Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

The entire culture has to change. Had a female programmer who works in Washington D.C. tell me a few years back the unwritten rule is that unless you're at one of the top rungs of the GS federal pay scale you aren't supposed to talk at all.

She had a boss who met with developers and told them nobody cares about your opinions. You see million dollar mistakes being made and you either accept it or leave government which is what she did.

View on HN

And this is miniscule. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost hundreds of billions more than they needed to (not talking about whether they should have been started, just the effects achieved for the cost). I flew F/A-18s off the carrier for 6 hour missions that could have been handled by a small propeller plane in country. These missions required a carrier (millions to operate), extra more-costly flight hours ($10k/hour for F/A-18s), and 3 air-to-air refuels (cost of tanker flight time and gas). Not to mention the deterioration of incredibly expensive assets that need to be replaced. I also saw artillery and tanks in country that had no use. Could go on about the waste.

The sad truth is government bureaucracies spend all their budgets so they can ask for more. Limiting cost is the least of their concerns. I applaud 18F and the Digital Service for their efforts to advance and streamline IT and development costs. It’s an uphill battle. There is no reality check in the public sector as there is in the private sector, where inefficient behemoths eventually go bankrupt to more efficient companies.

Outsourcing is supposed to prevent this, but the big contractors just milk it for all it’s worth (Oracle failing to build Oregon’s healthcare website for $250 million is an example, HP and NMCI is another). I don’t believe it’s just the byzantine contract bidding process but the fact it is easier for leaders to say they chose a big “reputable” company so it’s not their fault it failed, whereas if they had chosen a small no-name company and it failed it would be their ass. So real competition and efficiency end up being non-existent in government, unless the president’s legacy initiative is in jeopardy and he throws his weight behind the fix. I don’t know of any way to fix this behavior except to limit the size of government and make it more local so accountability is easier to maintain by the electorate. I wish more good people in government could change things, but there are already a lot of good people trying their best in a top-down system where CYA and optics are more important than efficiency and results.

Government and non-profits alike: people shoot for mediocrity and avoid taking risks. This is how you avoid getting fired. This is what happens when incentives & accountability are misaligned with your organization's supposed goals.

There's also a culture of not recognizing or admitting failure; they're spun into success stories. This means people don't learn from mistakes and keep repeating them.

Smaller teams are weeded out very early. The barriers to entry for working with government and non-profits are high, demanding all kind of certifications and processes to be implemented.

If you don't have teams to build excruciatingly detailed (and inaccurate) proposals (complete with 100 slides presentations), jump through the hoops of procurement and fill up the deluge of paper associated with tracking every single hour working on the contract, you won't land the big contracts.

Personally, I threw the towel in. Enterprise pays more, is more loyal and while procurement can still be a PITA, the overall organization is clearly aligned behind growth and revenue. If you help them do that, you can circumvent or negotiate things.

I too experienced several million dollar efforts that went nowhere. Governments in general are not geared to think about returns on investment, but our current one is quite terrible.

I think government, in general, is built to be slow and deliberate, but as the pace of tech change has accelerated, the responsiveness of government hasn't kept up. Git was invested in 2005, for example.

ref: https://bhc3.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/consumption-spreads...

The government is geared towards risk aversion and ensuring that the friends of the people at the top are taken care of.

Results are secondary. This is possible because there's no accountability for not getting results.

And I'll say, outside of the military, the public sector does not attract competence. There are exceptions, certainly. But the pay and the level of bullshit tends to attract those who either want to play politics, or who want a secure paycheck and benefits with little accountability, or just can't really perform at the level most private sector work demands.

Yeah, I have to think that the only reason this story exists is because there was a very public humiliation for the Administration, and that the original project is business as usual 99% of the time. I highly doubt billions of gov't contracts are now being rerouted to "young people," and in fact (on a parallel track), the last 18F headline I saw was that they came out with a to-do list.

Changing the government contracting process is going to be the slowest part of this -- yep nothing drastic is different now that a few years ago. But the winds of change are in the air. The fine folks at USDS are working hard to fix this from the root. There was a recent California child welfare software project that was broken up into smaller pieces and served as a prototype of a contract that was made to appeal to modern firms, and reward sound development practices. Expect more of this to shift the playing field and lay the groundwork for competition to do the rest.

You want to have been involved in the NHS Connecting for Health scheme. My god that ineptitude was beyond anything else I had ever seen.

Do tell.

Feature creep, "technical managers" who promised close-to-impossible functionality in totally impossible time frames. So many teams developing in isolation on loosely defined specs so nothing worked as it was assumed then when it was "fixed" it broke it for another team, etc. Higher ups making decisions on what stack to use based on who bought them nicest lunch or some other "bribe" so nothing worked together without a shit load of extra work, then obviously the price went up when they needed to purchase more for phase++ as none of the higher ups had any kind of negotiating or technical architecture experience.

Essentially it came down to too many people in too many isolated teams who were led by people that would struggle to do IT for a small Windows-only business.

At the time I used to say that the people running the project would get nine women pregnant in the hope of having a baby in a month. I would hope the problem with that is obvious but you would be shocked at how many people thought it was actually a good idea!

I dealt with this in the military, and it left me with a completely fatalistic look on work in general.

Welp, you're signing my paychecks. I will do whatever you want me to do for 40 hours per week. If that's productive work that makes a difference, awesome. If that involves me wasting a gazillion dollars on something stupid, I'm not paid to think, man. I just work here. If you want me to think, then pay me to think.

On the bright side, I have absolutely zero stress when it comes to workplace drama because I couldn't care less to begin with.

But doesn't the indifference eventually become soul-destroying?

Nope, because I have passion for things outside of work. Hiking, lifting, spending time with my girlfriend, programming, playing Kerbal Space Program, etc.

For me, work is something that I neither dread nor enjoy. It simply is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com