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100% agree. The problem is not that there aren't opportunities to improve but that getting those into the hands of users is often nearly impossible. Public off

by tyre 7y ago

100% agree. The problem is not that there aren't opportunities to improve but that getting those into the hands of users is often nearly impossible. Public officials are not incentivized to improve software or even services. People vote based on emotions and the downside of fucking up a software upgrade is far more politically damaging than the upside of fixing it. Until the procurement and purchasing process is improved—changes that, in my mind, have to come from within—building better products just doesn't matter all that much. (I say this as someone who co-founded a YC-back company building software for local governments and burned out after 2.5 years trying to sell into them.)

yeahitslikethat 7y ago
I had the same experience. Too many hoops to jump through. No one trusts the decisions public employees make so there's too much Red tape. Sales is too expensive. The value to the public might be millions. The software value to the organization is nil. Their attitude: Oh we can process applications 10x?? Why bother? The people will wait. They always have. Why change it now? Staff won't want to learn something new.
- tyre 7y ago
  And they almost literally cannot go out of business. The incentives aren’t there. I don’t know. I sincerely hope someone figures it out. We could improve so so so many things
  - empath75 7y ago
    the government isn’t about efficiency, it’s about fairness. (In theory).
empath75 7y ago
I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you the interface between agile teams and feds is painful. Agile development is about people over process and government is about process over people (for valid reasons!) We sat through a retro after a sprint with some of the feds and the questions were all about deadlines and dependencies and when such and such would be complete so they started putting everything on the board and made us throw out story points and put dates on everything and we were like, congratulations you just reinvented the Gantt chart. Like I get it, they have different incentives than most product owners do, but yeah if you think you’re going to reinvent government by bringing silicon valley development practices to Washington, you are going to have a bad time.

by tyre 7y ago

yeahitslikethat 7y ago

I had the same experience. Too many hoops to jump through. No one trusts the decisions public employees make so there's too much Red tape. Sales is too expensive. The value to the public might be millions. The software value to the organization is nil. Their attitude: Oh we can process applications 10x?? Why bother? The people will wait. They always have. Why change it now? Staff won't want to learn something new.

tyre 7y ago
And they almost literally cannot go out of business. The incentives aren’t there. I don’t know. I sincerely hope someone figures it out. We could improve so so so many things
- empath75 7y ago
  the government isn’t about efficiency, it’s about fairness. (In theory).

empath75 7y ago

I was working on a contract to replace a legacy system for the federal government, and we were doing agile development (or attempting to) and let me tell you the interface between agile teams and feds is painful. Agile development is about people over process and government is about process over people (for valid reasons!) We sat through a retro after a sprint with some of the feds and the questions were all about deadlines and dependencies and when such and such would be complete so they started putting everything on the board and made us throw out story points and put dates on everything and we were like, congratulations you just reinvented the Gantt chart. Like I get it, they have different incentives than most product owners do, but yeah if you think you’re going to reinvent government by bringing silicon valley development practices to Washington, you are going to have a bad time.