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I currently work in NSW Health. The quality of what we deliver is to the bottom. Millions of dollars spent on project that have 0 unit test, 0 integration test where we as developers don't have any ability to talk to users. Every piece of code I see has inconsistent style with nobody bothering to write clean code. I am trying hard to bring more best practices and less cow boy programming but this might be a lost cause if you're not a professional politician. Everytime I hear my wife talking me about budget cut in her hospital as a nurse, I cringe of the absurd waste that happen on the application development side I'm involve with.

Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool... Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with

Well when you work for the government you never see a dime for improving things, and as a leader you get more prestige and promotions by having bigger budgets and head count, so all of the incentives are misaligned.

You're in eHealth NSW or Ministry? reach out for a chat. We could have an interesting conversation (platform deployed in 10 of the LHDs)

Wild this connection is happening on HN and not some internal water-cooler system where teams could work together.

Many years ago I did some consulting at Telstra and I needed a billing module for their upcoming online gaming platform. Another division had almost the exact thing I needed. I asked my stakeholder if we could reach out and talk to those folks, get a copy of what they'd done and implement with few changes. He almost laughed out loud at the suggestion and told me it would just be far easier to a new one from scratch.

Internal barriers are sometimes far greater than external ones.

I also work in government and my process is this: find the number of the lowest ranked person on the team I need to talk to, and call them directly. Follow the official channels after you have gotten verbal approval.

Internal barriers are sometimes far greater than external ones.

Yeah it's like a law of reverse propinquity in government. Working with a team next to you in the org-chart is completely impossible. Working with people far removed from you in the department is easier. Working with other departments easier still. Working with private firms and other governments easiest of all.

This is probably why remote work will fail in the long run, and why return to office is a good idea.

You've never worked at a large enterprise, have you? You'll at most interact with people in your direct product group, which are likely well below 100 people. IME often even below 50.

You're delusional if you think that the people being in the same building changed that whatsoever. And especially if you think that connections across buildings randomly happened without a specific goal.

Sure, you see them in the hallway or in the street, might even nod into their direction if you're feeling particularly social that day... But that's it. And people working in different cities might as well be separate companies.

Could be worse. I’m the whole team in my provincial government for the dev work for most of the forms for our government. Be careful what you wish for.

CHEFS[0]?

[0] https://bcgov.github.io/common-service-showcase/services/che...

Way back in 2016, I worked on a project for QLD Health, and it was no better than what you just described. Took years off my life, I swear.

>these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers.

This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing.

I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.

> how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies?

You don't. There's an inverse effect where you don't really want the clients that go for these big consulting companies because there's just as much crap on their end and they'll drown your skilled team in bureaucratic nonsense. You want the smaller clients where your technical skills complement their domain knowledge. There's still a lot of marketing and management, but the people that actually do things can talk to each other.

> The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing

This observation is absolutely spot on. An ignored element of meritocracy is visibility -- and, perhaps, as you suggest, inertia. And then we end up back at the black hole of designing the 'right' incentive schemes...

sigh

>The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants.

Just so we're all clear here, this is by design.

Why do you think this is?

The UK central gov is a notable exception, (if you exclude the corruption with track and trace) why might that be?

The stated reason: Outsourcing improves efficiency and decreases costs.

The real reason: It provides a mechanism for political kickbacks, vendor lock-in, and shifting blame.

> Why do you think this is?

Successive Australian governments since the early 90s have expanded public service outsourcing dramatically.

Here's a comprehensive discussion from the early 00s: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

The basic argument is that competition reduces costs and improves quality, therefore we should introduce competition into the provision of services to government.

There was also a pretty basic SSO security issue a few years back, and I tried and tried and could not find anyone to report it to beyond regular customer service. Maybe they've fixed it but basically you click to look at tax stuff, it takes you to ATO online services, you click back to mygov then sign out. Sign into another account and click and now you're looking at the original person's tax stuff since it's still signed in. Not a problem for myself and my wife, but potentially an issue for abusive relationships or shared resources like a library computer.

