7 ms·

There is so much incompetency in governmental IT/software decisions and software it's actually sad. Is it a product of smart people simply not working in this

by wyck 5y ago

There is so much incompetency in governmental IT/software decisions and software it's actually sad. Is it a product of smart people simply not working in this sector or corruption?. It seems from the outside to be filled with imbeciles masquerading as administrators. We need to somehow make the government way more accountable, if only there was an organization that could do that, we could call it the media.

Swizec 5y ago
Government IT: pays government salaries Private sector: pays more than lawyers and surgeons even if yiu never graduated college Gee I wonder where smart ambitious people will go
- bierjunge 5y ago
  Exactly. I dropped out of university, so I can't be hired by any German agency/office, because a degree is a hard requirement. But I can work for them as a consultant asking for more than two-three times the money... The salary is a joke, I've made their base salary, which requires at least bachelors degree, as part time working student in private sector. There is only one reason to work for the government in Germany and it's called "Verbeamtung" (a legal state where you are not employed, but appointed for government service, it's almost impossible to get fired and you pay little to no taxes, etc.), but the whole office politics and long decision making channels are awful (source: me working for a company owned by the local government years ago).
  - nkmnz 5y ago
    Agree with everything, except for the point about taxes. Income tax for employees, state officials („Beamte“) and self employed people in Germany is exactly the same regarding the tax rates. The difference is social insurance, especially pensions and health insurance.
    - dathinab 5y ago
      And pensions, and health insurance, state officials (Beamte) get a (non small part) part of the health insurance payed by the state (at least that was the case in many state official jobs until recently). When you get old and had a not supper high paying job this can easily be as if you had gotten 50%-100% more salery!! At the same time they (state officials) complain they get to little. It's completely stupid. AND at the same time non "Beamte" state officials do not get any such benefits, nor especially good pensions or reasonable pay or absurd employment protections(1) or even a proper working contract... (1): If you are a "ver_beamte_ter" state official it's close to impossible to get fired as long as you don't idk. commit some serve crime (and a few other special cases). So you are not getting any work done because you don't care anyone, no problem keep your job. You mess up all your work, ok you still have a job. You working moral degraded to a degree you are basically unemployable and still you have a full paycheck every moth and keep your job. Through besides serve crimes there are a few things which can cost you your job, but they are easy to avoid. Anyway this doesn't meant there are not honest, proper employees in such positions it's just very hard for them to keep their motivation.
      - nkmnz 5y ago
        To be fair: German employee protection is so strong, it's almost impossible for anyone to get fired from any company bigger than 10 employees for reasons other than committing crimes or felonies, as long as the company cannot prove that they have to let people go due to bad overall business. Even then, as an employer, you cannot simply fire the underachievers, but you have to negotiate with the works council to be able to keep the youngest, highest performers, because they have the least protection and have to fired first...
        polypodiopsi 5y ago
        Which is exactly how it should be, no? Or do you favour kickin someone in their 50s out who has worked at the place for the last 20 years and will have a super hard time to find another job no matter how hard they try, so that their only option is being unemployed and to rely on social security?
  - dathinab 5y ago
    "Verbeamtung" which you basically won't have any chance of getting in most German states in a IT related job even if you litterally save their ass. The only way to do money there is by having a position where you can make decisions and then twist requirements for "external tasks" so that "your" company has a good chance to get it. Worse if you don't twist requirements the job is still most likely going to a partially incompetent scam company due to how stupid the whole process it...
- tetha 5y ago
  Additionally, well. the BKA, similar to the FBI, looks for security experts. However, since they would be employed by the BKA, they have to go through mandatory physical exams and drug tests. That's just dumb. I'd be able and interested to do that work, but I'm medically unable and not allowed to do that test. So that's that topic done. Can't do security due to asthma.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  People always wonder why our government often sucks so hard at implementing stuff. Easy solution: 1. Pay fewer people more money 2. Reinstitute civil service exams I guess this is politically impossible?
- mpyne 5y ago
  So this might be an element of the problem, but having been in government for 17 years (and last 5 dealing with IT), I'm not even sure this is a top 3 problem. Against all odds, the government manages to recruit and retain people who can do good work. The larger problem is that government seems designed to make it impossible for IT talent to actually apply their talent. Now I understand why one of Grace Hopper's most famous quotes in the Navy was "it is better to beg forgiveness, than to ask permission".
stinkytaco 5y ago
