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Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't necessarily just IBM's fault either, it was complete incompetence by the government who continuously pushed the change through in the face of ample evidence (and IBM's own suggestion) that it should have been delayed.

Not only did they push it through despite issues even after initial limited rollout, they made a ton of terrible decisions like to do training in house instead of from IBM as cost savings, made the new Public Service Pay Centre elsewhere for political reasons with new staff and they laid off most of the people that worked on the old system and decommissioned it so there was no going back.

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> It wasn't necessarily just IBM's fault either

My understanding is that it wasn't IBM's fault at all. They delivered exactly what was aggreed upon. What the government asked made no sense.

That's why they couldn't and didn't sue, and if you read about it in the media, there's no direct blame on IBM (a lot of it is implied; being to direct could be construed as defamation).

> My understanding is that it wasn't IBM's fault at all. They delivered exactly what was aggreed upon. What the government asked made no sense.

If what the government asked made no sense, why did IBM agree to do it? Rhetorical question. Money talks.

> If what the government asked made no sense, why did IBM agree to do it?

My understanding is that the government gave IBM a complete spec of what they believed were their pay grades. But that wasn't what was agreed upon with the employees and unions (how do you calculate overtime on a coast guard boat?). So it all made sense to IBM, they shipped it and fufilled every requirements. They had no way of knowing these weren't the "correct" pay rules.

It's the magic of government contracting: you write the spec and select the lowest bidder.

Forget a 0 to the total weight the bridge must carry? You'll get very cheap proposals. Ohh and there's typically rules against a bidder contacting the government to get more information; that could be considered as interfering with the bidding process. It's also why older USPS vehicules had poor snow performance.

Yeah that was what I thought too, but I don't have a full enough understanding to definitively say if IBM had any culpability or not.

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