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I agree UK services are ahead of other countries I've experienced but they are still terrible in my experience. That said I know very well some contractors that

I agree UK services are ahead of other countries I've experienced but they are still terrible in my experience. That said I know very well some contractors that worked on gov.uk and they're top notch. That's probably were the technical excellence come from. The bureaucracy and process are the problems. They're much worse than any UK private company or UK bank I had to work with. HMRC is terrible, there are tons of error on the payslips, they mess up tax codes all the times, part of the website uses a previous UI and not the cool modern one, several functions need you to call and queue for 1hr or send letters and hope. Having an accountant helps as they have access to a special version of HMRC they can use to do things mere mortals can't. Childcare services are embarrassing and require you to have a subaccount in your governments account. I've spent 3 months without access because they asked me security questions for the childcare service on HMRC; I provided HMRC security answers and got locked out; the procedure to restore the account involved verifying my identity by providing via email certified copy of various documents. They were extremely slow in replying (sometimes not replying at all), they never returned any copies or originals I sent and they were extremely picky about certifications so I ended up having to send 3-4 certified and original documents.

vidarh 6y ago
Most of the problems tend to occur when you are forced to interact with legacy versions of tools that were built prior to the buildout of the new gov.uk. The old sites are all over the place. I think part of the reason gov.uk has been a success is exactly that they were not forced to replace old systems wholesale, but were allowed to build out a platform and methodology that works well and replace public facing services bit by bit.
- lucraft 6y ago
  I interviewed at a large UK gov Ministry for a technical architect role a couple of years ago and one of their interview questions was: "How would you architect new features on top of a legacy system implemented by an external agency that is hard to work with and has many bugs but we are unable to change in any way for contractual reasons?"
  - baq 6y ago
    i'd expect nothing less. only surprise is that there hasn't been any 'hypothetically' here.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    How did you answer? It isn’t a technical problem...
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Sure, it is a technical problem too. It's a technical workaround to a political problem of not being able to touch the other platform. My approach to this has been to embrace, extend, extinguish (yes, that was an intentional reference, sorry): Insert a constrained API "around" the service you can't modify. Change all your services to go via that API instead of direct. Now you can apply the fixes you can to the new layer while finding ways to gradually replace it in parallel. At the same time the new layer provides a constraint: It should be as narrow as you can get away with - creating a "new contract" with the API consumers about what they're actually allowed to do without negotiating with you, and ensure that any expansion of dependencies on the service you can't touch get documented and appropriate attempts made to avoid increasing complexity (it's good to do this in general, but realistically it's easier to get buy-in to enforce in limited cases like this). This intersection of tech with procedures and politics lie at the heart of a lot of technical architecture work. A huge proportion of the work we do is not technically hard in and of itself - it becomes technically hard because of organisational considerations.
  - zebnyc 6y ago
    I am curious to know how one would answer to this. Is it related to DDD concepts like maintaining upstream/downstream dependencies, boundary contexts and migrate piecemeal?
gerdesj 6y ago
I've been doing self assessment for 20 years now and it almost fills itself in these days - the P60 stuff and pensions etc do anyway. Getting your car taxed is embarrassingly simple and takes seconds as does checking your car MOT and insurance status. I don't have an accountant for SE and I do my wife's as well. The amount of documentation available is amazing. This is a great example of what's available: https://www.gov.uk/transition https://www.gov.uk/transition . Scroll down to Announcements, hit the first link and you have the full withdrawal agreement in multiple freely open formats. No it not perfect but it is rather good for this user anecdote.
- gpderetta 6y ago
  I have always had to fill in pension and P60 by hand (not that it is particularly hard); has this changed in the last year? Which reminds me that I need to do the self assesment before the end of the month.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    I think it (P60 and Pension) was filled in last year for me as well. The service is being changed quite quickly but I can imagine the pain behind the scenes. Screens that used to look like the old green/yellow thing are becoming rarer and the front screen has more options. My overall impression is that we have a rather sensible GOV.UK thingie (not sure of the real brand) Make sure you settle up before Jan 31 otherwise you'll be fined. HMRC are merciless. Get it done mate.
    - gpderetta 6y ago
      I started the return a couple of days ago and the P60 was indeed filled in; I'm pretty sure that it wasn't last year, but I might misremember. The P11 was not, but I don't think I have anything to report as everything is taxed at source for my current employer (I'll double check of course). The pension (Assuming you refer to the private pension scheme) is not filled in and I already know I have to pay some tax on that as I overshoot my allowance. I normally get it done a couple of weeks before the 31 and doesn't take more than a couple of days even with triple checking everything, so I should be quite in time. And yes, TBH filling in the tax return has never been a big problem. It would b e nice to automate a few more things (like computing exchange rates for dividends/capital gains instead of having to look them up) but it is fairly straightforward.