At least in the US, some of it is the vagaries of government acquisitions. The requisition process is one that works fairly well for services and products that are established and largely interchangeable, but is more difficult for something that's either emerging or complex. So it's fairly straightforward to say "I require a piece of construction equipment that does something" and then go view a few off-the-shelf options and pick the best price. But for software and services, especially things that don't exist, the existing requisition process doesn't work well. You're required to plan very far ahead in a market that moves quickly. By the time you get to bids, the requirements have likely changed, but it might be too late to go back and change requisition without going through an approval process again. It also requires you boil down a process into a series of atomized pieces that can be scored so you've got a clear paper-trail of the acquisitions process. It's a system that benefits vendors that can manage the red tape that's there to prevent corruption.
andrew_v4 5y ago
It's actually "accountability" that's a big part of the problem. Government procurement is so focused on the appearance of fairness and money saving that all other goals, like actually getting something that works, take a back seat. You end up with over-specified requirements that remove the possibility of innovative or creative solutions. Providers are treated like a commodity, where it is assumed that all will do the same job, and cost is the only real negotiation point, maybe with some kind of scoring grid against the over-specified requirements thrown in. And the procurement decisions are made by procurement officers who are not the actual users of what is being bought (in the name of objectivity). So what happens, on a good day, is that the operational users in the purchasing department work with the preferred vendor to "wire" the RFP to reflect the scope or work that is wanted and add requirements (e.g. years of very specific experience, past projects) that heavily favor the preferred vendor. At least this way the department may get something they want, thought it obviously can be gamed. Worse though is that many contracts just go to lowest cost staffing firms that are optimized to comply with government procurement requirements and provide the minimum set of bodies that meet those requirements, usually former government folks rented back, plus some low cost IT resources, that are there to execute to the letter of what the government has over-specified, usually something that wont actually work as written. This is why so much government procurement is a failure by any objective measure. What I have seen work is when a vendor provides a credible unsolicited pitch to a known problem at a fixed cost, and the relevant departments are forced to decide if it makes sense. In Canada we had a major one like that a few years ago, the outcome was great for the department that needed it, but careers were destroyed in the process as politicians and their incumbent friends pushed back to try and stop it.
- metanonsense 5y ago
  Last week we lost a bid for a government contract. That's nothing unusual but I almost laughed when they described how they reached that conclusion. They weighted price against quality at a ratio of 80 to 20. I mean: really?
  - g_p 5y ago
    This is fairly standard, sadly, and is why Government struggles to deliver, especially on IT and similar "intangibles" type contracts. The same issues happen in any other procurement activity that is required to rigorously follow a specific process due to spending public money, or bill-payer money of a regulated monopoly etc. In short, you need large numbers of people involved to avoid "corruption" (irrespective of the actual level of such risk), and this means you end up less flexible and less able to buy what's needed. Weighting price by 80% is common, as nobody wants to be seen to deliver "poor value for money to the tax-payer". Hence the cheapest bid almost always wins, as nobody wants to have to stand up and explain why they didn't pick the cheapest bid. There's a whole separate issue in how to handle "too cheap" bids (i.e. where you under-bid on the initial work, knowing you can get technical lock-in and be able to win future contracts uncontested, and turn those lucrative), but this is still an issue - see how the large outsourcers or consultancies do this regularly, and end up winning renewals on basis of "necessity". There's an art to writing a winning (cheap) tender, then staffing it with people who rigorously enforce the scope back onto the Government client, and force every single change through an expensive change process. That's the business model many follow, and it delivers far poorer value for money in the long run. But the headline price was cheaper, so they'll still get selected...
dukeofdoom 5y ago
Politicians operate by building support and making money for their backers. If you are too efficient, and leave no crumbs, you will quickly lose support. Being a messy eater will get you much further. If you piss of enough tech billionaires, look no further than the last election to see what happens.
- virbtb 5y ago
  I have interacted with a level of the US DoD that is far removed from actual politicians. The situation there is closer to what others described: a pervasive, penny wise and pound foolish fear of being seen to spend money. It really affects everything: an entire professional workforce hired at well below market salary, wasted man-hours due to restrictions on equipment purchases, frequent reorgs to shuffle budgets around, etc. If this is anything like that, I bet they gave this to the cheapest bidder without consideration of much else.
foepys 5y ago
Weirdly enough, the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), Germany's cyber security authority, is actually very good and has very competent security experts. I bet the officials never consulted them about Luca.
- g_p 5y ago
