Why it is important that software projects fail (2008)

The USAs tax system where the online portion was essentially privatized by a single company (Turbotax) was pretty jarring.

It's usually filed correctly already. So many times you'll just be clicking next.

If you have other income, like dividends, there are a few more boxes to fill, but it's still fairly simple.

Once you start having serious money, you better have a tax lawyer doing this for you, but I suppose this is the case everywhere.

Four years, maybe eight in some cases. Not much more. That's all they have to prove their worth. Most complex projects easily take longer than that to plan and execute. Civil servants on the other are typically there until they retire. In many countries civil servants enjoy special job protections that ensure it is typically hard to fire them. And since they are large organizations, there's a bit of a rat-race to get promoted to the lucrative top positions. That requires pleasing the people holding the purse strings. Politicians in other words. And politicians need to get stuff done and that requires warm relations with the established civil servant leadership because otherwise nothing gets done and they lose the next elections.

This adds to the problem because politicians basically rely on an already compromised bureaucratic machinery that resists changes to make it smaller. So any new policy just translates into more budget, more people, and more bureaucracy. The old ones never go away.

You see the same pattern of behavior in large corporations except those periodically get forced by their shareholders and the market to do something about it. Sometimes that fails and they get acquired, lose market-share, or even just implode and disappear. If you look at the fortune 500 through the years, you'll see there's a lot of churn there. New companies take up spots vacated by older failing corporations. But pretty much all of them employ way more people than the competitors that ultimately displace them.

Banks were mentioned in the article a few times. Most banks have actually been reducing head count for years. It used to be that they had to have offices in every small city, village, and even neighborhoods. Not any more. Those days are long gone. There are now several startups disrupting the space with online only banks. Any bank looking to survive in that space is pretty much copying that organizational model at this point. And as consumer banking is a this point a low margin product, a lot of the older and bloated banks are clearly struggling.

Sort of but not really. Just keep voting in progressives that believe in government until the bureaucracy gets the message that it pays to be progressive and fix things.

If we elect politicians in favor of simplifying government operations, and they can actually succeed, then it follows that government software would naturally simplify as well.

Note: This isn't necessarily the same as reducing government's role.

In my experience, there is a correlation between parties that follow the science, invest in education, and create useful software.

My critique is towards people that gives up and says that governments cannot make good software. And, that is false. It will never be perfect, like anything else, but it can be good.

Go figure.

Thanks for the reminder! We had a small fun party to celebrate!

It is if you fail.

It makes no sense to blame the people trying to solve this problem, rather than those who created it in the first place.

Now we have two problems: the original problem that GDPR failed to solve and GDPR useless warnings.

Exactly. If it went far enough the solution could have been much simpler. But instead of the real solution, politicians preferred the appearance of the solution which created enormous complexity and didn't solve the problem.

So when the Aussies get their tax system, they must have asked for it. Why? Because they got it.

This is an absurdity. Have you ever complained about the proliferation of utterly terrible reality TV shows? Very few people think it's anything but mindless garbage. But it's there, so it must be wanted, because it's there.

Plenty of other examples in society of things that exist but nobody appreciates them.

Anyway, been reading Mazzucato recently.

My school in fact had my contact details from way before GDPR was a thing. Recently, they were forced to write to confirm that they were allowed to continue contacting me. If I had not responded, they would be compelled to delete my information.

So if I'd missed the message, I would unknowingly be disconnected from further communications.

And what is to be gained from this? All the risks of someone hacking the school system are the same, someone could still spam everyone, and so on. Why not just have an opt-out system, defaulting to stay-on-the-list? Then people who care to be removed can do so, but we can assume quite confidently that most alumni of a school want to remain in contact.

It just smells like someone had a use case they were thinking of that perhaps made sense to have a default-remove, but they ended up imposing it on everyone.

For example many paintings have huge price tag, and we could live without them. Many CO2 removal could devices are very useful but not financially sustainable ...

Maybe they are right. I often wonder about the point of building another CRUD form. We’ve taken paper forms and digitized the process, but haven’t really figured out how to avoid needing the form in the first place. Massive digital bureaucracies exist that are all about pushing around digital paperwork. It’s as if there was a twist of history that caused the development of mechanical horses pulling rubber tired carriages, instead of just inventing cars.