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The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. Large corporations routinely spend gazillions on software projects that end u

• matwood 11y ago
  Having worked in large companies, small startups, and government, government is orders of magnitude the worst offender when it comes to simply wasting money and getting nothing done. The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. In the worst cases for companies, money stops coming in the door and cuts are forced. Contrast the above with the government where it sometimes literally takes an act of congress to fire someone. If the populace is unhappy with how the government is spending its tax dollars they cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else.
  • bjitty 11y ago
    > The main difference between small and large companies was it simply took longer for people who got nothing done to be let go. That is certainly true and one major facet to the problem.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • specialist 11y ago
    I've done corporate, startup, government (higher ed). Another difference with government is the intractable complexity. This plays to the difference between digitization and automation. Automation is the removal of human judgement. It requires simplification of the rules and processes. My local government revamped their payroll system. The first effort tried to digitize existing rules, and failed utterly. The second effort reworked the payroll rules (automation), allowing them to use software closer to off the shelf, and succeeded. I consider the projects I worked on for higher ed to be complete failures. Publishing course catalogs, registering for classes, auditing degrees, etc. Conceptually simple stuff. Alas, management tried to implement every single psychotic rule and mutant edge case for each and every stake holder, preserving paper-based processes over 100 years old. Such fun. My work for a telco wasn't any less nutty making. There's a reason your phone bill is too high: bureaucracy. Their internal IT is terrible. They can't even provide conf call services or roaming wifi to themselves. I sometimes fantasize that Apple or Google will introduce ubiquitous flat rate service, gut the dinosaurs, and making another gagillion dollars just thru operational simplicity.
    • Aloha 11y ago
      > preserving paper-based processes over 100 years old. Such fun This is probably the most important part - every digitization effort I've seen fail, failed because they tried to digitize the existing process, rather than look at what information needed to be collected and creating a new digital process to collect that information.
    • e12e 11y ago
      > Automation is the removal of human judgement. It requires simplification of the rules and processes. My impression, is that government projects often go like this: 1) We want to digitize and make some process X more efficient, 2) Oh, now that we're automating we can avoid "errors" by removing case-by-case handling (X is of course now set up for individual evaluation by a professional bureaucrat). The result is that not only do you get feature/scope creep (handle all the things for all the cases, or declare failure), if you succeed, the system ends up being much worse (it now follows outdated written documentation to the letter, doesn't allow for any leeway). The obvious way around this, is make a system that automates the easy 80% of the cases. Allow the system to give good information to, the now much fewer, bureaucrats, and allow them to handle the 20% on a case-by-case basis. After a year, evaluate, and reduce the 20% to another 80/20. Give up the idea that you should automate policy. It's completely insane, even if it might look good on paper. It's like with accounting systems: you should always have a way for a clerk to enter in and account for unforeseen things in a way that a) accommodates the system ("-500 towels missing/destroyed") along with a comment-field to elaborate, and to facilitate revision ("Bus crashed through the window, gave away 500 towels for use as bandages").
  • Retric 11y ago
    On the upside when a gov project works they are often willing to keep it for a very long time and killing a project does not mean the original need is not still there. So, often really old government boondoggles are often 2 or 3 separate projects which keep the name after the first one fails. > cannot simply stop paying taxes and go somewhere else Plenty of people leave the US every year. It's generally really easy to do. At a local level choosing a city or state based on tax rate is even easer. ED: Unless you meant the moving was the hard part, which seems reasonable.
    • CWuestefeld 11y ago
      If you're a US citizen, it doesn't matter if you move anywhere in the world, the IRS will take part of your income regardless.
      • Retric 11y ago
        You can renounce US citizenship, as long as you have paid all your taxes up to that point. The point is it's a proactive action. http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-considerations/us-citizenship-laws-policies/renunciation-of-citizenship.html http://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal-consideratio... Persons intending to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware that, unless they already possess a foreign nationality, they may be rendered stateless and, thus, lack the protection of any government. There are also a lot of exceptions to that IRS rule, depending on the type of income. PS: As to renouncing Citizenship; Social Security is an example of long term obligation that transcends where your living in a single year. If your willing to give up Social Security by renouncing Citizenship then things get simple.
        • maehwasu 11y ago
          As someone who has looked heavily into this option, I can say that you are drastically understating the simplicity of this option. Getting a second passport takes significant time and investment in most cases.
          • 11y ago
• BurningFrog 11y ago
  There are terrible projects everywhere. But when individual private companies screw up, other companies do what they tried to do better, and in the end the problem gets solved. > The root problem, I think, is that the people who are put in charge of these massive software projects -- typically, MBAs or lawyers by training -- often don't know anything about how to develop software at scale Sounds like a... branch problem. What is the root cause of government projects being run by incompetents?
