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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

> Deloitte is the only contractor that can meet the project requirements, because configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform. Therefore, no other contractor has rights or access to leverage the system to carry out O&M activities, such as the administration of the system, change and defect management and end user support. As the only contractor with the GovConnect proprietary platform, and the need to stand up O&M support for VAMS while concurrently developing future releases, Deloitte is the only contractor that can achieve the O&M scope and contract requirements.”

Can’t make this stuff up.

https://beta.sam.gov/opp/2f5fc512fdde4e22860832337aac420f/vi...

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Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.

There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person.

Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.

It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract).

In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, from the point of view of labs doing it, like there’s this great person doing a lot of work and they deserve this new opening the lab fought to get budgeted.)

The sad part is that some poor naive young researchers will prepare and cross the country to interview (hopefully now there will be more video calls) not knowing that the call is already custom fitted to someone in the lab.

The fun part is that, as there has to be a majority of external jury in the commission appraising the candidates, the external jury sometimes don’t even know that the call is rigged and pick another, clearly better candidate Then, a few months later the candidate starts their new job and is really puzzled at the attitude of this one person… the one that was supposed to win the call

France has this down to an art.

When the French government puts out an EU wide bid for something (As is the rule in the EU), the bid will be won by a French company. Every. Single. Time. And it's not by accident.

Finland, on the other hand, is playing things stupid.

We've had cases where a city's laundry services was won by an Estonian company(!) because they were the cheapest. They actually shipped all laundry 300km+ south, over the bay and to Estonia. Wash it and send it back. For some reason the people handling the bid were all suprised_pikachu.png when it turned out the arrangement didn't work AT ALL.

That's all down to knowing how to write the bid so that the winner will also be the best.

Estonia was probably chosen because Estonia has very good experience doing laundry of the Russians if you know what I mean.

Joke aside, it seems one of the winner of the Finland->Estonia washing contract is actually a Finnish national that incorporated a company in Estonia: https://www.aripaev.ee/article/2011/2/22/soome-pesupesijad-u...

Estonia has done a great job with these contracts. Washer salaries are 400Eur per month here and 1600eur per month in Finland so Estonians keep the washing factories open overnight.

For more context: When opening a permanent position, research institutions are required by law to advertise the position publicly and interview candidates.

We are talking about permanent positions guaranteed for life with fantastic perks. They're extremely competitive to get.

When a permanent position is opened, it's often for a position that's been contracted out for a while.

Want to hire the contractor who's been doing the job perfectly for 2 years? It's simply not possible because of the law above. Gotta advertise the job nationwide and run formal interviews. An interview panel will run interviews and pick whoever they like (it takes months).

It's not as rigged as the poster makes it out to be. The panel is 5+ random people selected among a very large company. They don't know that the position is tailored to someone and they couldn't care less either way, they're all people with a cushy position guaranteed for life, no favor to give. (It's really the opposite of Russia/China for those doing the comparison).

It's rigged in the sense that if there was somebody doing the job for year, they're probably more qualified than you are.

This rule exists to prevent middle managers from doing empire building and growing their headcount indefinitely. It works as you can see above where a better person was chosen.

I have a friend who was lucky enough to present himself and get such position. the reason was that the other guy made some mistake in the formal process (missed some required sheet of paper).

This is exactly how American companies game the h1b visa system. When I worked at AVG we would write job requirement so specific to an Israel developers who worked for one of our subsidiaries that it was clear no other human being in the world could qualify for it.

What you call gaming, I call working around the government’s idiotic visa requirements.

That depends on what you see as the purpose of the visa requirements. If the purpose is to support economic prospects for American citizens and current residents (which seems like a completely valid purpose of government), then putting hurdles to ensure the job opening was “shopped” to qualified existing authorized workers seems pretty reasonable.

(I should clarify that I’m fully in favor of immigration programs that serve to increase the density of highly qualified individuals in the US and to fill positions which would otherwise go vacant. If as a small side-effect, those programs depress wages via increased supply, that’s still an excellent trade for the population. I am not in favor of visa programs substantially/primarily aimed at decreasing wages.)

Increased supply of labor depresses wages ceteris paribus.

That is why George W Bush and older generation Republicans always supported legal AND illegal immigration. Their constituents were the businesss that thrived and made more profits from a cheaper laborforce.

