Comment by ssl232 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssl232 | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. The others here saying FAQs are useful should try gov.uk and understood why they shouldn't be needed. Using gov.uk you really get an idea a lot of research and testing has gone into the text phrasing and structure and the overall look and feel of the site. It's really excellent. I've since seen other countries' government websites copy many of its design aspects - the highest form of flattery. It's all organised by Government Digital Service, who produce "government as a platform" tools [1]. Once you realise that this group have managed to get various IT departments spread across the whole UK government to stick to a common set of tools and design rules, it's clearly an even greater achievement (see their "design system" [2]). All the more so given how large government IT projects normally turn out.

One more for good measure: the "design principles" page: [3].

[1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/category/government-as-a-platform/

[2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

[3] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

Government IT projects just work better in the hands of internal teams than external consultancies. It's quite well-known that there's a whole industry of consultancies who make money taking on government contracts with low bids and intentionally expanding the budget by dragging their heels so they can extract the maximum amount of taxpayer money possible. Then the project usually fails and the process repeats.

Even if an external contractor is honest, bidding in the first place requires navigating such a complex process that essentially you're choosing from a set of companies who have designed themselves around being able to handle the bidding process.

This does not have as much overlap with designing a company around being to handle delivery as one might like.

I think there's also a dynamic related to pay that's not often discussed.

My observation is that in the UK, developer pay in the public vs private sector is not so wildly different than it is in the US.

The public sector can reliably get quite good staff.

I don't know any developers in the public sector, but friends in various civil service roles love the other perks. Decent pension. Loads of flexidays. One friend could almost work a 4 day week all year.

They all seem quite fulfilled, too.

Really disagree IME — there are great people at GDS, but they're doing it as a vocational thing and could make much more money in private sector.

Generally in the UK you have to go freelancing to earn the top of the market, but even permanent roles in private sector have much better pay for less responsibility. E.g. I saw some GDS "Head of" roles advertised with a salary band ~£60-80k.

AFAIK, they've also dialled back on public sector & they now offer defined contributions nearer to general private sector.

Yep, the divide is still there, I meant it's not quite so extreme. There are good people everywhere, but not having so much FAANG 4x comp vs .gov, maybe the alternative is contracting for 2x perm rate - it does make a difference.

that's also true, in a former life I was a contractor and while I didn't work in the public sector at any point by pure circumstance, a few friends did and they pulled a similar rate to when they were in the private sector.

For people who aren't British or UK-resident, a reasonable example would be working out how to move to the UK for a job — what visa to apply for.

Start at https://www.gov.uk/

I tried to do this and found it very easy. I suppose it would be a more stringent test for someone who is ESL and not very tech competent.

I am impressed with the careful and clear use of language to explain everything. It is just so easy to understand what is going on, where I am on the site, and what I need to know.

1 in 6 adults in the UK have poor literacy skills [0] so it's important for the Gov website to clearly give information to people who maybe don't have the best comprehension even in their native language, especially when it comes to government/legal matters.

[0] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...

A friend, tried to apply for a heavy goods vehicles driver visa; but he couldn't find a simple how-to, unfortunately.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58670792

I think the backstory here is that at some point the government hired the team from theyworkforyou.com (and various other citizen/politics websites), who were clearly very smart and motivated. Wonder if anyone knows more details.

Interesting - it's clear that some talented people on a mission were put in the right place at the right time. I too would be interested to hear from anyone that knows more!

Fortunately there's an FAQ^h^h^h Story about that: "A GDS Story"

Introduction

The most common questions we’re asked by visitors to GDS are things like:

    “How did it all start in the first place?”
    “How did you get where you are now?”
    “How can I get my government/team/organisation to do similar things?”

This is an attempt to answer those.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/

Yes its good once your on the site but not having structured data FAQ's means your not targeting search.

Also looking at FAQ and PAA data does give insight into searches that your not providing information to your users - which you can quickly solve by adding FAQ's

Just blindly assuming that users will automatically know to go direct to the relevant .gov site is typical Civil Service Arrogance.

Don’t know about you, but use this thing called Google, does a really good job of landing me on the correct .gov.uk page almost every time, because the content of those pages is clear and simple enough that you can easily Google what you need.

No duplication, no stupid FAQs that link to thing i actually want. Just one page with the right content at the top of the Google search results.

The fact that people may not know which is the relevant site is why https://gov.uk/ exists.

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