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Comment by unreal37 | Hacker News Reader

The so-called "real" explanation of the $600 hammer doesn't make the story any better.

The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435. Just because the extra $420 was "R&D expense" for something else, doesn't make the hammer any cheaper.

Even in the most charitable explanation, this makes it impossible to know the real cost of anything. If the contractor can lump all sorts of charges into the cost of the hammer (for unrelated projects), it's a way of hiding the true cost of anything.

I've worked for companies where they took money meant for one thing, and used it for something else. "Can you record your hours on this project under this different expense code?" This stops them from going over budget and having to explain to the client, but takes the money from another project of that client instead.

The $435 hammer sounds like that. They didn't have R&D budget, but they had a hammer budget. Let's spend the $100,000 hammer budget.

About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked on a contract for the Department of Defense in IT. He told me that he was making $1500 per day, and for the first few weeks, the government didn't have a computer for him. So he sat at a desk, reading "printed manuals" waiting for a computer to arrive. For weeks. Making $1500 per day.

The truth is worse than a $600 hammer.

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> If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.

This claim appears to contradict what the story says, as far as I can tell? He's the original:

> The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)

> "The hammer got as much overhead as an engine," Kelman continued, despite the fact that the hammer cost much less than $420 to develop, and the engine cost much more-"but nobody ever said, 'What a great deal the government got on the engine!'"

So the bought an order containing a hammer, an engine, and some other stuff. There weren't itemized prices. So they divided the price evenly between everything in the box. Which is a silly way to do accounting. It's as if I bought a "woodworking kit" containing a hammer, a screwdriver and table saw for $900, and then I decided decided that meant the hammer cost $300.

I acknowledged in my comment that even if the most charitable explanation was assumed, the method of accounting is misleading and makes determining the cost of anything impossible.

How is that? If you buy an engine, do you itemize by: engine block, alternator, water pump and starter? You might include in the requirements that the engine must come with all 4 extra elements, but you will pay for the whole engine. Now, if someone wants to be misleading, they could say the water pump was 1/4 of the price...

If the total R&D cost for all items is split across every single product equally, there's no way to tell how much of the $435 hammer is R&D for the hammer. It's a really weird way to do accounting, almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item. And that makes you wonder if the amount they are charging is even real in the first place. In general it lowers confidence and makes you think you're probably being ripped off (which, hey, is true).

You know what you are paying for the bundle you get.

You can also get multiple bids for different bundles. The problem here, if any, is not getting competitive bids for the bundles.

The article is not quite clear why the contractor had to split the intangible goods cost to the tangible ones, but it does give a hint. Federal accounting is meant to prevent possibly corrupted overspending and that's why charging for intangible services is not allowed or made more difficult than charging for something tangible that can be measured and counted afterwards and compared to market prices.

So to me it sounds like this: you hired me to make a wall of bricks around your garden. I did it and presented you a bill: bricks 100$, mortar 20$, work 300$. Then you say I cannot charge for work as that's intangible and I have to restructure the bill by allocating the cost of work to the tangible objects. So instead of charging for work I split the cost of it by two and charge a bricklaying fee of 150$ divided by the number of bricks for each brick and another 150$ for mixing the mortar. Because I'm pissed off by your awkward and unpractical accounting requirements and not going to start figuring out more complex ways of dividing the cost between the materials, when everybody knows that it's the bricklaying that counts and not the bricks or mortar.

And that's how you get very expensive mortar or 600$ hammers.

> Federal accounting is meant to prevent possibly corrupted overspending and that's why charging for intangible services is not allowed or made more difficult than charging for something tangible that can be measured and counted afterwards and compared to market prices.

Right - so if contractors are doing an end run around those requirements by padding the prices of hammers or whatever, that's a problem.

No one is saying that it isn’t a problem.

But there is an additional problem when a congresscritter makes a big song and dance about the “$600 hammer” and uses it as an example of government waste instead of using it as an example of dubious accounting that could be used to hide waste but probably didn’t in this case. This article is about the mythical costs and how they have mundane explanations that don’t really support the song and dance.

I don't see a problem with a congressperson taking the accounting at face value and assuming it means what it says. Our accounting should be trustworthy.