The Democrats were historically hostile to immigration because their base was the working class. Now that Wall Street and Big Business has gone Democratic since Bill Clinton and the New Democrats there will be more supply of labor and thus lower wages ceteris paribus.

> ceteris paribus

Today I learned another useful latin expression.

Working for a subsidiary has a preferred status for getting a work permit in US.

It is called L-1 Intra-Company Transfer Visa: L-1A and L-1B for transfer of managers and specialists

https://workpermit.com/immigration/usa/employees-guide-us-im...

Why Israeli developers? Just out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for anti-virus software for mobile or for desktops?

Oh just in this case I was working at a security company and everybody we imported were from Israel. I’ve worked st 3 security companies and they all either had Israeli offices or had acquired Israeli security startups. It just seems to be a thing there.

I don't think he meant israeli developers in general. Specific people.

There's a bassoonist urban legend (possibly true) that Bernstein wrote the ludicrous high Fs in the West Side Story bassoon part so that one of his pals who played bassoon would have to be hired for the pit orchestra, because he was the only one around who could play that high.

This is how hiring works in most public tech centers and colleges here in Spain.

The job postings are useless, if you want to work there what you need is an introduction (someone to give your CV to a lead that needs hands on deck). Then 2 to 3 months later a job posting with an almost complete copy of your CV will appear and they’ll hire you.

Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.

Here's a link in Swedish: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-...

Under the first bullet in the screendump in the article it says:

* Experience from personnel management positions and documented good leadership qualities (Here Henric lacks the clear experience why I think it should be moved to meritorious)

Couldn’t find an English version, but I’m sure you can run it through a translate and get the gist of it

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...

A quick google search didn't give me much but I found this https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-...

> He rose to the rank of major despite not having completed mandatory training, and was even temporarily promoted to be able to serve at the military alliance headquarters, the newspaper said.

Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.

That’s beautiful

Russia at some point instituted a law that all contracts have to be published in a centralized database. So, to award contracts to specific companies, an array of techniques was developed to prevent anyone from using that database to bid on those contracts. The names of the goods are misspelled, spelled using a mix of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, the items are required to be of specific model with tiny modification from common one that only one (pre-arranged) provider happens to have, unusual names are used for goods, etc. etc. It's a whole branch of art now.

It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich.

edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure we don't have a monopoly on such practices, only couldn't remember if I ever read about Western procedures and misconducts with these contests. Dunno even what they're properly called—it's a ‘tender’ here.

However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...

Also its less spectacular but more long term, "revolving door".

That term I do know, generally speaking. It's particularly associated for me with the industrial band Pigface.

This is quite common in the US.

For a while my entire job ended up writing proposals and all the related nonsense for federal an state government contracts. I did not like that one bit.

However spending week after week trying to divine the meaning behind phrases and terms.

It shortly became apparent that some parts of the government would consistently have requirements only applicable to one vendor.

That saved a lot of time since I could just skip them whenever they came out.

These types of «arrangements” often go all the way to congress promised pork for donors and secure job for voters.

If I have given the impression I was doing all the work myself that is not intended. We had a big team of all sorts of disciplines

What I don’t understand is why auditors can’t or won’t put a stop to this.

It's hard to put down a technically legal, as far as text of law goes, practice. Especially when there are no complaints to use as a base because all contenders for the contract were similarly shady. And sometimes some $RANDOM gets the contract because nobody serious will take it, thanks to anti-corruption/anti-loss measures that the populous voted in that made the contract impossible. So Honest John Federal takes the contract and finds a suitably desperate student/outsources it to cheapest vendor possible.

Meanwhile auditors (unless burned out) would love to get the contractors and buyer staked in court, but technically all checkboxes on the checklist are checked (pun intended) and there's no obvious better candidate to use as counter example.

Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.

Reminds me of an RFP for the Pennsylvania Land Trust Assocation I spent $10k preparing a bid for when I was young and naïve before I understood that RFPs were often a sham to give auditors the illusion of due diligence and that it would have been impossible for us to win the contract.

It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract.

The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

> it reads a bit like any government contract.

I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI.

I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either.

Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.

It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it.

I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1].

Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation.

Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi...

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...

