Hacker News Reader

Comment by critium | Hacker News Reader

I've worked in and out of the public sector for the last 10 years and unfortunately, this actually _PAR FOR THE COURSE_.

This is not the contractors fault. Its the government. Before I left to work with a startup, I was abhorred by the lack of ownership on the client's side. Everybody is looking to shuffle responsibility, keep the lowest profile, and do the least amount of work.

It doesnt matter who's writing the code, unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side, large projects are destined to fail and better left off to be written by the public sector. This is government waste at its best.

I'm neither republican or democrat but just to add, if my rinky dink app I was working on for the Dept. Of Commerce gets shown to the president when its in 'ALPHA' state, there is no way the most informed person in the world didnt know that the site was going to fail from the get-go.

View on HN

"unless they find somebody competent and passionate on the government side"

The newly appointed fix-it czar, Jeffrey Zients, definitely sounds competent from his current remarks (see elsewhere in this topic his top priority), hopefully he can muster enough passion for the Maximum Effort required.

And, yeah, I've done some work for the public sector and it's that bad, sometimes worse. In the last case, an entity had Lockheed make an at least half-bespoke (custom) system, which worked pretty well. Then put out continued maintenance on bid, Lockheed didn't win that contract, and years later, as the DEC Alpha systems were nearing their end of life (the line was of course killed by Compaq/HP), it was discovered the sources Lockheed left behind wouldn't compile into the binaries used (e.g. they used SCCS (!!!) ... until a few months before launch). First by a guy they had to let go after a month or so because of budget screwups, then by me over a year later. But of course the plan and budget was predicated on a doesn't match reality estimate of work to be done by another contractor long before.

Needless to say the clients didn't understand the difference between source and binary code, or how they'd painted themselves into a really difficult to exit corner.

As for failing, CMS in its role as integrator did do integration tests 1, maybe 2 weeks before launch. They of course failed hard.

It's the contractors' fault, too. Both parties are playing the same game, here: corporate welfare for the contractors, who usually are owned or operated by people with connections to the government, and long-term job security for the government project management officials who oversee these things.

I don't know if you've ever worked for a contractor, but I have, and I guarantee you the same responsibility shuffling, profile munging, least-amount-of-work attitude exists there. Without it, these contractors wouldn't be able to keep feeding at the trough with the rest of their corporate welfare recipient friends (while they bitch to each other about how evil liberals are, how disgusting entitlements are, etc.).

The argument i'm making is that no matter who comes in, so long as they dont have a dedicated and passionate lead, it will be all for nothing.

I dont argue that the contractors are/can be part of the problem but from my experience, the government _IS_ the limiting factor, especially when they say that they're the systems integrator, not the contractor as is in this case.

I did my damnest to write/architect/design the best system that I could but if the government forces you to use RH JBoss 2 versions behind the latest, just because they have a support license then refuses to buy JRebel because it was too expensive after paying tens of thousands of dollars on said JBoss, and then changes the system requirements every 6 months you're doomed. Worst of all we were _NOT_ allowed to talk to end users. We can only talk through our Task Order Managers and supposed Technical Leads (that have little or extremely dated technical experience).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com