While we might want to talk about fallacies of a government contract, the reality is, well even software companies fall for it. Without giving much away, my ex

While we might want to talk about fallacies of a government contract, the reality is, well even software companies fall for it. Without giving much away, my ex-employer a fairly large "product" company wanted to implement a system from Peoplesoft's competitor. The management wanted to save cost which meant neither full time employee (FTE) were hired nor retrained. So they brought in IBM consultants. Once the project was over IBM left only for the company to realize they had no one to make incremental changes to the system or maintain it. They spent extra money to hire another developer and consultancy to maintain the system. Takeaways: a. This was not the first time IBM had delivered shoddy product but "low cost" was a driving factor so they get hired again and again. This is true for both private companies and government. b. Low cost also means companies don't want to hire FTEs rather make do with contractors. This creates dependency. c. It is not entirely on IBM or other consultancies but general ineptness too. People holding on to their jobs, hiring and creating messes: During the development of the aforementioned project one of the workflows fell within my team's domain. But the finance team had some "developers" who wanted to justify their salaries. They wanted to develop but had zero understanding of what do words like "standards" and "best practices" meant. I spent hours and hours arguing over why certain things should be done in a certain way. I was always told I was too uptight. In the end of module written by these "developers": a. Transmits salary for the whole company via plain text files b. If a, was not enough the text file is emailed to 60-70 people in the company who have no authorization to look at salary data. It is always maintained that without sufficient background people might not understand the salary data at all because it uses "employee ids" instead of names. So not everything was IBM's fault on the project. Currently, the salary in text is a huge security risk but no one cares. All our efforts to write a program to obfuscate data was rejected for being "too complex".