Hacker News Reader

Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Also noteworthy is that compared to leading commercial websites (Amazon, Facebook, etc.), the Canada Revenue Agency website: Responds an order of magnitude slower (like 3000 ms vs. 300 ms), and has maintenance downtime hours (instead of being up 24/7).

> However, the Internet is a public network and there is the remote possibility of data security violations.

They conveniently ignore the fact that HTTPS is pervasive and that you can reasonably carry private conversations on a public network. And why don't they have a disclaimer for the fact that the telephone network is public and the mail network is public?

View on HN

Revenue Canada's website is slow and often down for maintenance, but at least I find it much easier to find what I'm looking for than on Amazon. It's actually one of the better user experiences I have online, and much easier than tax filing was in the US. But that response time ensures I'll never get addicted to doom-scrolling my tax records, to be sure.

By comparison with the province of BC's web services, anything provided by the federal government looks straight out of science fiction. For example: https://www.corporateonline.gov.bc.ca/ ... have fun!

99% of the CRA website traffic is now Mar/Apr the site is slammed by probably 20 million of the 38 million of us who adults pay taxes.

In first few the years following the 2000/2001 dotcom crash the Swedish Tax Agency realized they had a golden opportunity to move away from expensive and fickle consultants to a competent in-house team of long-term employed developers. They pulled it off really well. The effect is still visible - web services are well designed in a simple and efficient way and generally just work.

I think now (and the next year or two) might be a suitable time to pull a similar move.

Canadians would throw a fit about it though. Government employees earning over 100K triggers a lot of people.

I’ve often thought that exempting government employees from paying tax would be a decent way to slip them some extra income.

For good reason. I live in Ottawa and interact with a good many government workers that aren't shy about how little work they do. I'm not convinced increasing comp is going to somehow motivate these folks into greater productivity.

Raising the bar in the public sector is a complex topic: there are jokes about lazy public workers all over the (western?) world. There's no competition and the goals aren't as clear as profit VS loss.

But if you refuse to have competitive wages, no competent software engineer will want to work in government. Then you get some contractor job from a consulting company and good luck with that: many are happy to send a handful of junior developrts to fill their multi million contracts, with their seniors hopping in just enough time to justify the billing.

Plenty of private sector ones too. I am not doing work at any of my jobs (I am overemployed) today.

Increased comp isn't to motivate current people. It is so you aren't only hiring people at the level of skill and motivation as the current people.

You can say the same for any institutional web site. Sure CRA is slower than Google, but so is 99% of the sites in the internet. Is access speed really the top concern when you're interacting with the site? Unless you're an accountant, you're probably logging in all of twice a year, once to file and once to review the final result.

Personally i would rather my tax money be spent elsewhere than latency optimizing a website that i have to use once a year.

The maintenance hours thing is unconsiable though. Sometimes i want to know how much tfsa room i have on sunday evening.

Rest assured, it will have cost way more than a comparable commercial website. Poor performance is not a cost savings measure.

> Sometimes i want to know how much tfsa room i have on sunday evening

Which you wouldn't want to check with the CRA either, because the information is often incomplete and updated annually at best.

The CRA even advises that whatever numbers they give you are essentially fugazi, and you should keep your own records because if you make a mistake they will obliterate you with fines.

One of the mottos of the Canadian government is: if you make a mistake because we gave you the wrong information, it is still your fault and you will give us money.

Personal experience, once received a notification from CRA to the effect: "6 months ago we refunded you incorrectly, you owe us, oh by the way we're also charging you a penalty for our mistake.". The amount was not inconsequential but not a problem to remedy. The insult was "we made a mistake and we are punishing you for it".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com