  I've seen authorities like this "not consulted" deliberately, on the basis that there's a more expedient need for the product, than for the product to be secure. If the experience of the procuring department is that "BSI finds everything is insecure", then you procure without letting BSI know or have a say in it, and then you look good for getting the procurement completed. Getting cross-department cooperation on anything complex tends to be the exception rather than the rule - it's much easier for everyone to make the same (avoidable) mistakes over and over again, apparently, than it is to accept the process doesn't work and fix it. "Intangible" non-functional requirements are simply something that don't translate well into the procurement world, and are the first thing dropped to try and lower the "headline price". Being secure enough to get past BSI is a cost that your competitor likely won't be factoring in.
  - themulticaster 5y ago
    > If the experience of the procuring department is that "BSI finds everything is insecure", then you procure without letting BSI know or have a say in it, and then you look good for getting the procurement completed. Sounds plausible. Especially looking at years of (German) data protection officials recommending against using Windows 10/Office 365 in government agencies, followed by officials explaining that only Microsoft's products are able to fulfill their "extremely complicated requirements". I'm not entirely convinced that only Windows 10 has the necessary features for registering a vehicle title...
    - g_p 5y ago
      Of course it doesn't! I've yet to meet a procurement team that actually understands what they are buying. Companies like Microsoft focus heavily on "training" and "awareness" of their products and solutions - pure slideware, but speaking the right language. At enterprise-scale, I must concede that Microsoft have a really sleek sales pitch. Group Policy in AD offers a level of "managed desktop" that a low-pay, mid-skill sysadmin can operate. That lets you set and enforce "policies", and they get enforced on the computers, and this is something that entirely non-technical senior managers can understand and feel confident in. Any OS could be used to register a vehicle title, but MS' option gives you a fleet of relatively cheap and accessible talent with an "official certification" (MCSP or whatever it has become) - governments love certifications, as it helps them de-risk things they don't understand. The clever enterprise vendors understand this, and try to ensure the market is awash with "their people". It's probably controversial to say, but governments love technology that is able to be run (by-design) by hiring mediocre people to run it. Windows Server with a shiny GUI to edit group policies and apply updates hits that spot for many organisations. I wouldn't be surprised to find the "extremely complicated requirements" for the vehicle registration government agency are the ability to run some (procured) proprietary endpoint protection client (which probably runs everything it sees unsandboxed, as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM [1]), and enforce a whole host of client-side restrictions (which could easily be network-layer) to prevent people using personal email on managed devices. [1] https://www.recon.cx/2018/brussels/resources/slides/RECON-BRX-2018-Reverse-Engineering-Windows-Defender-s-JavaScript-Engine.pdf https://www.recon.cx/2018/brussels/resources/slides/RECON-BR... like Windows Defender did (!)
varispeed 5y ago
> There is so much incompetency in governmental IT/software decisions and software it's actually sad. Most likely because a company with lowest bid wins or a company that has connections with government, so they get selected based on friendships rather than competence. Then such company typically sends least experienced developers working for pittance and they hope project will last long enough that it gets scrapped before it gets completed, so they will not be held accountable for anything.
m463 5y ago
If you were a top computer person (software, security, IT, etc)... emphasis on top... would you want to work for a government? Would they value you?
Krasnol 5y ago
I know one even worse: health IT. The prices for crappy software/hardware solutions are mind boggling. I guess this is how it is if you just can afford it.
- vbsteven 5y ago
  Don’t forget that pretty much all software that touches medical data will have to go through various approval and regulatory processes. Which sometimes take up even more time than actually writing the software. Hence high costs in this industry.
  - Krasnol 5y ago
    It is true for actual patient touching software/hardware but it doesn't stop there. If the licence for a single scanner the lady on the registration uses to scan your referral sheet is 500€, than it's clear that this is a "because we can" price and not something which would have some real life connection.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Is it a product of smart people simply not working in this sector or corruption? Depends on the country/jurisdiction. This reminds me of a story: college career fair is held in January. Government is there and takes resumes. Candidates start getting callbacks for government positions in late April. Do I even have to explain that those still available late April for the summer maybe were not... the sharpest tools in the shed?
salawat 5y ago
I turned down a contracting opportunity that would have been exceedingly lucrative for me because the contractor wanted me to take liberties with what I've done all in the name of greasing RFP's for government procurement. Was initially stoked and honored to be considered, but the longer I thought about it, the more uncomfortable and heavy the thought of how it all worked started to sour me to the entire idea. Never realized how pervasive the whole practice was til then. Thought it was a rumor or story... Turns out...
nikanj 5y ago
Due to various reasons, government IT jobs pay a fraction of private sector jobs. So they tend to have slim pickings when it comes to hiring skilled people.