  • jerf 11y ago
    "What is the root cause of government projects being run by incompetents?" The incentives tend not to reward competence at achieving a task very well. They tend to reward political climbing. They don't necessarily preclude competence at a task, but energy expended competently performing a task is energy not expended playing politics, which means it tends to get outcompeted. This is not, strictly speaking, a characteristic of "government". Large corporations that get sufficiently rich and powerful that they end up detached from market discipline develop the same problems. Security, wealth, and comfort are even more dangerous to large organizations than they are to individuals.
    • themetrician 11y ago
      cs702 said: The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. jerf said: This is not, strictly speaking, a characteristic of "government". Large corporations [...] develop the same problems. You know, I saw this "10 years, 1 form" article yesterday and I thought how would the HN people react to it. Today I see I should have known they would simply deny this is the government's fault and use the Tu Quoque fallacy to excuse the behavior of government, like good Stockholm-syndrome-afflicted captives.
• bograt 11y ago
  I have experience of developing large software systems for both government and corporations, in the UK. Large IT systems fail in many ways, small and large and I don't think it's possible to isolate a single root cause but I do have one observation which I think is often overlooked. When a company like Amazon or Google release a new service or a new product, they generally have the luxury of choosing which customer requirements they want to meet. The more customers they satisfy, the more customers they can hope to win. This freedom means that these companies can follow the common trajectory of releasing a simple realization of their product which is then honed by iteration. But companies contracted to produce government and corporate systems rarely have this freedom in my experience, but for different reasons. In the case of government systems it is politically (and often morally) unacceptable to exclude specific classes of end users from a system; the requirement to make a system available to nearly 100% of possible users while at the same time catering for the labyrinthine complexities of local and national government is simply very difficult. In corporate environments, there is a similar pressure to meet 100% of customer needs, but in this case the users are often staff and though the problem is similar at a technical level, the source of the pressure is different: Google is a large corporation, and when it releases a product like Gmail, users can choose to use it, or not: they can't singly demand changes, so Google has the power to stand up to users and, in short, be a good custodian of the user experience. When developing software for corporate customers, this relationship is inverted, and very often, every wrinkle in every corporate business process is expected to be modelled in the software. As a contractor, you know you could produce better software for the corporation, if they were willing to adapt some of their processes in the same way customer adapt their behaviour to using Gmail, but they have the power. The result is the same in both cases: excess complexity.
• api 11y ago
  I say this very often: The MBA (who has no other expertise) is capitalism's answer to the Soviet "apparatchik." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik "Management" is a secondary skill in the sense that it only makes any sense if one also has a primary skill. An engineer might learn to manage and thus become an engineering manager. A baker might learn to manage and might manage a baking company or a restaurant/cafe. But only knowing "management" alone is absurd and vapid. I truly cannot comprehend how anyone could purport to manage something they do not understand at the ground level. To some extent I blame academia for pushing the idea that one can get an MBA and manage things without understanding what one is managing. Programming is particularly bad. There are no physical analogies for it. It's so alien to ordinary human experience that asking someone with no experience in it to manage it is like asking a blind person to direct a silent film. Actually the latter is far more likely to be successful. I can't actually think of an analogy right now that suitably captures just how inept a non-developer is at managing developers. From the link: "Members of the "apparat" were frequently transferred between different areas of responsibility, usually with little or no actual training for their new areas of responsibility. Thus, the term apparatchik, or "agent of the apparatus" was usually the best possible description of the person's profession and occupation." "It is often considered a derogatory term, with negative connotations in terms of the quality, competence, and attitude of a person thus described."
  • jackgavigan 11y ago
    > The MBA (who has no other expertise) is capitalism's answer to the Soviet "apparatchik." I'm an MBA. Are you suggesting that I have no other expertise? Do you think that we undergo some sort of specialised lobotomy at business school to remove the knowledge and experience we accumulated before enroling in business school, and to prevent us from learning anything thereafter?
    • cowardlydragon 11y ago
      Well, we know ethics are lobotomized. I'm not specifically denigating you, more of an observation of the overall class.
    • 11y ago
• jessriedel 11y ago
  > The root problem is not government. The same thing happens in the private sector. Large corporations routinely spend gazillions on software projects that end up working poorly or not at all. Everyone who has worked in Corporate America knows this all too well. > The root problem is not bureaucracy either. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have fairly large bureaucracies yet they routinely successfully complete massive software projects. >...The root problem, I think, is that the people who are put in charge of these massive software projects -- typically, MBAs or lawyers by training -- often don't know anything about how to develop software at scale. I don't think these explanations are mutually exclusive. If you're right about the root problem being the technical expertise of leaders, then one can still argue that the Amazons of the world slowly rise to the top and displace the K-marts, but an incompetent government can persist indefinitely because it has a monopoly on governance.
