The US government probably has more software than any non-tech company out there. Non-tech being very important here. The US government is not a technology co

The US government probably has more software than any non-tech company out there. Non-tech being very important here. The US government is not a technology company. So think of the worst enterprise software you've seen and the US government has it beat somewhere on some system they are still using. How does this happen? Contracts, they write contracts to the lowest bidder to build them software and then they pick the greenest/cheapest software engineers to do work in a mix of waterfall, agile, what's older than waterfall? On top of that they've got mission critical software that runs on this stuff. A silly little change like upgrading paper Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) requires YEARS of planning, safety analysis, and buy in from a representative every airport/airline/airtraffic controller across the US. Multiple unions etc. At it's worst the us government is slower than the slowest enterprise company you've seen. On top of all that, there is a review board for EVERY (mostly open source library you want to import, so there aren't bad actors on it. This review process is slow and pushes back on innovation. The worst thing you can do as a contractor is not hit your deadline. So many of them use tried and true technologies to get the job done, but don't innovate. Is it by decision? Yes the decision to pick the cheapest contractors, yes by the decision to include security in a way that actually slows things down, yes by a myriad of decisions that make innovating government software really hard. Is it by incompetence? Meh, yes and no. You have people even at these contracts who are railing and screaming against this. There is competence in all these places. But the pressure to slow down and do things a specific way push back so hard it's really difficult to accept new risk. And this was just my experience on one contract. Another government contract was super innovative and fun.