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If you have a government sponsored monopoly like that, at least do a half-way decent job. I will never understand getting paid $300k for a static website and being so desperate to squeeze another ounce of profit out of an already absurdly profitable contract that you shoot yourself in the foot by not at least delivering something pretty.

I mean, wow.

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The predetermined companies chosen to execute these projects have never operated in real market conditions and they employ underpaid, demotivated people. No competent programmer would ever want to work there. Most of these companies are actually ill-transformed former communist enterprises which started importing and selling hardware in the 1990s, doing the occasional state software project when it comes up.

What happens is they pocket $295k and spend $5k on an actual project. In Poland a company got ~$150k to make a system to collect and count votes for local elections, it failed spectacularly. It turned out they employed one 23 year old CS student to make everything over about a half year. No public salary data, but I bet they paid her something like $800/month. The saddest thing is she got most of the blame for failure, if you google her name it's the only thing that comes out.

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