So what is the downside of blowing your budget for the bid?

Are you asking what happens if you have the low bid and you go over budget on the project?

If you can’t get change orders to cover your budget overages, your company loses money.

Russian government certainly doesn’t have the monopoly of that kind of practice. It’s a standard practice in wordlbank projects as well : wordlbank finances the development of a system in a foreign country, and the projects requirements are written in such a way that only US companies can answer.

That's nothing to do with Russia. I had a client make an RFP based on my company's service specs. The entire intent (stated behind the scenes) was to have us get the work. We'd already done other work - they wanted to keep us involved for the next phase of work. We lost to someone local. They charged basically the same as we did, but they were local so didn't have to include travel costs, so they 'won'. The client lost out because there was no consideration for continuation of knowledge/experience - we'd done an initial training course for them - our teams knew each other and had done some informal prototyping already while on site. But... "the other bid was lower".

This also happens a lot in some European countries, where governments/municipalities buy/lease cars for. They specify features list in the way, that only one car model form particular manufacturer matches the requirements. Pure corruption.

This is endemic in tender processes the world over.

I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.

Seems like the software procurement process itself is broken.

I guess this could happen with hardware too. But adding more features is much easier in software. Marketing can then argue that it makes a certain product “better”.

It’s not just software. Military hardware procurement is also notoriously corrupt, ditto with local infrastructure projects.

Sounds like poland and hungary today :)

It reminds me of how during the Iraq war (fiasco), Halliburton, partly owned by dick Cheney, was awarded a huge "no bid" contract (no competitor by design, no bid required) for logistical support in Iraq.

No corruption to see here folks, move along.

This right here “configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform.”

Because it is so difficult to launch a project and provision the requisite infrastructure in the federal government due to various IT regs and laws and subsequently obtain an Authorization To Operate (ATO) in a timely fashion an existing platform is routinely sole sourced especially when speed is necessary.

Why? This is both legit and utter bs. Legit: the fed gov actually attempts to protect a persons’ private data. BS: after the drain of the acquisition process (led by non-technical folks), ATO, slide decks to more non-technical management (Deloitte and their peers crush this), the competent folks find other jobs either in or outside gov that free their creativity.

Positive: groups like USDS are reducing the drain, but once an exec gets burned they go back to checkbox management and shun the learning organization culture that has made tech the anti-thesis of this type of acquisition in other sectors.

*edited misspelling to show gov tries to protect not product privacy data

Government will always be very inefficient. Government certainly has some strong benefits, but you should avoid using government wherever it is not absolutely necessary. Private industry would have done a far better job of handling the vaccine roll out.

This is propaganda and you should be more critical of the people peddling it. For example, ask yourself whether Deloitte is part of the federal government or perhaps the solution to this problem isn’t simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker. The same private sector which includes Amazon and Apple also includes Comcast, not to mention Enron.

The deeper lesson is to look at incentives: where things go well, the structure encourages the outcome society wants. When they’re misaligned, you get global climate change or the American healthcare system underperforming our peers at whole number cost and stress multiples.

Private companies go bankrupt all the time. Large public companies (like telcos) are slow, inefficient, monopolistic etc. Large defence contractors in the US are responsible for bribing officials and corrupting the US democracy. My point is that large organisations fail all the time. It doesn’t matter if it is public or private.

> Private industry would have done a far better job of handling the vaccine roll out.

The British vaccine is being rolled out by public bodies and is working pretty good indeed (half a million doses a day).

Meanwhile our track and trace system, misnamed "NHS Track and Trace", is, despite the name, almost completely outsourced to private industry (and barely even speaks to the NHS). It's universally acknowleged to be an absolute mess.

For your next laptop, car, etc. try doing what you think the government ought to do here. Write down the requirements, give them to a neutral third party who doesn’t doesn’t use computers/drive, and ask them to figure out the cheapest thing that meets the requirements. Commit yourself to buying only that. See how it goes for you.

But that's how I procure anything and everything. I go to geizhals.eu, select the category, select my requirements based on comparative testing from test.de, sort by cheapest total, and click buy.

Every single piece of electronics I own was bought that way.

How else would you buy stuff without being influenced by some subconscious bias caused by some stupid ad?

What makes you think you aren’t?

