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Can someone explain to me how the fuck my government can spend 15.8bn[1] on a software project? We could build 5 Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers for tha

• detaro 11y ago
  They don't employ the developers. The development is done by companies that might pay the developers that much, but bill the client more per hour and bill the client more time. And of course you can't forget project managers, architects and other consultants that are more expensive. And have a lot of meetings. And hardware, and oracle databases/SAP licenses, and support contracts for those, and audits, and extra charges for change requests, and travel budgets, and... Just because one team of developers could do something in 200 man hours doesn't mean you can't spend and bill 2000 for it. And that's just development. Data migrations and user training/support are going to be massive issues if you replace or newly introduce a widely used system.
  • organsnyder 11y ago
    > Data migrations and user training/support are going to be massive issues if you replace or newly introduce a widely used system. Yup. My employer is undertaking a massive IT project (many many many millions of USD), and it's my understanding that training accounts for over half of the budget.
  • orf 11y ago
    > Just because one team of developers could do something in 200 man hours doesn't mean you can't spend and bill 2000 for it. It doesn't mean you should pay, or plan, to spend 20,000 man hours in meetings and devote huge chunks of your budget to expensive licenses for something that could take 200 man hours, especially when it's taxpayers money. Sure there are unavoidable overheads but why does our government keep splashing billions on them and failing, with little accountability? Training is going to be expensive, sure, but perhaps plow millions of pounds into that after the program is finished. Maybe don't use the same massive, costly consultancies that fail to deliver? The Obamacare website was a great example of this IMO. Costly consultancy failed to deliver, small agile teams brought in to save the day - if only a bit too late.
    • Avshalom 11y ago
      The U.S. Government* isn't allowed to say "we want to spend this much money for this thing" they can only say "we want this thing" and then take the "best" offer they get, a fact known by all the companies bidding, and by all the companies I mean the one company that has jumped through all the legal hoops necessary to allow them to bid. *I know UC is British and while I suspect they have similar constraints I won't swear to it.
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      Basically all the laws that are written to avoid government abuse and corruption create a corrupted system of regulatory capture. Here is the simplest example. Say you need a device that does X. Now, I can go down to the local hardware store and pick up a device that does X (and Y and Z) for $40. But the law is written so that I can't just buy it where I want, because I might be wasteful and I might buy it from my buddy. So instead, I have to put out a bid that says I want a device that can do X and only select whom ever wins a bid. But there are a lot of regulations in who can bid, so the local hardware store doesn't ever even try. So I say I want a device that does X, and I end up getting a couple offers, the best of which is a device that barely does X for $200. That is the best offer I receive, so I have to take it. So now I have a much worse device at a much higher cost. Now, multiply this with every single thing you need to pay for in a software project (including other software, licenses, hardware, manpower, even the paper to print specs on).
      • petra 11y ago
        >> the best of which is a device that barely does X for $200. OK, after we did the bid, and that's the result, why can't i just go buy something if it's less than half the price ? even if i buy it from my buddy, as long as it fits ?
        • jjoonathan 11y ago
          Because your buddy was secretly cutting corners using Chinese chips that have a backdoor. Or chips that weren't bonded to spec and last only 2 months in the desert heat. That's the theory anyway.
  • sliverstorm 11y ago
    And of course you can't forget project managers, architects... Which, IMO, are extremely important investments in any 20,000-developer undertaking. Valve Software is famous for having a relatively flat hierarchy, but they also have ~330 employees.
• Avshalom 11y ago
  According to Wikipedia in 2015 Facebook took in ~18billion and ~3.5 was profit which means it costs 14.5 billion dollars just to maintain Facebook, for a year.
  • tehbeard 11y ago
    1. Facebook is a global company, not a national project. 2. Advertising/marketing budget is in there somewhere. 3. So are acquisitions (Oculus etc.). 4. Operational costs for their datacentres, ops staff etc.
    • Avshalom 11y ago
      And yet at the end of the day Facebook is a bloated PHP app that costs more per year to run than UC cost to develop over half a decade.
      • Avshalom 11y ago
        I mean look I'm not trying to say that these aren't staggering amounts of money. I'm just trying to keep these numbers in perspective. 15billion pounds may be an insane amount of money but if we look around we start to find that it is typical not just of 'inefficient government' but of software in general.
      • danso 11y ago
        According to the Wikipedia article, which may or may not be accurately stating things: > Whilst original estimates from the DWP planned for the administration costs for the rollout of Universal Credit were £2.2billion, by August 2014 this estimate was revised to £12.8billion over its "lifetime". The cost has since increased to £15.8 billion.[29] At that date only 7,000 claimants were receiving UC, although there are now over 175,000. The cost of the rollout is £15.8B. Its customer base is currently 175K. There's no indication that costs won't increase when the customer base increases by an order of magnitude. Besides simplifying Facebook's business model and operations (akin to calling Google just a big web scraper), you seem to be underestimating what's up ahead for UC, or you seem to think that software is just built and then maintains its value and functionality with no future costs whatsoever.
• gaius 11y ago
  A normal programmer will be billed out at £500-1000/day by a big consulting firm. By the way you cost your employer a LOT more than your salary. There's taxes, rent on the building, utilities, equipment and supplies, support staff, overhead staff, yadda yadda.
• jandrese 11y ago
  Legacy costs are why. You think "oh, it's just a big record store with some privacy controls, no problem!", but pretty soon you're trying to integrate some COBOL based system hosted on an IBM 360 to load data that is stored in a poorly specified format (mostly just text transcriptions of whatever idiosyncratic method that practitioner used--everybody did something a little different) on the order of a hundreds of millions of records. You may literally have to hire and army of data entry specialists to retype every single record in your new format, millions and millions of them. And you can't outsource that part due to regulations, they have to be housed in a secure facility that you need to build and get accredited (by who? It's unclear, you need to figure it out yourself. Oh, and if you guess wrong you're going to prison.). And this is before the lawyers get involved with their reams and reams of regulations that all make your job more difficult. If you think you could just dump the database and load it on the new system think again, that's an unacceptable data risk, you need to broker all of the data through yet another system.
• huuu 11y ago
  Risk is also what raises prices: - We are going to fine you if you don't deliver on time - Ok, but then we have to tripple our price
• flatM 11y ago
  One word: rent-seeking
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• atom-morgan 11y ago
  During my senior year of college I discovered, while working on my senior project, that the head of my state's financial department had a lot of outsourced software projects. Who builds those software projects? A contracting company. Who owns that contracting company? The head of the state financial department.
  • jonesb6 11y ago
    That.. deserves its own hacker news post.
• easytiger 11y ago
  Assholes like this: > Richard Granger the former Director General of IT for the NHS, took up his post in October 2002, before which he was a partner at Deloitte Consulting, responsible for procurement and delivery of a number of large scale IT programmes, including the Congestion Charging Scheme for London. In October 2006, he was suggested by The Sunday Times to be the highest paid civil servant, on a basic of £280,000 per year Deloitte are a cancer on society and business. Presumably he learned how to ruin companies there/