7 ms·

I have worked with Deloitte on two projects (on clients' side, I would never willingly work for Deloitte). Generally expect them to do absolute minimum necessar

I have worked with Deloitte on two projects (on clients' side, I would never willingly work for Deloitte). Generally expect them to do absolute minimum necessary to meet the contract. The code was obfuscated to ensure support contract. The people employed to write it were not interested in the quality in the slightest but were interested a lot in specifics of the contract.

brundolf 6y ago
Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?
- et-al 6y ago
  There's 18F for the US government, but unfortunately they're limited by government salary caps and other policies.
- offtop5 6y ago
  For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-employees-hit-the-federal-pay-ceiling-in-2020/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e... >But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year. And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector. Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that. It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector. I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qualifications to architect out a whole system. And while we all want to act like we could whip up this entire thing with VueJs in a weekend, pretty sure there's some God forsaken legacy system it needs to hook into. Since most engineers don't want to work with legacy systems for less than market pay, the engineers who end up working on this stuff tend to not be all that great.
      - brundolf 6y ago
        They only have to be better than the Deloitte grifters
        offtop5 6y ago
        The article mentions Florida using Eventbrite. That seems like a much better solution rather than rolling your own.
        brabel 6y ago
        Tell that to the people on this thread trying to justify how 45M is reasonable for a project like this because "software development is just a small part of the process". If a state can use freaking Eventbrite for this, clearly they are wrong.
  - dopylitty 6y ago
    As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms whose sole purpose is to fleece the government. Can you imagine how much better it would feel to work on important and needed systems than working on the 100th food delivery app or yet another social media facism incubator?
    - brundolf 6y ago
      Exactly! That feeling of improving society would go a long way toward balancing out the pain of working on legacy systems
    - deathgrips 6y ago
      If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
    - gunsch 6y ago
      There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about. I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
      - brundolf 6y ago
  - baby 6y ago
    That's actually much more than I imagined o_O and a government job is usually pretty stable as well.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment. TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax." With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly. Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.
    - flurben 6y ago
      As far as federal employees go, making their salaries tax-free would cost the government lost tax revenue. It would also make a lot of voters angry because they still pay taxes, but "those bureaucrats in Washington DC exempted themselves from taxes." I can see the speeches now. Approximately 50% of American politicians are anti-government as an ideology, and use the argument of "cutting overpaid government salaries" as a plank in their economic policy, so having well-paid gov't staff is just "waste" in their minds. As far as teachers go, they are not employed by the federal government. In most states they are county-level employees and the counties obviously do not have authority to dictate federal income tax levels.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      I can't think of a worse solution. Sure, it effectively raises their salary, but it is full of moral pitfalls. It is already outrageous that government employees are exempt from social security taxes.
      - andrewflnr 6y ago
        Uh, what? Former federal employee here. I've got one of my pay stubs in front of me and there is definitely a social security line.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        It is primarily state employees (police & teachers) that are exempt from social security if they have a different state funded pension plan. Take a look at table 2 and chart 1 of this report from the social security administration[1] for some examples of rates in different states. >In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job I find this offensive because one of the main functions of SS is to subsidize the retirement of low earners at the expense of higher earners. As a private citizen, I don't get to opt out of this social obligation just because my 401k gets a better return. Not only that, but as a tax payer, I will be on the hook for bailing out the public employee pension funds when they go belly up. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html
- clintonb 6y ago
  It does: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/. It's my understanding that USDS also bids on projects, but isn't necessarily the go-to team for such work.
- ergocoder 6y ago
  Generally, it's much better for the government to outsource. More competency and reduce corruption. I came from a country where government tries to do all these things in house. It was bad. Paying premium isn't a big problem.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I mean, the main theme of this thread is the existing incompetency and corruption
  - catlifeonmars 6y ago
    Based on the rest of its thread, it looks like the corruption has also been outsourced.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  I'm reminded of a guy that used to go on Leo Laporte's podcast and had a program or joined a program where Silicon Valley tech people join government entities to make their tech and websites better. I'm sure they took massive paycuts to do this but they felt it was their duty, like military service. This guy and others like him are true heroes and patriots to me.
- gunsch 6y ago
  As others have mentioned already, 18F and USDS are in this space. They do some work, but their scope and manpower is limited, and they try to multiply their impact through contracting. Part of that is helping federal agencies write better contracts to be able to source the kind of contractors they want --- ones who think in terms of product development, user research ("build with, not for"), and are using modern software development practices. Bringing in contractors helps them multiply their impact, especially with how difficult hiring people into government is. (and a lot of people in tech simply didn't want to work directly under the Trump administration, which --- as liberal as the tech field tends to lean, seems to be a factor on hiring at 18F and USDS). I work at one of the contractors in the space (Ad Hoc [1]) and get to work with people from USDS every day. Like others have commented here, the government salary ranges are a problem for them to hire enough. Our last COO had been an administrator at OPM, and would say things like "on the government side, I couldn't ever hire the kinds of software developers that we're able to here on the contractor side." [1] https://adhoc.team/ https://adhoc.team/ -- we're hiring, full-time remote!