Are you asking him to prove a negative?

He just explained he picks the cheapest item in some database based on some specs.

I don't understand the analogy. Why would I give the requirements for making a website to someone who doesn't make websites? The government should do whatever anyone who wants a website does, hire someone to make a website. What's the issue?

Politics.

This is how hospital software is handled (at least in Finland). The one making the decisions is the head doctor in the hospital, because they have the most power.

They know fuck-all about software and fuck-all about the day to day work of the nurses and doctors who need to use the product every day.

And this is pretty much how we ended up giving Epic Systems 774 million for their MUMPS-flavoured piece of shit rebranded as "Apotti". And the project - started in 2015 - isn't even done, nor bug-free yet. The American model of everything being cost first didn't fit the Finnish model of medicine - to the surprise of no-one outside of the organisation.

It was so bad that other cities refused to use it and went with their own solutions instead of using Apotti.

Dr Corn Flower (Blue).

That was our nickname for our worst customer. Some wannabe nerd promoted to CIO, probably to keep him away from patients and the other staff.

His most substantial contribution was divining the precise shade of the highlight color used by our theme.

Our "portal" had labs, scripts, meds, notes, referrals, and on and on. Stuff like lab reports were industry standard (we had domain experts on our team). Dr Corn Flower had opinions on all of it. Not detail too small to argue about. Every pixel mattered.

We eventually got to the point where two team member's full time job was babysitting Dr Corn Flower, while others were permitted to do real work (skunkworks style).

And that was just one hospital. We had dozens of other customers, and 100s of partners.

Not the same industry, but it’s changing. Silicon Valley meets big Gov:

https://a16z.com/2019/10/03/anduril/

Basically, build first at the VC’s risk and then deliver a finished product to Gov.

If I asked our procurement team to get me a distributed version-control software to use I'd be given a site-wide license of Perforce before being given git.

So enevitably requirements are tailored to what I want. It seems someone wanted Deloitte, why (and how expensive was the dinner) is another question.

Do you think one expensive dinner was all it took? ;-)

What if the demoralizing answer is... yes, just one dinner!

I think this is what usually happens and what causes many public projects to fail: the customer has no competent staff that can a) write requirements or b) evaluate tenders. They're often incompetent enough to even hire someone competent to do those things. The government should maybe have a dedicated unit that assists other units with procurement of IT solutions. Where the staff gets very well compensated when a project is a success. But that's probably never going to happen, for more than one reason.

One of the responsibilities of the UK’s Government Digital Service is to review any IT spending by other departments, and are staffed so that in many cases they can implement and support products themselves rather than outsourcing them. My understanding is that other departments are making headway in being allowed to bypass that process, but at their peak GDS were fantastic at shutting down bad projects before they’d sucked up millions of pounds.

tl;dr it's not working

Well how the hell do we have a £40M contract for supply of laptops to schoolkids filled by a noname laptop supplier using the jankiest (really low quality, really poor spec) laptops worth maybe £100 but being charged to the taxpayer at >£300 each.

School IT people are getting them delivered, a lot are broken, and the cost of repair is given as more than the cost of buying _retail_ a better replacement.

I don't know how these people live with themselves, ripping off the taxpayer and lumping in-need schoolkids with poor equipment.

Anyone in that decision chain could spend an hour reading "budget laptop" articles on trusted websites, then look on the website of a high-street supplier for a top price. Boom, saved the taxpayer £20M.

Mind you at least something was delivered, current UK government tenders appear to be typified by non-delivery by completely inexperienced companies for costs well above market.

The equiv contract in Australia went to Lenovo. Microsoft and Adobe preloaded the laptops with Office and Adobe Suite and no cost. Worked out pretty well.

This is especially sad given that the BBC micro project in the 80's was a resounding success and showed exactly how these project should be run.

I used to work for a consultancy that almost exclusively worked for the German armed forces. And pretty signficant chunk of these contracts evolved around requirements and specification documents. Basically we wrote them, the way the armyed forces wnated them to be written, and they just signed of on them. That was equally shocking as it was hilarious sometimes. The sad thing, almost the complete management of that firm, and the majority of employees, used to be former Army, Navy or Airforce. Or from the civil admin staff. I always wondered how much value we actually created, the amount of additional expertise was quite limited.