The experience of many reporting security issues to the Australian government is to be harassed, so I'm sure many such issues have been picked up by people and not reported out of fear or just not being willing to deal with the drama. One wonders how much this applies even to the developers.

Yeah having worked in a big company or two, "you find it you own it" is a real issue. Easier to keep your head down when you know it'll be an 8-month back-and-forth meeting-fest to fix a basic issue.

Another similar issue is, if you see a huge problem that will take lots of time to fix, and, if you take it on, your timesheets don't have enough time on the other approved new work codes. For this you will eventually be punished in the corporate way, sidelined, no promotion, no pay rise (.5%) and assignment to failed projects where anyone else who worked on them has long gone.

The net result of this is a wasteland of rubbish as far as the eye can see.

> They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything.

Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.

Not true. I worked for large multi-national contractor on a current Australian government project. 90% offshore "talent". Most of the time these employees actually had no previous work experience; just some training offshore and then projects on their CV were a complete fabrication. I'm assuming the contracting company does this on purpose so they can charge at a much higher rate.

The contractor employs the off shore workers, not the Government, but the problem bis that the people who sign off on the plan of work have little to no experience.

And why would you continue working for the Government when you could make 50% more even working for a dogshit company like Accenture?

Most of it. Some of the Australian contracting companies some government projects are handed to use external contractors themselves to varying extents. Though I do believe it isn't that common as IIRC most contracts explicitly disallow it.

I think this is all a bit harsh. Compared to having to front up to the tax office or Centrelink or (in NSW) the RTA to do things, MyGov and the Service NSW system are a modern miracle.

You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny.

However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.

Think my phone died or something. No problem, should be able to log in to MyGov and set up authentication again.

Nope. Had to nuke the whole account and start again. Had to relink all services. Lost all communications in the "inbox".

I had to laugh. The alternative was too frightening.

Same thing happened to me just the other day. Including the forced clenched teeth laughing to avoid the alternative.

Sounds like a classic government IT project failure. They basically codified their internal Kafka-esk bureaucracy in UI form and projected their collective incompetence by insisting the project must be built exactly according to their (wrong & incoherent) requirements. I can imagine the long documents. This is classic waterfall. They would have insisted on that even. The project was doomed as soon as they started writing those documents.

So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better.

Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done.

The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.

Completely disagree. You've absorbed the right wing mantra that Government workers are bad and incompetent. Actually the politicians have stripped the public service bare, capping staff levels at absurdly low levels, because they get big donations from consultants (and cushy post-politics jobs), and they somehow avoid blame for failed projects but outsourcing.

The politicians promote the staff who tell them what they want to hear, and independent advice has been lost.

I actually consider myself a bit left of center; definitely very moderate. Certainly by any US standards (hint, I don't live anywhere close to there). So, I kind of resent the gratuitous labeling a bit.

This is a simple case of objectively government projects around the world failing over and over again for more or less the same reasons. There are quite many studies on that topic. Lots of nice articles that get written whenever another one fails. So, that's not a right wing mantra against big government but a nice argument that maybe they should try doing things differently. Especially considering that there are some well run countries with more success on this front. Quite a few of those countries are what you might label classic big government states. I lived in a few of them (Sweden, Finland, Netherlands). These three have had some duds but also some successes when it comes to government IT projects. Overall well run places.

Even left leaning people have absorbed right wing economic thinking! Every economic think tank repeating the mantra that Government employees are fat overpaid bureaucrats that can't deliver projects.

All software projects are fraught with risk, but when no one takes responsibility for the outcome, and particularly when the people who generate requirements have no stake in its success, the probability of failure increases rapidly. The de-skilling of the public service in favour of advice from highly paid consultants, often the same ones who provide the services, means no impartial advice or trustable expertise, so governments can't be smart buyers.

Exactly this…

They are not willing to invest in quality dev/product/project managers instead they pay below market rates (see jobs on seek) yet there are endless budgets for consultants and outsourcing.

Government has frozen APS salaries for a decade, and refused to have pay rates based on specialist roles (except lawyers). They are capped in headcount so they can't tackle really big projects like myGov. In contrast, the Government has no cap on consultant spending.

That last part appears to be changing if there's a new government at the next election.