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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

You've got understand that the orgs involved in myGov, such as Centrelink, Medicare, and the ATO are special bad. They're dysfunctional to a degree most people simply cannot believe.

I was at Centrelink's IT department for just a couple months, and that was the only time in my decades-long consulting career that I had seen an adult man cry. Not for personal reasons. Work-related reasons. Several men, on multiple occassions, for different reasons.

That place crushed their spirits, and the tears just had to come out...

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I have known a few people working in IT in government in Australia and it sounds like absolute hell. It takes a special kind of person to work in government. You either have to be extremely incompetent to the point you cant even tell that things around you are a disaster, or you have to not give a shit to the point where waiting a month for someone to press a button does not bother you and you are only focused on what you will be doing when you get home at the end of the day.

This one guy I knew told me that he had seen meetings dedicated to working out how they could spend money since they hadn't spent the whole budget yet. Services run over hundreds of servers when it could be done in one just to keep the whole team of system admins employed.

Government departments are filled with bloat to a level you wouldn't believe.

> meetings dedicated to working out how they could spend money since they hadn't spent the whole budget yet

I think this is fairly common in government outside of Australia as well. With the budget it’s use it or lose it, so you better find ways to spend it, or you’ll have less margin next year when you might actually need it.

I know about this - it’s actually worse and very serious if you underspend.

Almost all the higher ups are paid out of budgets based on how much you spend- so the supervising agency gets their 15 percent admin fee, your managers are part of the indirect cost pool etc.

If you spend 50% of budget it is game over upstairs. And you lose the money at year end, and future allocation is dropped. And all the budgets in long chain up get messed up. Almost nothing gets more attention and priority than this.

I should have said that I don't blame any individual dev or sysadmin for failing to respond. It's a deeply entrenched organisational issue.

Imagine fixing an issue on a Model 204 mainframe, with a perpetually dwindling number of people you can rely on for help, knowing that if you don't fix it, people don't get their welfare cheque.

High stress, low reward. Unsung heroes in my books.

> people don't get their welfare cheque.

A "fun" anecdote I heard was that every 1 day of outage of Centrelink's mainframe would result in 5-7 children with broken bones.

You see, some alcoholic high-strung fathers in rural communities were spending their welfare cheques mostly at the local bottleshop. If the cheques stopped, their booze supply stopped, and their withdrawal symptoms would send them into mad rage. All too often, they'd take it out on their kids.

Apparently someone at Centrelink was tracking this kind of stuff by gathering paediatric admissions data from hospitals.

While I was there they had a 3-day outage that everyone just laughed off. You do the maths.

Terrifying

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