did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!