It was purely a stunt for the congresscritter in question; they were not fooled into thinking that the hammer had really cost that much. If they had been honest, they would have talked about how the repair kit cost a lot of money, and tried to figure out if it had been worth it. Along the way they could have discussed the accounting fiction by which the cost of assembling the kits from bulk purchases of common tools such as hammers and screwdrivers had been baked into the prices of the items themselves. But since all they wanted was soundbites for television news shows to repeat over and over, the simpler and more emotional narrative was what worked best for them. They created the myth in order to profit from the outrage that it generated. Sound familiar?

If their point was to protest the poor accounting practices, calling attention to the more ridiculous consequences is a good way to do that.

Likewise, if their point was to protest potentially wasteful spending and fraud. Even if they couldn't be certain there was waste or fraud because of the lack of transparency in accounting, it's fair for them to call attention to the accounting practices by pointing out how they appear to imply waste and fraud.

You’re inventing good motives that didn’t exist. The hammer was merely a bad example of government waste. Government waste certainly exists, but this was a flawed example. The congresscritter found the flaw useful, nothing more.

> It was purely a stunt for the congresscritter in question; they were not fooled into thinking that the hammer had really cost that much.

As far as I can tell the hammer "really did" cost that much in every meaningful sense. The government's accounting said they'd paid $435 for a hammer and they didn't have a problem with that. Whether the government was getting ripped off by some dude buying a hammer at a hardware store for $10 and selling it for $435, or by some lab doing unbudgeted R&D and concealing the cost of it in the hammer invoice, is not really here nor there. It generated outrage because it really was outrageous.

No, it really wasn’t outrageous. It was bad accounting, but not an outrageous waste of money.

They were essentially building repair kits that could be shipped off to military bases and used to maintain particular pieces of equipment. The contractor bought the tools and spare parts in bulk, marshaled them all at some warehouse somewhere, and then broke down the bulk items into individual kits. A palette full of hammers got broken up so that each kit had exactly one hammer. The same has to happen for all of the other tools and items in the kit.

That’s a useful service and it is definitely worth paying money for. If you want a good example, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxBgTDpsUC0. You can see how this would be used: in the 1940s the army was setting up bases everywhere, and they all needed to communicate with each other. So obviously you ship out teletype machines, a repair kit or two, a pile of manuals, and a platoon of Signal Corps engineers to keep the teletypes in working order. The kit is mostly common tools, but if every base had to order every one of those items individually then it would be chaos. Logistics wins wars, and this is a very good example of how.

Then whoever did the bookkeeping recorded it as if they had purchased COTS items each with some normal price, instead of doing it as a contracted service with both material and labor costs. You see how one bookkeeping method can be used to generate outrage for political gain, while the other cannot? It was an entirely cynical manipulation on the part of the politician(s) in question.

> Then whoever did the bookkeeping recorded it as if they had purchased COTS items each with some normal price, instead of doing it as a contracted service with both material and labor costs.

OK, and why was that? Like, they were essentially embezzling this "R&D cost"; even if they were embezzling for the sake of buying useful military equipment, embezzling is still an outrage, I think rightly.

There’s no evidence that it was embezzlement, or any other type of fraud. Just bad accounting.

"Embezzlement is [...] where someone takes money or assets that were entrusted to them and uses them for a different purpose than for what they were intended." That would seem to apply just as much to spending funds on useful military equipment that's different from what they were allocated for as it does to spending them on blackjack and hookers. If the funds were being spent correctly then why would they be accounted for falsely?

> If the funds were being spent correctly then why would they be accounted for falsely?

How should I know? There’s never been any hint that the funds were spent on the wrong items. After all, the military has a rather large budget for spare parts and repair equipment, and Congress doesn’t micromanage how many hammers they are allowed to buy.

Most likely it was just an honest mistake. Someone used form P instead of form Q (or told the contractor to), and accounting didn’t notice. Indeed, if this were evidence of a crime I think the politician in question would have lead with that, rather than pointing it out as an example of government waste (which is bad but not generally criminal).

> There’s never been any hint that the funds were spent on the wrong items.

How would we ever know, if they can be incorrectly accounted for and no-one cares?

> Indeed, if this were evidence of a crime I think the politician in question would have lead with that, rather than pointing it out as an example of government waste (which is bad but not generally criminal).

Proving intent is a lot harder. If the government is overpaying its contractors... there's probably crime going on there too, but it'll be the nudge-wink kind that's very hard to prove. You funnel an overlarge contract to them, then a few years later after you've gone around the revolving door they funnel an overlarge contract to you. That's a crime, but it doesn't leave any evidence except, well, overly large expenditures in the accounts.