vidarh 6y ago

Most of the problems tend to occur when you are forced to interact with legacy versions of tools that were built prior to the buildout of the new gov.uk. The old sites are all over the place. I think part of the reason gov.uk has been a success is exactly that they were not forced to replace old systems wholesale, but were allowed to build out a platform and methodology that works well and replace public facing services bit by bit.

lucraft 6y ago
I interviewed at a large UK gov Ministry for a technical architect role a couple of years ago and one of their interview questions was: "How would you architect new features on top of a legacy system implemented by an external agency that is hard to work with and has many bugs but we are unable to change in any way for contractual reasons?"
- baq 6y ago
  i'd expect nothing less. only surprise is that there hasn't been any 'hypothetically' here.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  How did you answer? It isn’t a technical problem...
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Sure, it is a technical problem too. It's a technical workaround to a political problem of not being able to touch the other platform. My approach to this has been to embrace, extend, extinguish (yes, that was an intentional reference, sorry): Insert a constrained API "around" the service you can't modify. Change all your services to go via that API instead of direct. Now you can apply the fixes you can to the new layer while finding ways to gradually replace it in parallel. At the same time the new layer provides a constraint: It should be as narrow as you can get away with - creating a "new contract" with the API consumers about what they're actually allowed to do without negotiating with you, and ensure that any expansion of dependencies on the service you can't touch get documented and appropriate attempts made to avoid increasing complexity (it's good to do this in general, but realistically it's easier to get buy-in to enforce in limited cases like this). This intersection of tech with procedures and politics lie at the heart of a lot of technical architecture work. A huge proportion of the work we do is not technically hard in and of itself - it becomes technically hard because of organisational considerations.
- zebnyc 6y ago
  I am curious to know how one would answer to this. Is it related to DDD concepts like maintaining upstream/downstream dependencies, boundary contexts and migrate piecemeal?

gerdesj 6y ago

I've been doing self assessment for 20 years now and it almost fills itself in these days - the P60 stuff and pensions etc do anyway. Getting your car taxed is embarrassingly simple and takes seconds as does checking your car MOT and insurance status. I don't have an accountant for SE and I do my wife's as well. The amount of documentation available is amazing. This is a great example of what's available: https://www.gov.uk/transition https://www.gov.uk/transition . Scroll down to Announcements, hit the first link and you have the full withdrawal agreement in multiple freely open formats. No it not perfect but it is rather good for this user anecdote.

gpderetta 6y ago
I have always had to fill in pension and P60 by hand (not that it is particularly hard); has this changed in the last year? Which reminds me that I need to do the self assesment before the end of the month.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  I think it (P60 and Pension) was filled in last year for me as well. The service is being changed quite quickly but I can imagine the pain behind the scenes. Screens that used to look like the old green/yellow thing are becoming rarer and the front screen has more options. My overall impression is that we have a rather sensible GOV.UK thingie (not sure of the real brand) Make sure you settle up before Jan 31 otherwise you'll be fined. HMRC are merciless. Get it done mate.
  - gpderetta 6y ago
    I started the return a couple of days ago and the P60 was indeed filled in; I'm pretty sure that it wasn't last year, but I might misremember. The P11 was not, but I don't think I have anything to report as everything is taxed at source for my current employer (I'll double check of course). The pension (Assuming you refer to the private pension scheme) is not filled in and I already know I have to pay some tax on that as I overshoot my allowance. I normally get it done a couple of weeks before the 31 and doesn't take more than a couple of days even with triple checking everything, so I should be quite in time. And yes, TBH filling in the tax return has never been a big problem. It would b e nice to automate a few more things (like computing exchange rates for dividends/capital gains instead of having to look them up) but it is fairly straightforward.