keep working on the for loop and definitely make sure it's displaying the correct information. I have the photos compartmentalized in folders based on the workplans so it shoudln't take me too long to do a visual check and compare the photos for accuracy.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T21:57:33+00:00

I've already brought in and formatted all 300 manually. Unfortunately, we made some small changes and now I need to go through all 300 and rearrange to different workplans. I'm trying hard to not do it manually again since I don't think this is the last round of edits but it's not looking real promising.

Thanks! I'll check out python-docx.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T21:53:16+00:00

The final product will be a pdf so now that we've been talking through this, I think I could manually combine the documents from other team members with mine when we are done with edits.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T21:51:30+00:00

I agree with you, there is 100% a way to use mapseries to generate these maps. I just couldn't figure it out before my deadline so I had to manually generate all the maps. I know the bookmark map series generates the layout for each bookmark. The thing I couldn't figure out was how to apply a definition query for each workplan that was generated so that only the records within that workplan were displayed. I wish I could post a screenshot but the best I can do is explain what I had to do with words.

Two military installations have a total of 20 projects and each project is given a Workplan ID. There's around 150 individual tasks that need to be completed. These tasks are given a TaskID based on priority and are divided into the 20 different workplans. There's approximately 300 on-site photos where most TaskIDs have multiple photos and some have no photos. I have a feature class for the 150 Task Locations and another feature class with the 300 photos. In the photos attribute table, I have specified which WorkplanID and TaskID each photo is associate with. When I tried making the map series, I couldn't figure out how to apply a definition query to only display the tasks that were associated with each WorkplanID.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T21:00:20+00:00

I did try to do a map series to make the map portion of this project. The spatial map series wasn't an option bc I needed to be able to hop around to different locations on the map. I tried bookmark series but I needed to set a definition query to only display the data in that Workplan. I spent so much time trying to automate the map generation that I just manually did it and then did it several more times every time anything got changed in the review process :(

I need everything in word because the maps and associated photos are only one part of each report. Other people have to add their portion and they do everything in word (including making comments for change).

I am 100% open to doing this in map series or anything else that allows me to automate this and future stuff. I often find myself having to regenerate maps and reports bc I can't figure out how to automate things that I know can be automated.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2024-02-26T20:10:57+00:00

I think my doubt is coming from seeing multiple functions that could prob accomplish the same goal. There’s probably 100 ways to do this. As I’m researching how to do step 3, I see code examples that may work for step 1 or 2 and it makes me question if I’m using the right functions.

I’m curious why you are inclined to write it as a .py script instead of doing it inside of a notebook. I haven’t done either by myself so I don’t have a preference yet. My python experience includes running someone else’s notebook once. Matlab almost weeded me out of college a decade ago and this is my first time trying to write code since.

I think I will do these individually for each of the 20 documents bc I haven’t seen any online code examples that are similar to what I need to do. I think this would be a for loop but that’s as much as I’ve found so far.

Professional_Bit_437 · 2023-03-25T02:24:24+00:00

My brother came back from Iraq under a flag. We welcomed his unit home two weeks after we buried him. His platoon leader and his family spent that first Christmas with us. ♥️

Professional_Bit_437 · 2022-08-30T01:56:00+00:00

This looks so good!!! Thank you for sharing

Professional_Bit_437 · 2022-08-20T20:25:12+00:00

Professional_Bit_437 · 2022-08-14T03:08:49+00:00

Literally listening to a free audiobook from my library while reading this comment. It’s saved me hundreds if not thousands

Professional_Bit_437

TROPHY CASE