> How would we ever know, if they can be incorrectly accounted for and no-one cares?

I am saying that they purchased the correct items. We _can_ know that because there is an itemized list of items that they purchased.

> Proving intent is a lot harder. If the government is overpaying its contractors... there's probably crime going on there too, but it'll be the nudge-wink kind that's very hard to prove.

Don’t misunderstand, I never said that this wasn’t plausible. I just said that there’s no evidence of it. And if there had been evidence, ~30 years ago when this was a current event, the aforementioned politician would have mentioned it. Remember, this guy was looking for soundbites that would make himself look good. Finding government waste made him look good, but finding corruption would have been even better for him.

Worse, even the allegation that this was a wasteful purchase doesn’t really hold up either. A $435 hammer (or a $600) hammer makes for a great soundbite, and plenty of easy outrage from the average voter. But it hinges on nobody looking too closely, because the reality is that they just paid a contractor to purchase COTS parts and assemble them into repair kits. There’s nothing outrageous about that, once you get past the odd bookkeeping.

The most outrageous thing about it is that the politician relied on the “$600 hammer” story for years without much push–back from the media. The media in general should be much more skeptical of things that politicians say. They should check the facts independently, and they should report on the truth or falseness of the statements.

> I am saying that they purchased the correct items. We _can_ know that because there is an itemized list of items that they purchased.

The purchased items were purchased, but apparently a significant chunk of money allocated for purchasing them was instead diverted to this dubious "R&D charge". That's exactly what embezzlement would look like.

> Don’t misunderstand, I never said that this wasn’t plausible. I just said that there’s no evidence of it. And if there had been evidence, ~30 years ago when this was a current event, the aforementioned politician would have mentioned it. Remember, this guy was looking for soundbites that would make himself look good. Finding government waste made him look good, but finding corruption would have been even better for him.

As far as I'm concerned the bad accounting - and the fact that it wasn't corrected for years - is adequate evidence in itself. Yes, it's possible that it was merely monumental incompetence rather than wilfully inflating payments. But the most likely explanation is that it was corruption, of the normalized you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours kind that the participants probably don't even consciously think of as fraud any more.

> almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item.

so what? Like another commenter has said, you bought the package, it's not your business how much each individual piece is actually worth. You pick the best bid and move on.

> almost like they just didn't keep track of how much R&D they did for each item.

That’s often almost the whole point!

Tracking the R&D effort for each item in the repair kit would add an enormous amount of overhead and accomplish essentially nothing. The numbers will be wild guesses and you’re going to have to make tons of ad hoc decisions about allocation anyway. Suppose you tweak the design so it a part can be attached with a special pin rather than a screw and spend an hour testing it. What’s the “right” allocation of time to the pin, hammer, part, and screw (that you’ve eliminated)?

At the very least the cost could be split into

1. actual cost

2. guesstimated additional cost of 'very hard to split X'.

So that people looking at the accounting many degrees of separation removed will still be able to understand which is which and the relative proportion.

I cant help but think how hard it would have been to do that 60 years ago compared to today. It would not be all that challenging or expensive but it would be revealing.

> The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.

But the above statement wasn't true.

The article has a nice example of this in the B2 bomber. The first 21 planes cost $2B each. The next one costs $700M.

If, for some reason, we were to make a hundred or a thousand of them, the cost per plane would be even lower.

Unfortunately the military has now cottoned onto that trick with the F-35. Every time there's a budget overrun they just order another 100 planes so that "the price hasn't changed".

The B2 bomber case isn't a precise analogy. The hammer really was purely an accounting phenomenon. It's not that the first hammer cost $600. The first hammer was part of a collection of goods, of a wide variety of different values, that were billed as a single line item... and this was resolved, from an accounting perspective, as each item cost $600. In reality, most of the items only cost a few dollars, but a few big ticket items skewed the average.

Think of it like you're buying a car, and you have the dealer add in a half-dozen options & extras, and then they bill you for all of them, as a package, as a single line item. If you then said the cost of each item in the package, including the car, was worth 1/7th the price you paid for the package, that would be the equivalent of what is going on here.

Isn't this somewhat inevitable in any complicated engineering project?

Your main comment is literally untrue and contrary to the article, and pointing out a separate problem with telling what things cost doesn’t change that.

