Comment by throwaway897987 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway897987 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway897987

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.

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