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When I first started working on software I was fortunate enough to get exposed to working municipal contracts. One example was building out a payment gateway an
by lbrindze 6y ago
When I first started working on software I was fortunate enough to get exposed to working municipal contracts. One example was building out a payment gateway and website for the LA county coroner and medical examiner. This included making a small e-commerce site for their gift shop (I don’t know why they had a gift shop).
A friends father, who was very involved in local government, told me with regards to government work, “failure is unacceptable but indefinite delay is ideal.”
As long as you are in no immediate hurry to get paid, these sorts of local/state gov projects can be quite lucrative and require very little day to day effort to get them done. The hardest part is learning how to navigate the RFP process but it’s really just about reading the rules and proposals posted. The reason government is often overcharged for mediocre software comes down to this deeply flawed procurement process.
- subpixel 6y agoI once looked at a loft for sale in a Midwestern city. The owners were moving to some Latin American paradise, according to the realtor. I spent some time researching and discovered they were a husband and wife team winning contracts for utter shit municipal websites. I recall thinking ‘that can’t last when anyone can build a Wordpress site’ but I may have been quite wrong.
- sjg007 6y agoYeah, good gig if you can get it. If you like hardware you can buy surplus computer equipment from state and municipal governments. These are like i5 dells for $10 or so a machine. You can load them up with 32G of RAM and a 500G SSD and resell them.
- sjg007 6y agoHere's an article about it: http://www.californiacuriosities.com/la-coroners-gift-shop/ http://www.californiacuriosities.com/la-coroners-gift-shop/ The gift shop closed in 2019.