From the article:

> The new moral is that numbers, taken as self-explanatory truths by the public and the press, can in fact be the woefully distorted products of a broken accounting system.

So it appears you're just in agreement with the OP that the accounting system is broken, while also being the exact same sort of victim of misunderstanding that the broken accounting fosters.

We don't even know if the system is broken. It's not clear whether this was common case or a one off instance that they didn't really have an appropriate form for.

If you own a car how much did the engine in the car cost you to buy?

Unless you've done an engine swap recently you probably can't answer that, because you bought the whole car, and the engine came with it.

Sometimes what's written on paperwork can be silly because it doesn't really matter and the cost to verify or correct stuff that is estimated costs more than an estimate. Other times it has to be more precise than is possible, so you have to figure out a good way to "estimate" it. Being inaccurate isn't always problem if the costs outweigh the benefits of being accurate.

I think there’s an important distinction. It may not add value to whomever is writing the itemized expense, but more accurate data could add value to someone else who needs it for accountability or uses it to benchmark future work. You have to assess the entire value stream.

> Being inaccurate isn't always problem if the costs outweigh the benefits of being accurate.

You're speaking of public money; the cost of inaccuracy is much greater than the amount of the inaccuracy itself, it erodes public trust.

Also, the difference between $15 and $600 can't be described as an "inaccuracy".

having worked in government the amount of time wasted to ensure that money wasn't wasted is itself quite wasteful.

I think a more accurate analogy is that if you bought those 3 items and they did have proper itemized cost, but the whole package also had a $500 shipping charge. And then it’s not obvious how to distribute the shipping cost across each item. And in both situations it’s probably better to itemize by itself, though maybe some system didn’t allow for non tangible costs like “R&D”

Much better analogy.

If you itemize separately, then you can start to ask the important questions, like, “why is shipping $500”.

The excuse repeatedly here is that "it was easier/convenient (to merge it into a single line item)" or "its just an accounting artifact", as if that isn't a giant red flag all in itself. It's easy to ignore the $600... but if a hammer line-item could be 10x'd on vague R&D costs only the original accountant really understands... how is that better? That's a recipe for masking waste and never knowing why anything costs as much as it does, without expensive in-person interviews with the people involved.

Can't imagine what it's like trying to compete with companies engaging in this sort of practice. How could you possibly project costs? Why even bother? Just tell them it's a $1 hammer and make it up in R&D hidden away in "accounting artifacts".

Because table saws can frequently have the same dimensions as a refrigerator.

That still obfuscates the actual cost of things, which is the exact opposite of accounting, if you think about it.

That last paragraph, is that unusual?

As a kind of sysadmin, I was fairly ready to go week 1 on most my projects. But in my erp space, developers and testers have to understand business, processes, functional aspects, etc. Whether specifics of clients payroll process or their finances or whatever. So "spend a week reading manuals" is normal. We call it "onboarding". And of course they're getting paid - they're not doing it for fun.

Have I had a weird career? :-)

Definitely weird. ;) You should let clients know when it's time to 'put up or shut up'. After all, talk is cheap?

I don't follow. What's the context or meaning of put up or shut up? Did you reply to right thread or did I inadvertently misrepresent anything?

My point is that on all my projects for 25 years now, it's normal for many roles to need a significant amount of studying to become productive. That studying may involve project or client specific material such as design and architecture documents, functional specs, process and procedure documents, business overview, etc. On bigger projects there might be a part or full time training / L&K coordinator who would prepare and maintain training materials for new team members, create on boarding paths for roles etc.

I read on HN about developers who start coding week 1 and I'm always impressed and astonished but also puzzled - coding what? In ERP world all code satisfies a specific business purpose and a random outsider wouldn't understand business functionality to create or fix business code day 1. Is it actually our goal to be interchangeable cogs, knowing only technology stacks but nothing about business or functionality?

Either way, I don't understand what client shoild put up or shut up?

If they are indeed replying to you, I suspect they are coming from a freelance background where it’s sometimes beneficial to have a hard line in order to either get the project moving or drop the client (and move on to more serious ones)

Ah. If so I still think we don't understand each other.