  - info781 6y ago
    Nothing against your company, but when smaller companies get good long term contracts, they get bought up by larger companies and the good people leave and start new smaller companies.
- test6554 6y ago
  "One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems" How much does it cost to get a qualified person to put up with all that though?
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Lol. How was the code obfuscated? That brings back memories of php obfuscator. What a strange world that was. I think there was even a deobfuscator that tried to rename the variables sensibly, or something.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Well, you can make simple functionalities so baroque that you will not be able to work with them without some kind of notes. It is not easy to define in contract what is sane code.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    But that just sounds like regular big company codebases. I see no difference. At Scottrade, I was horrified to find a 5k or 10k line Date C++ class. They'd copy paste functions to handle each leap year individually. The function names themselves contained the specific year. They also yelled at me for downloading the source code to `touch`. It was nice to get to see the crazy side of software. Everyone was deadpan serious about it too.
    - uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
      Well surely there were tests...
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Nope! They solved it the opposite way. Their bug tracking system consisted of individual customers who called up to report bugs. I.e. Joe Blow would call up and say "Hey, I'm supposed to see 231 shares, but I only see 219 shares." That would result in a bug report. The bug report was that Joe Blow saw that outcome. In other words, the bug report didn't contain anything about the code itself. They had an entire division of support people whose job was to track these bugs, and to fix them. In order to fix the bug, they would manually edit the database, or do whatever was necessary to make sure Joe Blow saw the right value again. But they never changed the code; they weren't programmers. Once Joe Blow was happy, they closed the bug report as "fixed." Therefore, no tests were ever required. It was ... impressive? I think? I couldn't mentally process what I was seeing at the time. But "impressive" is probably the right word. After all, the system worked.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  > They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work? And this is how we get the 737 Max.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    You're right, we should just expect free work from all developers. Because if you want to be a good developer, you have to meet this imaginary bar made up by other developers who want to show off about how "much extra work we do." The point is the ask for the 737 Max wasn't a "plane that doesn't work." It was for a plane that does work. That was the deliverable. It wasn't met. That is not doing the bare minimum.
    - civilized 6y ago
      And this situation is different how? The CDC needed a website that works. Deloitte did not deliver a website that works. If it had, it would not have been abandoned, flushing $44M of work down the drain. You could also apply this weaselly BS to Boeing. Their "ask", if there was one, was to make a plane that customers would buy and that would pass FAA review. Not "a plane that works". No one's contract just says "make an X that works", even though that's what everyone wants. Because an X that works is hard to define. Fundamentally the system depends on honor and trust. Which is why we despise losers that just try to get paid and fuck the customer.
      - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
        They didn't meet the deliverable so they shouldn't be paid. This isn't rocket science. Think.
    - awestroke 6y ago
      Free work from developers? Deloitte got 44 million. Do you think they would get no salary for the extra hours spent on making it not suck?
thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
I too worked with Deloitte. The goal was to get the project signed-off on as quickly as possible because once that is done they get to bill time for maintenance/bugs. QA did not exists.
throwhtrhwthrow 6y ago
throwaway for obvious reasons. I've worked with Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and other big consultancies for a diverse range of reasons (regulation audits, security reviews, staff augmentations, etc.) and the value you get for the money you're paying is pretty insane. I'd say the value you're getting is probably 20% of the price you're paying, and I'm being optimistic. You can get good value if you know the people you're hiring, if you scope your project well, and if you have clear expectations. But let me tell you, nobody knows how to do this, unless they've been on the other side. Now, you don't always have a choice, the expertise is sometimes there, or you need one of the big four to do a prior audit before a real audit from another big four. But be prepared to have a team of OK people who will spend a lot of time producing slides and organize unproductive meetings with lots of other people (including yours) to give out a false sense of "we're making progress here". You'll have to do the PM'ing and be extremely strict with what you want from them, and you'll have to be ready to collaborate heavily. What I mean by this is: don't wait for them to ask questions, you'll have to do most of the work of onboarding them, almost like they're your coworker except that they don't have connections with the folks they need to work with, they don't have access to internal stuff, they don't know how to get there.
- aasasd 6y ago
  Sounds like one should split the system into small parts, order each one as a separate contract and basically micromanage the contractor into delivering the actual thing.
madaxe_again 6y ago
The people doing the development were likely not developers. A particularly common path is studying a random subject at university, doing a law conversion course, failing to get a pupillage or a position with a commercial solicitors, and going to Deloitte as a trainee consultant. There, they put you through a six week course in which you become a developer, and you’re then hired out for £800 a day as a technical expert. Source: literally half the people I went to university with. Fond memories of sitting at the kitchen table and trying to coach my flat mate through unfucking the air ground traffic control system that they were writing for BAA in VB5, in 2005. No idea if it ever went into production.
StrauXX 6y ago
In Austria (at least in the province I am living in) the provincial government does have its own software development departmant. I am currently working with them (for free :)) on a software project of theirs for a class.
bitcharmer 6y ago
I worked on huge projects in telco where big consultancies where a common thing. We had a joke about Accenture and their tactics. Upon being questioned about the quality of the software they delivered they would reply: "There was no requirement that the whole thing should work. We can put in a change request and bill separately". Also - the "no one has ever been fired for hiring IBM" syndrome among the higher management.