  • lazaroclapp 11y ago
    There isn't really a monopoly on governance, though. On the short term there is political alternance, on the long term there is the rise and fall of states. Of course, the first one would matter a lot more if: a) people voted based on previous performance, not vague future promises; b) there were more than two options in competition. As for the second. The second works quite well, but not a time scale that yet cares about well-designed websites... fail to figure out say steel alloys and gunpowder, though, and you'll see this competition in action... ;)
• wahsd 11y ago
  The root of the problem is really that instead of trying to figure out how to digitize immigration forms, we should be figuring out how to fill capacity within the country and not simply kick poor and underserved communities to the ditch and just cream people from other countries and societies where we are cherry picking off the best. I get it, that won't be a popular sentiment here because the hidden racism backed into immigration to fill holes created by incompetence and ignorance of long term problems by filling them with short term solutions is still quite popular, let alone not even realized. It's kind of like simply going to the title loan place to leverage the future to pay back the credit card of bad past choices. Digitizing the immigration forms is really more of a sad reminder of how racist our country is that we refuse to provide for our own people, while we are more than willing to deprive source countries of success by making people build industries and technologies in their own country. I know, I'm all wrong ... screw those mostly black poor kids in poor neighborhoods and screw those other countries, America needs to undermine their success in order to dominate.
  • woah 11y ago
    I know a lot of brilliant people from other countries. My mother is an immigrant. You are the racist here. EDIT: Xenophobe.
    • wahsd 11y ago
      Always with the predictable knee-jerk responses. I'm neither a racist nor a xenophobe. I don't hate people because of their origins or race, nor to I not like foreigners. You are surely not going to like hearing ths, but immigrants are essentially moochers on one hand, and traitors on the other. Moochers on both ends because if they were educated for essentially free in, e.g., Europe and come to the USA they both mooched off their source country and then they come to the USA to mooch off what the USA and Americans built. Traitors because they mooched off their country to get an education and are now putting their labor, knowledge, and skill to use for a different country or society instead of building up the country they came from and still hold on to even when they are in the USA. The humongous forest that pro immigrant people can't see for all the trees is that immigration is a core driver and reason for many of not only America's problems, but also the lack of source countries from gaining any traction. All the way from sapping out pressure for social change by motivated people leaving for places where they can mooch over the fight that was already won by others, to extracting the skill and knowledge to do the thing that the do from their society. What pro immigration types don't quite get is that immigration to the USA is like kryptonite or more like a witch that sucks the life force out of the source countries and societies. You may and probably confuse what I said with xenophobia and hatred and are angry because I am not saying your favorite thing, but reality is that I am right, whether you or others realize it. I'm fine with that, but it needs to be said. The point is not about "go back to where you came from" it's "why didn't you put your energy, drive, knowledge, and skill towards your own country and society and instead went to make the rich, richer and the powerful more powerful" Don't complain about America's actions and policies around the world if you are going to support our life force driven economic, political, and military engine.
• mbesto 11y ago
  The root problem is incentives. When a failed project doesn't mean any loss (financial or otherwise), there is no market correction. That, and no one has been able to actually defined what a failure is. Is 10 years too long? Who knows...there are no experts who can plan for that. [0] When healthcare.gov was turned around by a select set of motivated individuals, it only happened because the people who were involved had a high degree of motivation. IMHO I believe they were motivated by eliminating personal frustration (or having empathy for those who are frustrated) and the upside of a highly visible software project (with none of the downside...it was already failing). Money wasn't a focal point here. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jg/planning_fallacy/
• codecamper 11y ago
  In the early 2000s I worked for a big government contract company that had a contract with the CDC to make a website with.. wait for it... forms. Yes it was basically big complex, single page forms that wrote data into a... wait for it. Oracle database. These were the days of J2EE. They had about 30 programmers on the case. There were the architects, a lead architect, and many programmers. The contract was for about 100 million USD. Their interview process was: "can you write computer code?.. OK great, you are hired. Come on in." I should have known something may be amiss.. The dev server took about 5 minutes to start on a souped up computer. That and several static variables hiding up high in an uber base class. These variables were of course designed to hold per session data. I tried submitting a form twice simultaneously. This crashed the server. I left that and years later the project was I believe cancelled. I wonder why the government does't just use a forms as a service thing?