It's not "we don't know what to do with you go read some books". It's "we have 80,000 time and labour business rules that are unique to our public sector organization and you should not code any business rules into our payroll system until you have a vague understanding of how we operate". That IS a serious client and a serious project and that study time IS serious. It's important. It's a success predictor. If you ignore it or are coxky and go "meh I've seen it all before " you'll make an expensive business error. Not necessarily a technical error, not a memory leak or suboptimal sql. But people will get paid wrong or your ledger will be wrong or another business impact.

Again, I may live in different it world than average active HN participant. But developers on my projects speak business to functional analysts. They understand payroll or Financials or hr or whatever in general, and also understand them in particular as it pertains to client. It's not wasted time or inefficiency. Not sure if I'm presenting my case well or persuading anybody - but I'm used to paying people to learn when they join projects, including senior niche experts :-)

I am a contractor in a niche industry but a little downtime, of up to maybe 2-3 days at the start of a new project is enormously valuable as time to think deeply about the task before you have an overwhelming to-do list. Getting paid $1500 a day to read manuals is not at all surprising when I know people who have gotten almost that much to do little to nothing.

> the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.

R&D expenses are one time costs, they're not charged multiple times. An extra hammer would have cost $15.

"when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list... they simply treated every item the same"

Sounds like an extra hammer would have cost an $15+$420=$435. Anyways, we'll never know.

I will say, the one thing I believe, is that the government had a bucket of money to spend on the project. Let's say it was $1 million. And the contractor was going to get all of it, all $1 million. Not a penny more and not a penny less.

And so you can't really trust the invoice is accurate except for the total being the budget available to spend.

They would have amortized the 420/item across one more item. No additional research cost.

You’re ignoring the underlying math.

If they needed 2 hammers then both hammers would have cost less. Thus rather than 2 * 435$ hammers + other junk you get 2 * 430$ hammers + other junk which is also 5$ cheaper (or whatever the actual number works out to.) Net result a total that’s 15$ higher and a different set of otherwise meaningless numbers.

Hey! Buying that second hammer reduced the per-item R&D costs across the entire order!

The article even points out that an additional B2 Bomber would cost an additional 700 million not the reported cost of 2 billion. Including R&D costs makes sense in some situations, but not when buying one more.

> I've worked for companies where they took money meant for one thing, and used it for something else. "Can you record your hours on this project under this different expense code?" This stops them from going over budget and having to explain to the client, but takes the money from another project of that client instead.

Seems like a whistleblower could put a stop to this, and get a hefty reward as well. It's a felony.

The same thing happens in the private sector (law firms, management consultants, etc) but there's little control over that.

Yes but most of the time in these things the hours billed are internal cost controls, not billed straight through to client. Eg, it's a fixed price contract. But sometimes you have to work more or less so you horsetrade between projects. Agree with you if billing time through, but usually this is pretty strictly tracked.

(source: was a consulting partner)

A lot of companies make you track hours to distinguish capital expenses from operational ones, I assume for a different tax treatment, which I don't think has only internal implications.

> The hammer did indeed cost $435. If the government wanted to buy another one, the contractor would have charged them an extra $435.

What are you basing this on? If I buy a gaming console bundled with a game, you're saying that implies I have no other option to purchase the game separately? Is there a leap of logic here or did I miss something in the story?

Is this truth worse? I have a completely different reaction to your story.

There's a guy, who is a contractor (not an employee), who was hired to do work for the defense department. They hire and fire thousands per day. There needs to be a basic policy that guarantees a certain level of training and skill level, before you work on Defense for crying out loud. No one is going to spend days trying to figure out what you know and don't. Here's the training - some is easy, some you know, some is new to you. Get through it, then you start work.

This is the same with private companies. Whenever I switch the major vendor I work for, I have to get some certs, get some training, and most of the stuff I already know. Last time this happened a couple of years ago, I spent at least a month, just watching training videos and taking little quizzes at the end. This guarantees that before they send me to a customer, I have the base training for my role.

I already knew 95% of the stuff. I put the 2 hour videos on play muted, read the pdf a couple of times a day apart (30min of my real time), and passed the quiz at the end.

Your friend didn't have to watch useless watered down videos, and was just given the manuals. I wish I had those PDFs I read printed for me, but I didn't want to waste a whole tree worth of paper.

Yes, the training needed to get your baseline is part of your job. That's why people don't like it when they hire you and leave after a few months - because they have to pay you to certify your baseline skills those months.