brundolf 6y ago

Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?

et-al 6y ago
There's 18F for the US government, but unfortunately they're limited by government salary caps and other policies.
offtop5 6y ago
For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-employees-hit-the-federal-pay-ceiling-in-2020/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e... >But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year. And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector. Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.
- brundolf 6y ago
  That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that. It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector. I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qualifications to architect out a whole system. And while we all want to act like we could whip up this entire thing with VueJs in a weekend, pretty sure there's some God forsaken legacy system it needs to hook into. Since most engineers don't want to work with legacy systems for less than market pay, the engineers who end up working on this stuff tend to not be all that great.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      They only have to be better than the Deloitte grifters
      - offtop5 6y ago
        The article mentions Florida using Eventbrite. That seems like a much better solution rather than rolling your own.
        brabel 6y ago
        Tell that to the people on this thread trying to justify how 45M is reasonable for a project like this because "software development is just a small part of the process". If a state can use freaking Eventbrite for this, clearly they are wrong.
- dopylitty 6y ago
  As someone with a degree in software "engineering" and more than a decade of experience in the industry I'd gladly take a stable government job creating or maintaining important applications that help the government provide high quality and necessary services to people. I would take pride in working on such a system as a vaccine administration management platform. Instead those jobs are doled out to contracting firms whose sole purpose is to fleece the government. Can you imagine how much better it would feel to work on important and needed systems than working on the 100th food delivery app or yet another social media facism incubator?
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Exactly! That feeling of improving society would go a long way toward balancing out the pain of working on legacy systems
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    If you are interested in doing software development for the government, please browse USAjobs.gov or the careers section of any government department/agency you are interested in. It's a pain in the ass to apply and the government will take months to respond to your applications, but if you're highly qualified you will get a call.
  - gunsch 6y ago
    There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition (https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ https://digitalservicescoalition.org/) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of work you talk about. I work for Ad Hoc (one of these companies) on software projects at the VA, and I'm happy to chat with anyone who's interested to hear more about this kind of work. I left a cushy Google job to work on important and needed systems, and it does feel so much better!
    - brundolf 6y ago
- baby 6y ago
  That's actually much more than I imagined o_O and a government job is usually pretty stable as well.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I hear this sort of objection for all sorts of civil-service employment. TBH, I'm surprised we've never seen a proposal of the form "Federal employee salaries are not subject to income tax." With a single line of legislation, that makes all federal job offers immediately 10-35% more competitive, without actually increasing salaries directly. Once you get that as precedent, I could see it being used aggressively as a social tool: "We can't pay a public school teacher more than 60k, but we can pay them 60k tax-free, which is a little more competitive with a 75k private-sector position", for example.
  - flurben 6y ago
