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Comment by gervase | Hacker News Reader

US government electronic services have gone unmaintained for decades; I don't think it's fair to blame it on the administration who happens to be in power when things go sideways (see: OPM hack, etc).

I'm not sure the root cause, but there seems to be a long-standing, fundamental distaste for infrastructure maintenance by the US government.

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It's been 15 months, that's enough time to see results from poor decisions. Sure, he would need to be unusually competent to prevent such issues, but arguably that's a reasonable expectation for a president.

(I say this as a government contractor.) As to root cause for Gov IT issues, the real issue seems to be the government outsourcing so much. It makes many people rich, but outsourcing ends up being both extremely expensive and error prone. This is not purely an issue with the government most private companies face issues when outsourcing IT as it's difficult to get right.

Except neither the president nor his close friends pay any taxes, so how would they know anything is broken? /s

Putting aside the external politics, its hard for govt employees to take on these sort of tasks. The reason I say this is because of how promotions work for govies. Its much easier to get promoted if you deliver a new system than if you were just doing ops & maintenance on a system you didn't have a hand in building. Sure, there are going to be some that will do the work but its definitely an institutional priorities issue.

I don't think this problem of promotion is unique to government - this applies everywhere in modern sales and image-oriented business cultures rather than longevity and loyalty. Maintenance hardly gets any innovation in general compared to new products and lines of business itself due to the obsession with growth in a lot of business (maintaining systems gets thrown to lower tiers of talent and under-funded once the parade is over - this applies across just software too). It's impossible for me to get the recognition compared to engineers pushing out flashy demos that attract new dollars but when I optimize infrastructure systems and systems to squeeze out 50%+ more transactions / second without paying more hardly anyone seems to care even in engineering.

Not saying it's unique to government, I'm just saying this is the reality as well in government as it is in the private sector. The thing I'd like to point out is the morale issue and dwindling compensation for doing this work as opposed to walking out the door and going to the private sector is the crux of the promotion issue. I've worked in both the private sector & government and I've gotta say government work is a real shit show with the arcane rules and regs you have to follow to do the simplest of tasks. I'm going to stop short of going into a full rant, but I hope you see what I mean.

I’ve been a govie and contractor both and have done private sector work in companies of varying sizes, I get you. I was mostly speaking not necessarily to you but for others that may have certain perceptions of government work that are inaccurate or unfair comparisons. There’s plenty of inane rules in any large enterprise. The difference is that a truly inefficient large enterprise has a non-zero chance of winding down while government agencies themselves rarely start greenfield nor wind down (projects, of course, are stopped all the time).

Ah, a fellow masochist, I totally get what you mean; sorry if I seemed defensive/agitated.

One of the fundamental reasons is that tech is an in-demand industry, and you can make a lot more money working for a private company than you can for the government. Not so much at the developer level, but senior management is bereft of anyone with a clue.

What will be interesting to see is if Trump holds to his campaign promises and improves this type of infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if he is only referring to physical infrastructure and not software.

Collapsing bridges take priority over temporary website outages.

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