Comment by mordae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mordae | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Neoliberalism is super entrenched here. It is almost impossible to create a state/county/municipal IT department that would actually have enough sysadmins. All such departments rely almost entirely on external suppliers. One way this happens are salary controls. It is impossible to hire someone and give him the market rate, but it is trivial to tender the work associated with such position to a random external company for thrice the market wage.

This effectively means that the critical advantage of FLOSS - just install it and see if it works for the users - is effectively killed by the red tape. Only software that someone actively sells can ever make it through.

EDIT:

And to be clear, this is not about customer support and whatnot. Number one complaint from most of the public servants who contract out IT services have been that the suppliers are not helping them, are overcharging them and in some instances they even threaten and withhold documentation and read access to their software databases.

I worked with European firms for over 5 years, from the company who makes lenses for ASML machines, European telcos, to well known German shoe companies and groceries stores, and luxury French brand conglomerates. They all had slightly less than 0 IT knowledge and outsourced almost all IT work to contracting companies.

I’ve seen large contracting firms get the boot for pulling the let’s withhold docs to get another large change order for producing said doc. It’s BS games.

> Only software that someone actively sells can ever make it through.

Only software that someone actively supports*

No I think it is the sales that counts. That 200k salesperson will of course make PowerPoint decks showing all the support options. But, the main barrier to take is convincing 10+ people with different incentives to all sign off on your product, and that is what enterprise sales gets done.

If you show up with a PowerPoint deck to use as evidence for your competitor to Microsoft Office you’re off to a bad start

Can concur. A software project could be feasibly implemented in-house but in-house technological teams are both under-staffed (lots of "teams" of just one or two people) and the staff themselves have much lower salaries compared to a similar role in the private sector. As a result, there's no incentive for technologically competent staff to stick around and provide support for software/systems that they implement.

On the other hand, there are very large budgets available for purchasing software with support contracts and even more so for IT consultancy services. In practice, this neo-liberal push to outsource rather than develop in-house capabilities results in all sorts of inefficiencies and deficiencies in the ability of public servants to provide a quality public service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com