Contractor fired after criticizing USAJobs

An Oracle manager loses his job a few days after his comments appear in a newspaper.

A senior manager at Oracle was fired after his negative remarks about the Office of Personnel Management's USAJobs.gov relaunch appeared in a Washington Post article, reports the Washington Post.

Adam Davidson, general manager for human capital management, was fired Nov. 11 for talking to a reporter without going through Oracle's public affairs office, a violation of company policy. Davidson, however, tells the Post he was fired for his remarks in an Oct. 27 article, in which he said that a government contractor would have been fired for cause if one had delivered a project with as many problems as USAJobs had. Davidson said his termination came after a meeting between Oracle executives and OPM officials, though OPM did not confirm the meeting.

USAJobs 3.0 launched in October after OPM ended a $6 million per year contract with Monster.com and completed the work in-house. The site's performance problems lasted weeks, drawing complaints from users and lawmakers alike. Behind the scenes, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel led an IT fix-it team to diagnose and correct the site's operational problems.