    As far as federal employees go, making their salaries tax-free would cost the government lost tax revenue. It would also make a lot of voters angry because they still pay taxes, but "those bureaucrats in Washington DC exempted themselves from taxes." I can see the speeches now. Approximately 50% of American politicians are anti-government as an ideology, and use the argument of "cutting overpaid government salaries" as a plank in their economic policy, so having well-paid gov't staff is just "waste" in their minds. As far as teachers go, they are not employed by the federal government. In most states they are county-level employees and the counties obviously do not have authority to dictate federal income tax levels.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I can't think of a worse solution. Sure, it effectively raises their salary, but it is full of moral pitfalls. It is already outrageous that government employees are exempt from social security taxes.
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      Uh, what? Former federal employee here. I've got one of my pay stubs in front of me and there is definitely a social security line.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        It is primarily state employees (police & teachers) that are exempt from social security if they have a different state funded pension plan. Take a look at table 2 and chart 1 of this report from the social security administration[1] for some examples of rates in different states. >In 2018, one-quarter of state and local government employees—approximately 6.5 million workers—were not covered by Social Security on their current job I find this offensive because one of the main functions of SS is to subsidize the retirement of low earners at the expense of higher earners. As a private citizen, I don't get to opt out of this social obligation just because my 401k gets a better return. Not only that, but as a tax payer, I will be on the hook for bailing out the public employee pension funds when they go belly up. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n3/v80n3p1.html
clintonb 6y ago
It does: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/. It's my understanding that USDS also bids on projects, but isn't necessarily the go-to team for such work.
ergocoder 6y ago
Generally, it's much better for the government to outsource. More competency and reduce corruption. I came from a country where government tries to do all these things in house. It was bad. Paying premium isn't a big problem.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I mean, the main theme of this thread is the existing incompetency and corruption
- catlifeonmars 6y ago
  Based on the rest of its thread, it looks like the corruption has also been outsourced.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
I'm reminded of a guy that used to go on Leo Laporte's podcast and had a program or joined a program where Silicon Valley tech people join government entities to make their tech and websites better. I'm sure they took massive paycuts to do this but they felt it was their duty, like military service. This guy and others like him are true heroes and patriots to me.
gunsch 6y ago
As others have mentioned already, 18F and USDS are in this space. They do some work, but their scope and manpower is limited, and they try to multiply their impact through contracting. Part of that is helping federal agencies write better contracts to be able to source the kind of contractors they want --- ones who think in terms of product development, user research ("build with, not for"), and are using modern software development practices. Bringing in contractors helps them multiply their impact, especially with how difficult hiring people into government is. (and a lot of people in tech simply didn't want to work directly under the Trump administration, which --- as liberal as the tech field tends to lean, seems to be a factor on hiring at 18F and USDS). I work at one of the contractors in the space (Ad Hoc [1]) and get to work with people from USDS every day. Like others have commented here, the government salary ranges are a problem for them to hire enough. Our last COO had been an administrator at OPM, and would say things like "on the government side, I couldn't ever hire the kinds of software developers that we're able to here on the contractor side." [1] https://adhoc.team/ https://adhoc.team/ -- we're hiring, full-time remote!
- info781 6y ago
  Nothing against your company, but when smaller companies get good long term contracts, they get bought up by larger companies and the good people leave and start new smaller companies.
test6554 6y ago
"One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems" How much does it cost to get a qualified person to put up with all that though?

sillysaurusx 6y ago

Lol. How was the code obfuscated? That brings back memories of php obfuscator. What a strange world that was. I think there was even a deobfuscator that tried to rename the variables sensibly, or something.

