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I was a little too quick on the upvote for your comment. Your first paragraph is spot-on, but your second is not. > the government is legally prevented from t

I was a little too quick on the upvote for your comment. Your first paragraph is spot-on, but your second is not. > the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period This is absolutely wrong. There is no requirement that the federal government must go with the cheapest bidder or that they cannot take performance into account. The government can and does regularly reject bids because they are unrealistically low; in fact, I was on one DOD program where both bidders were told to go home and come back with something realistic. Past performance definitely factors in to what the government considers reasonable. It's one of the reasons the government requires labor tracking even in situations where the labor expended doesn't affect the final cost, such as fixed-price contracts and uncompensated overtime.

lostcolony 10y ago
That's some comfort then. I never saw any indication of it; across multiple projects I never saw any drive to refactor, or any of the signs I associate with developers taking pride in one's work (documentation above what is asked for, root cause analysis even when a surface issue has been taken care of, or really, any addressing of non-functional requirements that were obvious, but which had not been demanded in the contract). Perhaps because they were mostly long running projects that had already been bidden on, and just having the domain knowledge meant that they'd continue to have the advantage on any future bids to extend it. Also, while I've seen bid wins/losses talked about from the perspective of the quality of the solution, I've not seen them talked about having been won/loss due to past performance. I hope you're right that that's a consideration, but the lack of controls around quality, and the obvious apathy I saw, lends me to think that if that's a consideration, it's not one the government knows how to actually judge.

lostcolony 10y ago

That's some comfort then. I never saw any indication of it; across multiple projects I never saw any drive to refactor, or any of the signs I associate with developers taking pride in one's work (documentation above what is asked for, root cause analysis even when a surface issue has been taken care of, or really, any addressing of non-functional requirements that were obvious, but which had not been demanded in the contract). Perhaps because they were mostly long running projects that had already been bidden on, and just having the domain knowledge meant that they'd continue to have the advantage on any future bids to extend it. Also, while I've seen bid wins/losses talked about from the perspective of the quality of the solution, I've not seen them talked about having been won/loss due to past performance. I hope you're right that that's a consideration, but the lack of controls around quality, and the obvious apathy I saw, lends me to think that if that's a consideration, it's not one the government knows how to actually judge.