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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Because government contracts have to be transparent, the award process tends to be overly bureaucratic and algorithmic. There's no real mechanism with which the Canadian government could bar IBM from bidding, and they're obliged to take the best bid. Usually this is lowest cost per rated point, scored against a large matrix of must-haves and nice-to-haves that are assigned weights.

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Sounds like the system is set up in such a way as to deliver a under-performing product. Especially if it optimizes for "lowest cost per rated point". Quality things require significant investment.

No wonder IBM has to go get developers outside of the US/CA/AU if they were the lowest bid.

Now it all fits together. Whenever i go to my states web services and they look odd. I now know why. That is changing though.

If you don't have an objective metric like that, these bureaucrats don't magically learn how to make good decisions. They just overpay their friends instead. These bidding systems are a symptom of bad decision makers, not their cause.

Governments used to build things in house as well ... I remember the first time I applied for federal student aid — in 1999 — it was a long complicated form but it was far more complex and functional than any web application I’d interacted with up to that date.

Built on in-house knowledge rather than subcontracted out to incompetents with zero stake in product quality or understanding of what they were trying to build ... (aka the outsource everything mentality of the gop that spread everywhere during bush era from which American government managed infrastructure on all levels has never recovered — and probably will never recover)

I used to work as an in house contractor for the US Government on a team with two other developers. Our federal managers were pushing to replace a highly customized HR system with a 3rd party product. It was going to cost millions of dollars and take over a year. Our job was to help with the transition even though we built and maintained the original system. However, our contractor manager pushed for us to upgrade the existing system in house by hiring two additional surge developers. We ended up finishing the entire project in six months well under budget and exactly to spec with great feedback from the users. Funny thing about it is the federal managers took credit for the project even though they initially wanted to use a 3rd party system. Such is politics.

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