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You're definitely falling prey to a short-sighted and overly cynical point of view. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
by awakeasleep 11y ago
You're definitely falling prey to a short-sighted and overly cynical point of view.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" and never use the stupidity explination to overlook the fundamental complexity of a software project.
What you have here is a lot of non IT professionals, without siginificant IT experience, attempting the most complex IT projects ever considered, without the pressures of ship-or-sink, investors looking for progress reports, or even the benefit of working with their own employees (usually multiple groups of contractors work on these big projects). Also, they're not trying to build a MVP and iterate. They're trying to build Rome in a few years.
When you think about the hurdles these projects face, of course they fail. The government trying to do a huge software project is like a kid seeing a master level parkour video on Youtube and not understanding the lifetime of practice that went into the sport. They're just going to jump off the roof and break their ankle.
Of course in a sample size this large corruption is an issue. However, with zero corruption and only the best intentions, we'd see substantially the same results.
- tomaskafka 11y agoAlso, “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by complexity.” http://www.cennydd.com/blog/its-not-what-you-think http://www.cennydd.com/blog/its-not-what-you-think
- devonkim 11y agoOnly those that haven't worked in DoD / federal systems could ever think that laziness / stupidity is not a major root cause of so many DoD IT project failures. There's a lot of successes when using smaller, elite contractors but complexity intertwines with stupidity as larger contractors must be brought in to handle the bureaucracy and their hiring standards are basically abysmal. Why? They were very much incentivized to hire butts in seats on contracts historically, not to be effective at executing them to technical satisfaction. Someone needs to call out DoD for what it really is in the US - federal Public Works program that's approved by neoconservatives.
- Karunamon 11y agoWhat you have here is a lot of non IT professionals, without siginificant IT experience, attempting the most complex IT projects ever considered It seems like this boils down to "People should not hold strong opinions on things they don't understand." I've seen so much time and money wasted on nonsense endeavors just because clueless people insisted things had to be done a certain way without consulting they people they pay to make sure their stuff runs right.
- pjc50 11y agoYeah, it's definitely a failure of project management. I'd like to point out that GOV.UK have greatly improved in this regard recently. Mostly by the old fashioned approach of having senior permanent staff who know what they're doing. Contracting out at the top level (ie, including all the project management) is just a way to guarantee a money sink, because either you have a huge inflexible spec built into the contract or you have an area of vagueness where responsibility can be dodged.