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Comment by ridethebike | Hacker News Reader

In practice it's also very likely that customer mind boggling amount of bureaucracy, allocating extra penny might require approval from several committees.

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That's Cray/HPE's problem then. And if they can't fund bugfixes, maybe they shouldn't be in the business providing support for operations that handle nuclear weapons. And if their client can't allocate funds to keep the software they use secure, maybe they also shouldn't be working with nuclear weapons.

We keep coming up with excuses for why companies can't give Open Source projects money, and they all seem to boil down to: "companies are systemically unable to make secure/stable products, can't adapt to emergencies or pay for fixes even when it's the obviously most efficient way to get the fixes in, and because of that these companies shouldn't be in charge of anything dangerous or important."

Which is maybe not the conclusion those companies would want us to draw, but it seems to be what they're suggesting whenever they hide behind crippling bureaucracy like that somehow makes the situation better instead of worse. It's really irresponsible for Cray/HPE to take on a paid contract like this if they can't handle the job requirements.

What's more likely is that HPE/Cray have so much padding in the contract that paying someone $200/hour to implement the function and appropriate tests and it would be a rounding error on the contract.

I think they would do that, except Mr. Master Engineer with 25 years FORTRAN experience and 20 years as a principal member of a FORTRAN committee would have to explain to his employers why he can't handle this himself.

Either that or he sold himself to HPE as being able to throw his weight around because of his committee membership ("hire me and you'll get what you want from FORTRAN"), and we're seeing narcissistic entitlement when it turns out that's not the case and now his job is at risk.

That's Cray's problem. They're getting money from this customer, and they should be the ones ponying up the money from that contract to cover the development of the feature.

Very much this. I have worked with UN (ILO and WHO) in Geneva and signing a tiny (< $30k) software development contract required two years of extraterrestrial bureaucracy with an ultimate failure in the end.

All parties involved really wanted that software contract to be implemented and that software was in fact done developing and already in production by the time. We just couldn't.

So I can sort of feel Bill's pain. It looks ridiculous from the outside and even more ridiculous from the inside.

> Very much this. I have worked with UN (ILO and WHO) in Geneva and signing a tiny (< $30k) software development contract required two years of extraterrestrial bureaucracy with an ultimate failure in the end.

Pretty sure you meant extraterritorial, but if you really meant extraterrestrial, that would be VERY cool.

Extraterrestrial. As in, unprecedented on Earth. Seriously, their bureaucracy is incredible, and I speak this from a former soviet republic.

Ah. That's not how I interpreted 'extraterrestrial bureaucracy', which at an extreme suggests a mid-level functionary on the ISS, or at least workflows that involve forms sent in triplicate out to a Mars orbiter and back. ;-)

Usually most customers, even government, have different thresholds, where something under, say, $25k takes very few levels of management approval.

I recall buying $50-60k worth of hardware at one of my previous employers, with only 2 signatures required, both of which I was able to obtain within the space of an afternoon.

Was that employer working with the government? Government contracts are notorious for bureaucracy and bean countering.

So notorious that the US government has special vehicles to avoid their own procurement processes!

I’ve made proposals to state universities for $20k software projects that required a vote in the state legislature for approval.

Moved on to other projects until after the next legislative session, and the period after where the bureaucracy makes it all happen, then we actually scheduled a start date that was 3 months later, since that was how long it took to get all the resources back from other projects.

Government isn’t run like a household, nor like a business, nor should it be.

Are you willing to name the company? The ability to move that fast is an attractive quality for an employer.

For timescales of ~6mths (depending on where you are in the year) yes, for right now outside our budget... possibly not.

This bug has been open for 1.5 years now though

That doesn't matter clearly they have few people contributing so they will get to it when they get to it.

It’s not just the amount of money but where that money is going is a problem. You see this issue with procurement all the time if it’s a non standard channel you’ll encounter difficulties.

I would guess that the customer paying HPE directly to fix this wouldn’t be an issue but good luck explaining what a bounty is to procurement and with all the restrictions that come with government tenders it’s even more complicated as you have no idea who is the end beneficiary of that payment is so all the due diligence you have to do can’t be done or is far more difficult.

You also don’t get the usual contractural provisions that provide guarantees and protections for what you purchase this way.

I worked on a product where certain capabilities were implemented as required but there was no requirement to display the information to the customer. We had our own internal displays that we could use to view the information. The customer saw our displays one day and wanted them too. We were not allowed to give it to them.

You guessed it- government contract. Support the warfighter my ass.

All the money in the world but these things still take time. Unnecessarily, but still.

In that case, it sucks to be the customer.

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