US Digital Service. GSA 18f.

They already exist. Mysterious why CDC didn't use them. Maybe they are hollowed out after the Trump years. I know I wouldn't have stuck around.

In my 10 years supporting CDC, I can tell you 18f is nonexistent there. Nothing to do with the administrations.

I imagine you are correct that this happens frequently.

However, if a large outsourcer like Deloitte gets the gig, they should have the right experience and knowledge to work with the customer to determine what they really need/want, and to steer them through the whole process. They should also ensure they use best practices, such as tests. If a company fails here.

I think there is blame to go round on both sides.

Procurement teams are not the ones doing the work, they are centralized bureaucratic functions to which requests go in and products come out. They have a habit of buying stuff that actual practitioners would never buy: inappropriate to the use case, known poor quality, off-brand knockoff of something practitioners actually like, etc. Any latitude in the requirements will be used in the dumbest possible way. There’s a whole cottage industry of products for government that meet naively written specs but are actually crap.

Imagine hiring web developers with only HR on the interview loop, no manager or team rounds.

This is a common trap that people fall in while trying to understand the problem. It's not that they chose the "wrong software", it's that they tried to scope every aspect of custom-designed software ahead of time.

Imagine if you had to describe in exact detail every possible aspect of a mission to Mars in 1940. You are guaranteed to wind up causing the death of everybody involved, because there is an enormous amount of research standing between where you are now, and having enough information to create a workable design.

The real problem is that the nature of the contracting system doesn't allow for open-ended / minimum-viable projects with iterative development, you have to do your best to write the requirements then throw it over the wall and hope for the best. Of course you're going to wind up with a mess.

This is a major problem with using contractors. They bill by the hour. Their continued employment is not dependent on doing a good job. They half ass everything because it is about billing and being done. Also, doing a bad job means "overruns" for more free money. The government needs a Department of Technology that runs all these systems for all national systems that are needed. This isn't like building a combat fighter, it would be straightforward to be build a team that can build a scalable website with today's technology.

The problem is because of government pay scales they can’t fill those digital agency roles with the right people

Within a year or two the good staff end up working at the consulting shops and influence their former employers

Could big tech firms help by loaning out their employees on sabbatical, or could they sponsor government tech positions? It feels like so much of the talent there would be very useful to the government, which would probably have a positive feedback loop on the economy as a whole.

Companies have no incentives to improve the economy as a whole when the same time can be spent with a higher ROI on improving the company's own fortunes in particular. Give them the right incentives and only then it'll happen.

Good people want to work at places with stock options and bonuses for good performance, the government can not offer that. Government is more suited for people interested in management, not pure technical people

Speaking as a technical person who worked for government, one of the most frustrating things was not pay, I am a simple man. What was frustrating was the GARBAGE tech we had to deal with. I'm talking 5+ year old windows versions, crap peripherals and desktops, shitty offices in ugly buildings, super intermittent connections to the data that always go down, throttled data-centers by incompetent SQL pulls (I was guilty of this starting out, too)...the list goes on and on. Compare this to other places, where you can actually code in comfort, can actually solve more problems because you're not constantly derailed or demoralized by government's rusty and slow systems...

Fixing all those issues requires

1. competent technologists

2. competent technology managers who can communicate to the suits who are in charge of the budget that these things are needed for a functional quality tech environment

#2 is a much rarer skill than #1, and those people will get paid way more and will have to deal with way less BS working in tech companies than government positions.

I hate to get political, but perhaps some of this is due to certain parties that always want to reduce taxes, or to even pay for collecting those taxes...

The government absolutely could offer competitive incentive packages if the appropriate legislation can be passed.

At some point it will become obvious that software complexity is a national security issue. I feel that point still hasn't arrived, for whatever reason. Perhaps the realization has arrived, but those offering the realization have biased the reports to favor themselves (i.e. Deloitte, et. al.)

Government pay scales probably end up costing them more right now anyway. I would rather hire two software engineers at $250k/yr than ten software engineers at $60k/yr. Because those ten software engineers aren't going to produce anything at all usable.

https://media.defense.gov/2019/May/01/2002126690/-1/-1/0/SWA...