by wyck 5y ago

Swizec 5y ago

Government IT: pays government salaries Private sector: pays more than lawyers and surgeons even if yiu never graduated college Gee I wonder where smart ambitious people will go

bierjunge 5y ago
Exactly. I dropped out of university, so I can't be hired by any German agency/office, because a degree is a hard requirement. But I can work for them as a consultant asking for more than two-three times the money... The salary is a joke, I've made their base salary, which requires at least bachelors degree, as part time working student in private sector. There is only one reason to work for the government in Germany and it's called "Verbeamtung" (a legal state where you are not employed, but appointed for government service, it's almost impossible to get fired and you pay little to no taxes, etc.), but the whole office politics and long decision making channels are awful (source: me working for a company owned by the local government years ago).
- nkmnz 5y ago
  Agree with everything, except for the point about taxes. Income tax for employees, state officials („Beamte“) and self employed people in Germany is exactly the same regarding the tax rates. The difference is social insurance, especially pensions and health insurance.
  - dathinab 5y ago
    And pensions, and health insurance, state officials (Beamte) get a (non small part) part of the health insurance payed by the state (at least that was the case in many state official jobs until recently). When you get old and had a not supper high paying job this can easily be as if you had gotten 50%-100% more salery!! At the same time they (state officials) complain they get to little. It's completely stupid. AND at the same time non "Beamte" state officials do not get any such benefits, nor especially good pensions or reasonable pay or absurd employment protections(1) or even a proper working contract... (1): If you are a "ver_beamte_ter" state official it's close to impossible to get fired as long as you don't idk. commit some serve crime (and a few other special cases). So you are not getting any work done because you don't care anyone, no problem keep your job. You mess up all your work, ok you still have a job. You working moral degraded to a degree you are basically unemployable and still you have a full paycheck every moth and keep your job. Through besides serve crimes there are a few things which can cost you your job, but they are easy to avoid. Anyway this doesn't meant there are not honest, proper employees in such positions it's just very hard for them to keep their motivation.
    - nkmnz 5y ago
      To be fair: German employee protection is so strong, it's almost impossible for anyone to get fired from any company bigger than 10 employees for reasons other than committing crimes or felonies, as long as the company cannot prove that they have to let people go due to bad overall business. Even then, as an employer, you cannot simply fire the underachievers, but you have to negotiate with the works council to be able to keep the youngest, highest performers, because they have the least protection and have to fired first...
      - polypodiopsi 5y ago
        Which is exactly how it should be, no? Or do you favour kickin someone in their 50s out who has worked at the place for the last 20 years and will have a super hard time to find another job no matter how hard they try, so that their only option is being unemployed and to rely on social security?
- dathinab 5y ago
  "Verbeamtung" which you basically won't have any chance of getting in most German states in a IT related job even if you litterally save their ass. The only way to do money there is by having a position where you can make decisions and then twist requirements for "external tasks" so that "your" company has a good chance to get it. Worse if you don't twist requirements the job is still most likely going to a partially incompetent scam company due to how stupid the whole process it...
tetha 5y ago
Additionally, well. the BKA, similar to the FBI, looks for security experts. However, since they would be employed by the BKA, they have to go through mandatory physical exams and drug tests. That's just dumb. I'd be able and interested to do that work, but I'm medically unable and not allowed to do that test. So that's that topic done. Can't do security due to asthma.
whimsicalism 5y ago
People always wonder why our government often sucks so hard at implementing stuff. Easy solution: 1. Pay fewer people more money 2. Reinstitute civil service exams I guess this is politically impossible?
mpyne 5y ago
So this might be an element of the problem, but having been in government for 17 years (and last 5 dealing with IT), I'm not even sure this is a top 3 problem. Against all odds, the government manages to recruit and retain people who can do good work. The larger problem is that government seems designed to make it impossible for IT talent to actually apply their talent. Now I understand why one of Grace Hopper's most famous quotes in the Navy was "it is better to beg forgiveness, than to ask permission".

