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Comment by bsmith | Hacker News Reader

I wrote multiple systems that import most of the tax return data for the Finnish Tax Administration, a system that imports payroll data (and helped with the previous version of the system), and tax payer data extraction for other government agencies. Downstream process use this data to automatically fill out taxpayers' tax returns in Finland each year, and individuals only file tax return corrections. So if everything looks good, which happens for 90+% of taxpayers, there's nothing to do each year. We even won a few awards for the project.

https://www.pry.fi/en/activities/news/the_finnish_tax_admini...

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Please move to every country on the planet and replicate your work there.

I'd love to, this is exactly the use case for digital technology; automate the stuff we can making more time for more meaningful taska for everyone. Finland is ahead of it's time for these kinds of integrations. Problem is, it requires a central authority having all of the data, and the US has absolutely zero trust in it's government to not fuck it up. With good reason

Maybe you can start at the city level and move your way up. This is a great way to do it in the States.

Absolutely would not work in the US (as, unfortunately, most public services). There's already a huge lobby from TurboTax and other players. All countries that got to this level of automation already had publicly developed, free software for tax payers previously.

How did you sleep last night? Your cynicism is slowing.

Just this year, the IRS started a direct file pilot program that flies in the face of "it absolutely would not work". It's not everything, but it's a start.

Is that true that one can see everyone's salary in Finland? Or was it only for those above EUR 100k? Can people outside of Finland see it? Doesnt this attract thieves? They know whom to rob. What is the impact on dating scene? Do rich people put full names on Tinder?

Not sure in Finland but in Sweden yes you can see everyones salary (or more correctly you can see their income from salary. So if you got salary from two different jobs you just see the aggregate). Doesnt matter how much or little. And yes, it is def being used by criminals (on the other hand I'm sure it isnt hard to figure out in the US who is rich or not based on their lifestyle)

In the US, a lavish lifestyle can be funded on credit, so it's only an approximation. You don't know how much in debt the person driving the Benz is or isn't.

I’d say it’s easier to tell in the US as cities and towns tend to be heavily divided into class-based areas. Not to mention people in general are far more comfortable “showing off” their financial status.

Finland is a lot more homogenous in that sense and people certainly don’t flaunt their wealth.

Yes I believe you can look up anyone's salary in Finland, but you have to officially request it, and not sure how that's done. Some organization requests all the high earners and posts them online, so those above that amount can be identified. Everyone knows about it but find Finns are "if you have it, don't show it", and so it's not a problem as far as I know. It's the same as companies being transparent about salaries, it seems absurd to those not exposed to these kinds of companies, but after being part it's not a big deal. You're either not interested, or you use it as a tool to leverage yourself up.

About when was this? Just curious about the time period

Project started in 2014 and is still ongoing, but I think it's mostly small add-ons these days. I was on this project for nearly 6 years.

How was the work planned and organized? Any specific framework?

It was waterfall, but a lot of agile inside. Instead of development from waterfall, developers get a proof of concept up in front of the client SMEs as soon as possible, and then get it into their hands testing as soon as possible. In this way, the people working on the requirements were intimately familiar with the inner workings and offering feedback very quickly, to save time if solutions weren't working as intended. Each team would have 3-5 major projects so as soon as the first project didn't fill the full meeting, other priorities started getting their requirements. These meetings would be a touch base and rehash old topics if any solutions needed a pivot.

Once the SMEs and developers signed off on the solution, then it could go to the test part of waterfall, system test, everything launched once during the rollout window. And then maintenance mode.

What technologies did you use?

Old boring tech, VB.NET and t-SQL. Never understood the hate for VB.NET, I swear it's from people misconstruing VBA, which is awful, or they had terrible infra and coding standards. The system we had was a general core product that was configurable (I mean, taxes are the same, they just have different rules), but also customizable. Finland wasn't the first international project, but it was maybe the biggest one, so a lot of the solutions ended up being custom for the project. Unfortunately been difficult to find work with the boring tech background, but it was enjoyable (especially considering it was taxes).

> Never understood the hate for VB.NET

Not many people "hate" this or that tech, is my observation. As a guy who more or less refuses to work with anything else beyond Elixir, Golang and Rust these days, I can tell you that my stance comes from informed trauma over my 22+ years of professional experience; many runtimes like the JVM and .NET are quite good but have defects that tend to show up in exactly the wrong moments (like a burst of load that usually nobody ever tests for).

You absolutely have my respect for working on that system and it makes tangible positive impact on people's lives. Kudos. Wish I had even one such project in my long career but alas.

That being said, we should always qualify our statements. Your code likely never has to work in 100K+ requests per second conditions, and latency barely matters -- as long as people don't see 30s HTTP timeout canned pages then it's all good, right?

Many of us work on much more demanding stuff however, and there the programming stack actually makes very real and measurable difference on many axii -- programmer productivity, runtime resilience to bursts or just high loads, raw speed, easiness of deploying a hot fix, and others.

Again, you have my respect. Choosing boring / old tech is viable in many cases. But definitely not all. All our tools come with tradeoffs. You simply chose one whose negative tradeoffs will never manifest.

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