I worked on a contract to upgrade a legacy federal system to a modern architecture and it was a nightmare. For one thing, the previous contractor that has been

I worked on a contract to upgrade a legacy federal system to a modern architecture and it was a nightmare. For one thing, the previous contractor that has been managing the system essentially refused to cooperate in any way, dragging their feet producing any documentation or providing engineers to explain any aspect of the existing system, so a lot of it ended up being reverse engineered. In addition to that, the federal side of the house chased whatever technology they heard about at reinvent or whatever so the specs would continuously change to add cool new pieces to it from day to day. On top of that, the contractor I worked for was very much agile and move fast and break things which is fine if you’re a startup but is a disaster if your working on a federal system that hundreds of thousands of people depend on. There were regressions and outages regularly pushed to production and the engineers were just like whoops we’ll roll that back, but they weren’t appreciating how bad it looked on the federal side of things. I left the company after a year or so, and they lost the contract soon after.