lmilcin 6y ago
Well, you can make simple functionalities so baroque that you will not be able to work with them without some kind of notes. It is not easy to define in contract what is sane code.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  But that just sounds like regular big company codebases. I see no difference. At Scottrade, I was horrified to find a 5k or 10k line Date C++ class. They'd copy paste functions to handle each leap year individually. The function names themselves contained the specific year. They also yelled at me for downloading the source code to `touch`. It was nice to get to see the crazy side of software. Everyone was deadpan serious about it too.
  - uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 6y ago
    Well surely there were tests...
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      Nope! They solved it the opposite way. Their bug tracking system consisted of individual customers who called up to report bugs. I.e. Joe Blow would call up and say "Hey, I'm supposed to see 231 shares, but I only see 219 shares." That would result in a bug report. The bug report was that Joe Blow saw that outcome. In other words, the bug report didn't contain anything about the code itself. They had an entire division of support people whose job was to track these bugs, and to fix them. In order to fix the bug, they would manually edit the database, or do whatever was necessary to make sure Joe Blow saw the right value again. But they never changed the code; they weren't programmers. Once Joe Blow was happy, they closed the bug report as "fixed." Therefore, no tests were ever required. It was ... impressive? I think? I couldn't mentally process what I was seeing at the time. But "impressive" is probably the right word. After all, the system worked.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?

alasdair_ 6y ago
> They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work? And this is how we get the 737 Max.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  You're right, we should just expect free work from all developers. Because if you want to be a good developer, you have to meet this imaginary bar made up by other developers who want to show off about how "much extra work we do." The point is the ask for the 737 Max wasn't a "plane that doesn't work." It was for a plane that does work. That was the deliverable. It wasn't met. That is not doing the bare minimum.
  - civilized 6y ago
    And this situation is different how? The CDC needed a website that works. Deloitte did not deliver a website that works. If it had, it would not have been abandoned, flushing $44M of work down the drain. You could also apply this weaselly BS to Boeing. Their "ask", if there was one, was to make a plane that customers would buy and that would pass FAA review. Not "a plane that works". No one's contract just says "make an X that works", even though that's what everyone wants. Because an X that works is hard to define. Fundamentally the system depends on honor and trust. Which is why we despise losers that just try to get paid and fuck the customer.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      They didn't meet the deliverable so they shouldn't be paid. This isn't rocket science. Think.
  - awestroke 6y ago
    Free work from developers? Deloitte got 44 million. Do you think they would get no salary for the extra hours spent on making it not suck?

thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago

I too worked with Deloitte. The goal was to get the project signed-off on as quickly as possible because once that is done they get to bill time for maintenance/bugs. QA did not exists.

throwhtrhwthrow 6y ago

throwaway for obvious reasons. I've worked with Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and other big consultancies for a diverse range of reasons (regulation audits, security reviews, staff augmentations, etc.) and the value you get for the money you're paying is pretty insane. I'd say the value you're getting is probably 20% of the price you're paying, and I'm being optimistic. You can get good value if you know the people you're hiring, if you scope your project well, and if you have clear expectations. But let me tell you, nobody knows how to do this, unless they've been on the other side. Now, you don't always have a choice, the expertise is sometimes there, or you need one of the big four to do a prior audit before a real audit from another big four. But be prepared to have a team of OK people who will spend a lot of time producing slides and organize unproductive meetings with lots of other people (including yours) to give out a false sense of "we're making progress here". You'll have to do the PM'ing and be extremely strict with what you want from them, and you'll have to be ready to collaborate heavily. What I mean by this is: don't wait for them to ask questions, you'll have to do most of the work of onboarding them, almost like they're your coworker except that they don't have connections with the folks they need to work with, they don't have access to internal stuff, they don't know how to get there.

aasasd 6y ago
Sounds like one should split the system into small parts, order each one as a separate contract and basically micromanage the contractor into delivering the actual thing.

madaxe_again 6y ago

The people doing the development were likely not developers. A particularly common path is studying a random subject at university, doing a law conversion course, failing to get a pupillage or a position with a commercial solicitors, and going to Deloitte as a trainee consultant. There, they put you through a six week course in which you become a developer, and you’re then hired out for £800 a day as a technical expert. Source: literally half the people I went to university with. Fond memories of sitting at the kitchen table and trying to coach my flat mate through unfucking the air ground traffic control system that they were writing for BAA in VB5, in 2005. No idea if it ever went into production.

StrauXX 6y ago

In Austria (at least in the province I am living in) the provincial government does have its own software development departmant. I am currently working with them (for free :)) on a software project of theirs for a class.

bitcharmer 6y ago

I worked on huge projects in telco where big consultancies where a common thing. We had a joke about Accenture and their tactics. Upon being questioned about the quality of the software they delivered they would reply: "There was no requirement that the whole thing should work. We can put in a change request and bill separately". Also - the "no one has ever been fired for hiring IBM" syndrome among the higher management.