"U.S. national security increasingly relies on software to execute missions, integrate and collaborate with allies, and manage the defense enterprise. The ability to develop, procure, assure, deploy, and continuously improve software is thus central to national defense."

We already know it's a national security issue. Nothing is done about it.

Somebody had written this with exact purpose to give this contract to Deloitte. I would be very surprised if there wasn't bribery involved.

Geez, I thought the whole idea is that 'government is the problem. We need to let the private sector handle all these things.'

Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year. Shame the price has been so high.

Well, the thing is that when the government takes tax money and allocates it to private companies via obscure and arguably corrupt procedures, you get the worst of both worlds. Inefficiency and rigidity of the government, combined with opacity and greed of the private companies.

When people say privatizing things could be a solution, they don't usually mean "take tax money and award it through a no-bid contract to a private company for laughable reasons which could be either stupid or corrupt, your choice". At least if those aren't the people who are getting no-bid contracts, those people mean exactly that.

> Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year

You sound like somebody outside CDC on purpose went and made CDC look bad. As far as I can see here, CDC did it to itself - and it's way not the only messup they had recently, they also totally bungled covid tests rollout. There seems to be serious trouble there, and if they think they will be excused because of the pandemic - they unfortunately may be right, but this only means the rot will continue.

>you get the worst of both worlds. Inefficiency and rigidity of the government, combined with opacity and greed of the private companies.

This is what is being referred to when a politician used the words "public/private partnership.'

By itself, there's nothing wrong with government buying services from private companies - in fact, it's inevitable, unless the whole economy is controlled by the government, certain services will have to be bought on private markets. It is when the unique power position of the government is leveraged to give certain companies unearned advantage, and the government acts not as mere consumer among others, even if with deep pockets and special needs, but seeks to promote some companies at the cost of suppressing others, is where the trouble lies.

Isn't the problem that the compensation structure is wrong?

By paying lump sums you are basically encouraging your contractor to screw you over. You should compensate them based on metrics that align with your goals. For example, pay $1 (random number) for each vaccinated citizen.

If the governmental body is not interested in ensuring efficiency, than no matter what structure is chosen it will be abused - by inflating counts, or costs, or some other way, because people who have incentive to get money and no counter-incentive to follow the rules will cheat. Not all of them - but enough of them to cause serious damage. Look what happened in California recently - about 27% (!!!) of unemployment benefits is now thought to be fraudulent. This is what happens when people are incentivized to cheat and people who oversee the public coffers aren't incentivized to guard them. You'd expect that there would be some consequences for CDC leadership for their numerous failures - but that's not happening.

There are systems like that within the government, but in those scenarios the Contractor owns the system and deploys it as a service. While it can be cost effective in the early years, it does entrench the Contractor and make it difficult for the Government to switch because they own nothing.

From my experience with the german government, it is more the bureaucracy that is the issue and not government per se. And that bureaucrcy, on the governmen side, wasn't that far of from what I saw in companies like Siemens back the day.

I think government is just sitting on the extreme end of bloated bureaucracy, with everthing defense related taking the cake.

And the voters will easily vote for more of such bureaucracy, wrapped in words about controlling spending, avoiding corruption, preventing money going to few private contractors, ensuring cheapest bid wins, etc. etc.

This is combined with how various voter-friendly "cheap government" initiatives go on for all kinds of internal purchases, not just big dollar projects like this.

Printers that needs servicing all the time because "cheapest bid" means you have low-quality shady consumables used.

Cars that end up constantly in service because the provider is cheap and thus couldn't do the right job servicing a Land Rover Discovery 2, taking away critical machine for reaching accident sites for aviation accident investigation.

Purchase of new cars for the same org and purpose - the freshly elected government leaked "appropriate" story to one of the newer tabloids to make it look like excess that they are curbing.

I still tell the story of SCAAI investigator buying a plane ticket for international flight because office responsible for finances in appropriate ministry refused to arrange diplomatic courier. So an investigator booked an international flight, left the plane, gave the CD full of confidential data to his local counterpart, turned 180 and went back to the same plane back.

Are you saying this isn't an example of "government is the problem?"

I'm sorry notmarkus, what I said was unclear. I apologize for that, I'll try harder to avoid doing that again. Too much at stake.

