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Comment by hobaak | Hacker News Reader

Impressive work by Singapore government agency. I heard that they are as competent as private sector.

I heard that they are as competent as private sector.

They are much, much better than that. They hire the best grads and pay lots, but expect a lot too:

One thing that stands out in Singapore is the quality of its civil service. Unlike the egalitarian Western public sector, Singapore follows an elitist model, paying those at the top $2m a year or more. It spots talented youngsters early, lures them with scholarships and keeps investing in them. People who don't make the grade are pushed out quickly.

http://www.economist.com/node/18359852

The government is the highest-status and highest-paying employer in Singapore. The education systems are extremely strong, they send students all over the world for higher education, and those students usually return to Singapore to work for the government. The fact that their Prime Minister was the Senior Wrangler [1] at Trinity College demonstrates a lot about the overall way their government works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of...

Since moving to the US, my health insurance is handled by the private sector. Competent is not how I would describe it. (The more accurate term is 'Kafka-esque')

Back in Canada, on the other hand...

The incompetence of government is a matter of religious faith among some people in the US, logic and empirical evidence be damned.

we have private sector running trains here in the UK and they seem mostly incompetent

trains in singapore themselves are private sector. SMRT is a publically traded company. If their trains keep exhibiting this problem, they run the risk of losing their contract to run the circle line to ComfortDelGro (or possibly an upstart competitor).

Probably the handoff to data.sg was probably done because it doesn't necessarily make sense for them to maintain a separate data science division within the company.

Probably a lot easier to achieve as a unitary state!

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