500 Server Error for Careers page - USA Jobs API

[johnnyporkchops]

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Below, you'll find questions to help us more quickly identify, prioritize, and then address the issue.

Summary

What happened?
/about/careers page shows a 500 Internal Server Error when USAJobs is down for scheduled maintenance. This is because the error handling in the open_jobs.py -- get_jobs() templatetag only works when the status code for the response is NOT 200, which is not the case for the scheduled maintenance message.

What should have happened?
The about/careers page should show the USA_JOBS_ERROR in the open positions section instead of failing to load with a server error.

Frequency

This will happen whenever USA Jobs returns a Down-for-maintenance error from calls to the API that our open_jobs.py -- get_jobs() makes.

How to Reproduce

• This is hard to reproduce because the USAJobs API maintenance window is over and the API is back up and running.
• Attempt to return a json response mocking the maintenance message that USAJobs returns from calls to the API during this maintenance window.
• Contact USAJobs API support to clarify that the response from a call during a maintenance window is a 200 json response and not a 404 or something else

Device, browser, etc

Tell us everything you can about:

All OS's , all browsers

Screenshots

Screenshots would help us correctly identify the issue.

Techical considerations

• Research to subscribe to usajobs RSS feed into slack (Like we did for Git, Circleci)