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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Four hundred million dollars is unfathomable.

Has Deloitte ever built any software that is good? I certainly have a super strongly negative bias against their work. But hey maybe someone here has worked with them and was impressed…

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Their skill is in winning huge government contracts, which is not easy.

I’d be comfortable betting my house that they’ve never produced even mediocre software. Why would they if the government is willing to pay for garbage-tier work?

One thing to remember is that governments often cannot hire qualified people to work on these projects, which means it’s less “willing to pay” than “forced to accept the only option”. If they aren’t allow to pay market rates for tech workers, they won’t have the skills to even properly evaluate proposals or validate the work being done until it’s too late – and by that point if there’s a dispute, the contract business analysts and project managers will likely be able to point to some documents they wrote as proof that “the government” required whatever problematic decision was made even when that was some non-technical civil servant picking an option they suggested without fully understanding the implications.

The single best way to save government money on infrastructure projects (software and real) would be to hire a bunch of engineers at competitive salaries so there’d be in-house expertise without conflicts of interest, but since that involves spending money up front and trusting people to be professional it’s politically unlikely.

Deloitte has really once built software that good, it is a AI / strategy / tactic type multitool AI used for the purpose of winning government contracts

The contract is likely structured into "Scope of Work" and "Ongoing Maintenance and Support" to help justify this cost.

> Has Deloitte ever built any software that is good?

Not in my experience.

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