A friend of mine has had an illustrious career in I.T. with many successes in the last decade. Right before he struck out on his own to build his brand he was

A friend of mine has had an illustrious career in I.T. with many successes in the last decade. Right before he struck out on his own to build his brand he was unhappy with his then job and decided to work with a recruiter to find a new role. The recruiter got him a job with a large bank going through a transition from a major platform from a third party that had been long neglected. The platform was on what we will call version 5 of the software while everyone else was running what we will call version 9 of the software. My friend was hired as a technical project manager. He worked there for less than a month before he struck out on his own and got to realize his full potential. In that brief period of time he learned the following: * The bank had not started to put together the requirements for the new software to be integrated. * The software vendor had no upgrade path from the very old version to the new version. * The bank needed the migration done in under ninety days or they would start getting fined millions of dollars by regulators. * The project had already committed to spending $3M / month on a five year commitment with a hosting partner but they didn't have any developers working with them yet. What I took away is that when big companies do stupid things they are big stupid things. I'm not surprised that government being as big as it is would also do stupid things on a larger scale.