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Notes -
A few things I'd point out :
Trace's effortpost mentions that the FAA paused hiring in 2013 awaiting the new test, but I'll spell out that the FAA had previously expected to hire over a thousand ATC each year.
At best, this means a lot of people didn't retire when they were planning to do so; more likely, this resulted in a lot of shuffled schedules and reduced overlap (and not-ideal workload).
ATC work is hard, and important, often in stupid small ways. The New York, Chicago, and Southern California TRACON are some of the busiest in the world, and even with modern radar and computerized systems you're juggling a half-dozen aircraft in three-dimensional space moving at high speeds (and often with incomprehensible accents). There are major accidents where ATC, including overworked or undersupported ATC, have been responsible.
Ostensibly, everyone who passed this test still had to pass a cognitive AT-SAT test (though now mixed with biodata?), though not the Centralized Selection Panel. But with a now vastly reduced numbers taking that test (FAA expected 70% failure rates at the Biographical Assessment score), the final group to pull from was drastically smaller, and they almost certainly had to pull from wider ranges scores than before.
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