The one amazing thing that works is the taxes collection system. The French tax code is incredibly complex with hundred of special cases; yet the online system to declare revenues is perfect: super clear to use with excellent instructions, never broken (even at the end of a period where usage peaks must be insane) and with no errors.
I don't know who constructed this but it's proof that the French gvt can make good software when they really care (ie, when money's at stake).
I know HN doesn't appreciate snark, but isn't that kind of what you can expect from government websites anyway?
> C'est des sous menus dans des sous menus, si t'as plus qu'une page ouverte a la fois ça te déconnecte de l'autre, ...
The reason for that is that the site is basically a progressive merge-and-overhaul of many existing administrations and their sites.
Sure, apart from paying your taxes with entirely pre-filled forms, accessing all your medical bills, upcoming reimbursments, communication with the public medical insurance and your full medical history from a single place, doing everything that needs to be done with the French equivalent of the DMV, paying fines, changing your address everywhere with one form when you move, getting a digital copy of your ids and driving licences with the same value as the official one in a couple of minutes, requesting official documents like your criminal record or birth certificate and getting them mailed to you and all of that with the same unique login, absolutely nothing works.
I mean, what have the Roman ever done for us?
> Why do we need birth certificates in addition to IDs, exactly?
Because it’s the official record of your actual birth which gives you right and is therefore useful when you need for exemple to get said ids or prove to anyone that it is indeed where you were born?
Birth certificates are in no way unique to France. What’s remarkable however is how easy to get a copy of yours if you are French.
For the big project, my mental image is a public call for proposal, followed by one of the bigger groups (e.g. Cap Gemini) coming up with an initial solution that gets deployed. From there it becomes a mix of the public agency staff doing the day to day operation and maintenance, potentially including small bug fixes and updates, and external contracting again for wider range feature additions or changes like system wide security compliance.
The bureaucracy was painful enough that we just removed from the French App Store and when someone complains we tell them to write their representatives to stop with these misguided laws.
Excuse me, monsieur, do you have a license for that math?
Could the implementation be better? Knowing french admin, 100% yes, but complaining about the law itself is, in my opinion, misguided. This is an overall good law that doesn't came from nowhere.