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Comment by ankushnarula | Hacker News Reader

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

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That's the last thing I'd want my government spending time and money on. Govs can't even build apartment buildings without being half a decade late and 2x over budget, let alone extremely complex software.

If you start to look at the purpose of government as being to distribute tax dollars to themselves / campaign contributors / friends, rather than to serving the common good and the will of the people, things start to make a lot more sense. I think government can be to solution to a lot of problems IFF that government is actually responsive to voters. Here in the U.S. our political parties and politicians work quite hard to ensure this is not the case.

Hell no, tech is a really hard job, and the legacy in-house software I've seen the french public companies use were definitely a machine to convert heaps of tax money into mediocre software that became obsolete a few years later. A tax-to-tech-debt pipeline.

The tech market makes progress through booms and busts, hype cycles, and bankruptcies. The government can't afford that, and it should not.

The taxpayers deserve the most efficient use of their tax dollars, and that's not through in-house tech.

The best you can probably get is public support for open source companies and open source products.

Estonia does, because well... policy wise the US is not functioning very well. (Well various German goverments have their own inhouse tech, but kind of get the critic of German goverment lack of digitalisation)

Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?

I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical.

But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.

Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.

1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses.

2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.

Regarding your point (1):

How many developers/PMs/etc. are working on Office software at Microsoft? With 20 you might be several orders of magnitude off. Why would a government project be leaner?

What is more, at least where I live there is not even a salary structure allowing to pay developers those figures, while managers several levels above them would earn less. Hierarchy is everything in government organizations.

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