>I’m not quite sure why state’s employment systems are so fantastically terrible given the relative simplicity of the task. For one they usually pick bad vendo

>I’m not quite sure why state’s employment systems are so fantastically terrible given the relative simplicity of the task. For one they usually pick bad vendors, because they're big enough to have a license, not because they provide a well-designed solution. But I think this is one of those tasks that looks simple from the outside but has many pitfalls. Bureaucratic systems are somewhat rule based usually, but since they weren't automated from the beginning, they usually have some conflicting rules, some missing rules, and some ambiguous rules. Which means there's a lot of human intuition involved in decision making which isn't encoded anywhere. So to start creating a new software that is better you would first have to understand the old software + human decision-making.