Ask HN: What leads to government websites being badly engineered?
It seems this is an almost universal thing across all governments. Yes a few governments from UK and some Asian/European countries and even some in the US have recently been shipping good stuff.
But by and large the APIs and the UI/UX tends to be much worse than what private enterprise tends to come up with.
Consider for example booking a train in Spain. The official website of Renfe (the state owned railway company) is a mess. If you open the devtools and look at the network tab, you will get a cerebral aneurysm. This is true of other public transport systems around the world. Even the supposedly best one in Switzerland. For example if you go to sbb.ch and type Zurich, it will show you so many Zurichs that you'll have no idea what to select if you are new to the city (Renfe solves this with a "Madrid (ALL)" virtual entry). This leads to people using private wrappers around these like google maps/omio etc.
I've traveled and lived around a lot (at least in the northern hemisphere) and it's the same everywhere with anything government related.
I don't think it's impossible or unnatural for governments to hire good engineers. In fact most likely the engineers working there are probably pretty decent.
So what gives? What invisible forces are converging to make state developed tech so much worse worldwide?