No, you don't get paid less or more, depending on the type of work you are doing. If I have to come out to a DC and debug raw fiber channel dumps, or sit on the toilet at home and draw a visio - I get paid the same. You get paid per hour, not per type of task. That is literally every job that exists.

The $600 hammer is theft and billing fraud. Getting paid the same rate while the company certs you with training for your job, as you get paid for the rest of the job, is called employment.

That $1500/day contact with no computer for a week is an extreme case but paying people to do nothing because the environment its not ready is fairly typical for large companies/governments.

I have done many contracts like these and it went smoothly only once. I arrived first day in the morning, my contact came to meet me, gave me my badge, brought me to the IT department so I could pick up my laptop, on it was a post-it note with my identifiers, I then went to a desk that was cleared for me. An hour later, I was at work. Usually, I consider myself lucky to get to that point in a day. So normal and yet so rare, as if these companies like to pay people for nothing.

In Independence Day (1996), as President Thomas Whitemore and company are being led into the secret government alien lab, he wonders aloud where the funding for the lab came from, to which Julius Levinson (the father of Jeff Goldblum's character) quips, "You didn't think they actually paid $5000 for a hammer, or $30,000 for a toilet seat, did you?" Indicating those sums were actually being secretly diverted to fund black-budget initiatives like the alien lab.

Nice to see truth is not that far off from Independence Day.

The point of the piece would seem to be not "all is well" but that the real problem is the accounting practices used to direct programs. You've posed this like a counterpoint to the piece but there's significant overlap between what you're saying and the arguments it makes.

> About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked on a contract for the Department of Defense in IT. He told me that he was making $1500 per day, and for the first few weeks, the government didn't have a computer for him. So he sat at a desk, reading "printed manuals" waiting for a computer to arrive. For weeks. Making $1500 per day.

To be fair it’s the same in private companies.

Last time I was consulting at a big international corporation all it consultants (including those from big 5) on the project was asked (against company policy) to bring our own laptop and use the guest WiFi, since that particular PM didn’t have the patience or budget to wait a week for laptops to be acquired and setup.

In my opinion it’s a bit of a trope.

Wowza, he made 360K a year working for the DoD 20 years ago?

Sure hope he was smart with the money, you could use that to really jump start your life early

I met someone who spent six months in a SCIF waiting on a project to start. Go in every day and wait for 8 hours for some indication that work was available.

He said by the end of the "project" (which never involved any actual work) he had a complete space invaders clone written in Microsoft Excel with multiple levels, different game modes, difficulty levels, high scores, etc.

> If the contractor can lump all sorts of charges into the cost of the hammer (for unrelated projects), it's a way of hiding the true cost of anything.

You should have seen the massive number of very large enterprise IT projects in the late 1990s that were justified, approved, budgeted and accounted for under the famous Y2K umbrella.

Every reasonably smart business or IT manager figured out ways to connect their pet project to Y2K and after that the approvals were almost automatic.

Because what VP, CEO, board member or even shareholder dared to question the necessity of preventing the potentially catastrophic events if Y2K bugs weren’t properly eradicated.

It was pretty amazing times.

I don't know man, custom bespoke anythings probably need to cost a few hundred dollars to make it worth the time of the company, who needs to pay the workers and all the useful and useless management alike, and still turn a profit as well. The fault really lies with whoever in the government decided that a COTS hammer just couldn't work.

Yeah I don’t think this story is a silver bullet for “government doesn’t overspend!” That the author seems to imply

When I was a consultant, I had private companies do that at a cost to them of $2200 a day.

I had one project where this went on for 5 months. This was a private company with massive ill-gotten gains, which wasn't shy in spending that money frivolously. Whatever man, I guess.

I was playing poker with an old High School classmate who worked in Washington. I mentioned my consulting company chared 15% - 25% overhead for project management over what our Engineers got hourly.

He laughed, said "In DC that would be 200%"

I guess I believe it, from all this.

That's not unique to the public sector. Business and IT consulting charges similar markups for all customers.

They don't call them "beltway bandits" for nothing!

In Seattle, vendor/staffing companies typically charge a 50%-100% markup, though I have seen 200% at the most extreme.

20 years ago your friend was making $390k/yr on a DoD contract?

I'm skeptical. Though I'd like to believe your story.

People have entire careers that are like this. 20 years of doing jack shit but cashing pay checks

Sounds like any bureaucracy. The government doesn't have a monopoly on inefficiency.

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