Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

Having consulted on government projects - especially huge projects spanning dozens of government departments, what I have learnt is that the project is doomed right from the start. The specifications are written in such a way that it is impossible to get a working software which can address all of the millions (yes, literally) of specifications.

For instance, I had the opportunity to review an RFP put out by a state government for software to run a single state government. The specifications stated that a SINGLE software should be used for running the full administration of all of the departments of the government - including completely disparate things such as HR, CCTV management, AI enabled monitoring of rodents and other animals near/at warehouses, all healthcare facilities, recruitment, emergency response services etc...

ONE SOFTWARE for ALL of these!

There isn't a single company in the world who can write software to monitor rodents, hospital appointment booking, general payroll, etc. And since the integration required was so deep, it would be impossible to use existing best-of-breed software.. and everything has to be written from scratch.

How is such a software project ever going to suceeed?

I just fed the above into Claude Code and it one-shotted this in 5 minutes. Already doing $3B ARR after lunch.

Of course! This is actually very straightforward and easy, what you need is just:

- One MongoDB collection (`government_stuff`) to store employees, rodents, cardiac arrest surgeries and other items as JSON

- Core `/handler` API that forwards all requests to ChatGPT, figuring out if you're tracking a rodent or processing payroll

- AI Vision to analyze CCTV feeds for rodents, monitors employee productivity and verify hospital equipment status

- Blockchain layer for transparency (every rodent sighting minted as NFT).

Estimated timeline: 2 weeks, 1 junior developer. Cost: ~$10k including token credits. Should I start implementing the main.js?

The jab at NoSQL made me snort-laugh, well done. You forgot to mention the 25 thousand npm dependencies.

This touches on the absolutely vital issue of domain knowledge. Everybody understands that you're not supposed to have the same people handle sewer maintenance and preschool teaching because these are two entirely separate skillsets. To an extent you can also treat kindergartens and treatment plants as black boxes that consume money and produce desired services.

For people who don't know much about programs it's sort of natural to assume that software engineering works the same way. Put in money and specs, get back programs. But of course it doesn't work like that, because software dev is not a single skillset. To write useful programs, you have to know how to code and understand the environment in which the program will be used.

But can this software monitor patients via CCTV and see if any of them are about to faint and call ER proactively for them? No? then your bid for the project will be discarded! :)

What about the CCTV monitoring software needing to verify if there are women in a particular room and trigger an alarm when too many men enter the area - I am not kidding, but this was really in the spec!

To be fair, that’s a rare exception. Most government tenders are quite narrow in scope.

What I have found is that they’re written by people with zero knowledge of either the solution requirements or the technology! Combine that with zero profit motive and zero personal consequences, and you can end up with total nonsense even on projects with billion dollar budgets.

A state school department here put out a tender for wiring over two thousand schools with fibre, but the way the contract was stipulated only a single applicant could win the contract and most handle every single location across a thousand miles of territory. Hence, only the largest incumbent telco could possibly win… which they did… at 15x the cost of a bunch of local contractors doing the work. This cost something like a billion dollars to taxpayers.

The excuse of the guy writing the tender was “it’s easier for me to get one contract signed than fifty.”

He’s a public servant getting paid $50K. He’s got nothing else on, no other pressing needs or distractions, but he’s too busy, you see? So much easier to waste a billion dollars to save himself a few months of effort.

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