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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

In practice, I agree: this is pretty cheap given the market.

But now take a step back and think about it: the actual problem is probably pretty simple. If the databases are well made, it would just take a few requests for this operation to be done. Even with the tests, that's one or two programmers' job for two weeks, and maybe one week of a partial review of results by a legal specialist to validate the quality.

Imagine if the state had two in-house programmers up to this task available. $195,000 would cover their salary for a year.

> and the consequences when there's a system failure, e.g. lawsuits

Another saving grace for doing things in house: you take actions internally. You can correct very quickly, shuffle incompetent people, save all the litigation costs and the bad faiths over misinterpretation of a SoW.

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Those two in-house programmers would never get the time to do this. They would be swallowed in various maintenance task on the other 500 custom systems the state owns.

(from experience in the private sector)

That's a difference I observed (in France) between the private and public sector. In several administration, public workers have a reputation of being lazy because they don't always have work to do. They are on demand, and work on projects as appropriate.

That's what a well-funded public task force looks like.

In such a case, a manager would look at the schedule, reserve the time necessary for this dev, take into account the other missions of the devs and get it done.

$195k would be enough to probably only cover one state-employee programmer for one year. Think about your salary, now double it. That's how much you cost your employer. I'm sure a state employee costs even more with how inefficient overhead is for government agencies.

In most of the world, public administrations tend to have lower overhead than similar private sectors. Administrations usually benefit more from the economy of scale and if you consider dividends as a cost for the end user, they don't have those.

Is a 100k salary the norm for people writing DB queries in the US? That sounds a lot.

It's all about liability transfer. Government is basically crippled by risk aversion. The first 165k were to sign a contract accepting all sorts of liability in case something bad happens. The other 30k was to write some SQL, test it (hopefully) and then run it in prod.

I doubt risk aversion is the reason. The govt is still on the hook for data errors regardless, also data errors are can be corrected with existing processes.

> the actual problem is probably pretty simple.

Yeah but writing the code is not what's expensive on this project.

That's my point. What is expensive is to interact with a private entity to do it, to manage risks and potential litigation. All these costs would be saved if the solution was developed in house.

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