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Comment by ilikerashers | Hacker News Reader

What I've seen continually in government is the dreaded form-builder Frankenstein.

1. Gov thinks it needs some simple form building 2. Chooses a vendor form building framework, some mashup of ASP.NET usually with workflow tools 3. Oh, we'd like documents stored, and an integration with another system, and a custom reporting tool, and a payment function, and a appointment booking. 4. Vendor doesn't want to lose business so builds custom code into the "simple" form/workflow tool.

All of sudden the simple form tool is customized beyond belief, falls behind on updates and becomes impossible to change. Worst still, nobody wants to invest in it because it just-about-works.

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I work in medical and there the top guys often make decisions that are really hard to implement in software. If they understood only a little of the consequences of their decisions have they would probably think a little more about the rules they are creating.

I see the same in product development. Marketing comes up with something that has words like "most of the time", "sometime" or "somehow" in the description. Really hard to impossible to implement. When I ask them what they really want to achieve we usually end up with something simpler and straightforward that fulfills the needs, is well understood and easy to implement.

I think in government with most of the work being outsourcend this feedback loop doesn't exist. A committee comes up with something and the contractor implements it without questions asked. The more complex the work, the more money for the contractor.

I work with authentication protocols and access control. Product people want magic.

I am fine with product people expressing their wants. But we shouldn’t accept their requests blindly but put them through a reality check. The customer is not always right or at least the customer doesn’t explain his real problem properly.

That's true, but power dynamics don't always align with wishes. If the professional recommendations of security people weren't so routinely ignored, you'd see a lot less stupid breaches. A great many disasters^1 could be prevented if experts weren't ignored.

[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf

Bah. People have to ignore security professionals all the time, because all too often, security professionals don't care if any software gets shipped.

That's unfortunately true too. I often break IT policies because I have to do my job and when I ask they don't have an answer. Security people definitely can't just say "No" but have to help finding a solution.

Everyone wants magic, even technologists.

Unfortunately, magic is hard work.

Nail on the head.

ASP.net with windows workflow foundation hasn't existed for like 10 years or something like that.

VBA hasn't been updated since 2010... yet it's still going strong.

Things like this create a niche and will live longer than cockroaches after a nuclear war.

VBA is still the main way of writing macros. There are plenty of jobs requiring VBA.

Try and find a job for asp.net webforms and windows workflow foundation.

So kinda pointless you posting that really. One is still 'current', but the other you'll be writing asp.net core with modern MVC.

first result in google is a handful of jobs... not many but definitely they exist.

https://www.indeed.com/q-What-Is-Windows-Workflow-Foundation...

And many more for webforms

https://www.indeed.com/q-Webforms-jobs.html

Niche things live on... as my post states.

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