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All quite true - especially the bit about the contractual white-anting. A few years back, I was taking a course for my then-job, and the lecturer told us about
by jlangenauer 16y ago
All quite true - especially the bit about the contractual white-anting.
A few years back, I was taking a course for my then-job, and the lecturer told us about a group of people in one of the major Australian constuction firms (though he didn't say which one).
The job of these people was to go through all tender documentation looking for things which hadn't been specified properly, or which might conflict with other things in the tender documents. When the construction company bid, it would include a laundry list of conditions of their tender, usually saying abstruse things like "In s.311(a) of the Scope of Works, we have bid assuming that existing conditions on site are foo..." and the like. On those tenders they won as the conditions turned out to be different to what they'd assumed (bearing in mind that these conditions were now part of their contract), they'd be able to ask for a variation (and more money) for most things - pushing up the price of the contract while allowing a competitive bid price. This is all legal, and frankly, not that uncommon.
The interest thing is that this company had actually worked out how much revenue these guys - the contract analysts - brought in, and they found that the revenue per employee for these guys was more than for any other employee in the entire organisation.
- jacquesm 16y agoInsurance companies have similar people working for them called 'claims adjusters'. It's really sad how parasitic behaviour is rewarded so well and real productivity is not. There's a fundamental flaw embedded in there somewhere but I really can't verbalize it.
- puredemo 16y agoThe term "gotcha capitalism" pretty much sums it up for me.
- barmstrong 16y agoI'm not familiar with that term, but from reading the article the guy doesn't seem to point the finger at capitalism. He is saying big government is more susceptible to this than free market capitalism.
- chrischen2 16y agoI thought he went out of his way to emphasize that it's not necessarily big government that's the problem, since full transparency in government would serve to reduce the problem as "not buying the product" does the same in the private sector.
- Maro 16y agoHundreds of pages of legalese are the de-facto weapon against transparency --- even if you can obtain the documents, it's so boring, timeconsuming and frustrating to read it that it becomes effectively opaque.
- chrischen2 16y agoIt only takes one person to do that to expose it to everyone.
- dejb 16y agoPeople contribute to open source projects - doing work for free that many would consider mundane. Looking for loopholes would be a lot like debugging.
- notauser 16y agoIt's not quite that straightforward. Think about it from the other side of the fence. My experience was with weapon systems but to a certain extent it does apply to roads. Because of THE RULES only fixed priced bids are acceptable. As a contractor you are being asked to quote on the complete price for a new product build, even though you haven't designed, tested or built anything like it before. The price you quote needs to include the cost of upgrading a bunch of existing equipment to support your new product. You have no idea what the current state of the existing equipment is. You have three choices: - Quote a huge price that fairly covers every possible risk, and get told it's too expensive. - Quote a small price and caveat the hell out of everything and get blamed when the initial conditions or complexity turns out to have been misunderstood or misrepresented. - Go bankrupt. You actually even see the same decision being made by normal employees at work. "Sure boss, I can do it in three weeks, as long as Dell delivers on time" would be an example of option (2) in action.
- jacquesm 16y agoSo, when forced to choose between three honest options with (potentially!) unfavorable outcomes and a dishonest one it's ok to be dishonest?
- crc32 16y agoThe contractor has an incentive to identify caveats, the purchaser has an incentive to pin down those caveats before agreeing to the purchase. Where is the dishonesty in that? It is the purpose of the contract.
- fgf 16y agoDo you know of any corruption free economic system? If corruption is ever present (to varying degrees) is it still a fundamental flaw?
- eru 16y agoInstead of asking binary questions, you can ask about economic systems that minimize corruption.
- fgf 16y agoThe question was not meant to be a refutation. It is a reference to the dangers of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Problems such as these does not always require (or have) a solution. The kinds of social engineering that may or may not solve a particular problem often have unpleasant and unexpected results.