Hate to say this, but having worked in similar industries, RFPs are sometimes deliberately skewed/ created in a manner that make it hard (or downright impossible) for others to participate.

A lot of the time, that's ok. A few people in the know want to avoid a lengthy and wasteful evaluation process for the product or company they already feel confident will meet their needs. Or worse, they're afraid someone might underbid, people without context will pick the lowest cost option, and the product or service will end up being a disaster.

The problem comes in when things like this happen - that a company forces itself to be the only option through unnecessary infrastructure and proprietary software in the public space.

That's why biddings are well-intentioned but mostly bullshit.

The biased/corrupt person that ultimately is forcing the decision gets their pick, but doesn't face the full consequences of their decision because "hey it was a bidding, everyone got to offer". People making multi-million dollar decisions should be exposed with plenty of skin in the game for things to ever not be as rigged as they currently are.

But that’s also a failure of internal IT and processes. These types of architectural decisions really need to go through some sort of ARC before proceeding.

That is the easiest a company can leverage an invitation to tender ad infinitum. I believe that going for the cheapest is always the wrong way to conducting those projects. On the company side, bargain you first contract, install your proprietary program, lock everyone up in it and higher your fees when you have leverage on the next requirements.

Government, public offers, invitation to tender must not only play by the cheapest but also by the long term impact that changing contractor every 4, 5 years has on their own management and system. This is getting as absurd and stupid. Force contract to use standard/boring technology and leverage a large market of companies for support. Being the cheapest never was a fair decision maker.

US Digital Service Assemble!

Exactly. We need someone to “Amazon” the shit out of our governmental computing systems (e.g. APIs everywhere), especially those designed to interact with other systems. They should be required to use an accessible API with published schemas and documentation. I’m surprised someone hasn’t identified this as a stability and security risk for our government.

Yeah, we need the US Digital Service for oversight and prevent this type of failure as much as we need them to parachute in after-the-fact. Prevent Vendor-Thanos from ever finishing the Infinity Revenue Gauntlet.

Wow! the next article should be about who signed that contract!

Holy cow! Talk about vendor lock-in! Even AWS is easier to get out of.

The problem is that any success in delivering past contracts does not guarantee success in future in software technology where a typical software technology becomes obsolete every 3 years.

In software world things change so fast that someone with 6 years of experience developing software will not have enough experience with newest tools, languages, methods, etc. Newer graduates with experience is newest applications in their resume get hired and they sometimes lack real development experience.

Building and delivering software is not like building a road or sidewalk where technology does not change by much every year or decade. They still construct sidewalks like they did say 100 years ago.

So major software contractor's success is pretty much random depending on who gets hired and how good the chosen packages are for the given application and how experienced are the staff in putting it together and having good test specs.

Another problem in software world is that software developers move to new IPOs and so the staffs are ever more transient. Government jobs with complex hiring practices are actually becoming unattractive to developers.

> The problem is that any success in delivering past contracts does not guarantee success in future in software technology where a typical software technology becomes obsolete every 3 years.

They don't even seem to be saying "because Deloitte was successful in the past". It's literally saying "because they're the only ones who have access to their proprietary system that we already locked ourselves in too.... they get the business".

"...so the staffs are ever more transient". Yeah, there's some idea that "company X" does ABC. The people at company X do ABC, but you are at the whim of institutional knowledge and tribal info systems within that company. The superstars who made ABC work 4 years ago may all be gone, and the current people are trying to make a name for themselves by making 'The New Process' so any success from ABC isn't at all guaranteed to translate to your new project.

But they must have had something going for them in the past to get them that status.

Nothing happens for no reason. Few cases of success in big projects in the past must have got them in. History has impact on future.

Isn't Palantir doing something similar?

Yes they are from what I understood. Clever strategy if you are dealing with a client who doesn't see further than the next move.

Can't they help?

> Deloitte is the only contractor that can achieve the O&M scope and contract requirements

Clearly not. Unless... the requirements were garbage to begin with?

Yup. Allocate budget. Hire few $10/hr offsore guys to craft some frontend in a few months. Transfer money. Deliver kickbaks. Shutdown project. Rinse and repeat.

Corporations love regulations. Let’s remember this when we support things like net neutrality. They always try and sneak regulatory burden in any of these bills.

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