stinkytaco 5y ago

At least in the US, some of it is the vagaries of government acquisitions. The requisition process is one that works fairly well for services and products that are established and largely interchangeable, but is more difficult for something that's either emerging or complex. So it's fairly straightforward to say "I require a piece of construction equipment that does something" and then go view a few off-the-shelf options and pick the best price. But for software and services, especially things that don't exist, the existing requisition process doesn't work well. You're required to plan very far ahead in a market that moves quickly. By the time you get to bids, the requirements have likely changed, but it might be too late to go back and change requisition without going through an approval process again. It also requires you boil down a process into a series of atomized pieces that can be scored so you've got a clear paper-trail of the acquisitions process. It's a system that benefits vendors that can manage the red tape that's there to prevent corruption.

andrew_v4 5y ago

It's actually "accountability" that's a big part of the problem. Government procurement is so focused on the appearance of fairness and money saving that all other goals, like actually getting something that works, take a back seat. You end up with over-specified requirements that remove the possibility of innovative or creative solutions. Providers are treated like a commodity, where it is assumed that all will do the same job, and cost is the only real negotiation point, maybe with some kind of scoring grid against the over-specified requirements thrown in. And the procurement decisions are made by procurement officers who are not the actual users of what is being bought (in the name of objectivity). So what happens, on a good day, is that the operational users in the purchasing department work with the preferred vendor to "wire" the RFP to reflect the scope or work that is wanted and add requirements (e.g. years of very specific experience, past projects) that heavily favor the preferred vendor. At least this way the department may get something they want, thought it obviously can be gamed. Worse though is that many contracts just go to lowest cost staffing firms that are optimized to comply with government procurement requirements and provide the minimum set of bodies that meet those requirements, usually former government folks rented back, plus some low cost IT resources, that are there to execute to the letter of what the government has over-specified, usually something that wont actually work as written. This is why so much government procurement is a failure by any objective measure. What I have seen work is when a vendor provides a credible unsolicited pitch to a known problem at a fixed cost, and the relevant departments are forced to decide if it makes sense. In Canada we had a major one like that a few years ago, the outcome was great for the department that needed it, but careers were destroyed in the process as politicians and their incumbent friends pushed back to try and stop it.

metanonsense 5y ago
Last week we lost a bid for a government contract. That's nothing unusual but I almost laughed when they described how they reached that conclusion. They weighted price against quality at a ratio of 80 to 20. I mean: really?
- g_p 5y ago
  This is fairly standard, sadly, and is why Government struggles to deliver, especially on IT and similar "intangibles" type contracts. The same issues happen in any other procurement activity that is required to rigorously follow a specific process due to spending public money, or bill-payer money of a regulated monopoly etc. In short, you need large numbers of people involved to avoid "corruption" (irrespective of the actual level of such risk), and this means you end up less flexible and less able to buy what's needed. Weighting price by 80% is common, as nobody wants to be seen to deliver "poor value for money to the tax-payer". Hence the cheapest bid almost always wins, as nobody wants to have to stand up and explain why they didn't pick the cheapest bid. There's a whole separate issue in how to handle "too cheap" bids (i.e. where you under-bid on the initial work, knowing you can get technical lock-in and be able to win future contracts uncontested, and turn those lucrative), but this is still an issue - see how the large outsourcers or consultancies do this regularly, and end up winning renewals on basis of "necessity". There's an art to writing a winning (cheap) tender, then staffing it with people who rigorously enforce the scope back onto the Government client, and force every single change through an expensive change process. That's the business model many follow, and it delivers far poorer value for money in the long run. But the headline price was cheaper, so they'll still get selected...

dukeofdoom 5y ago

Politicians operate by building support and making money for their backers. If you are too efficient, and leave no crumbs, you will quickly lose support. Being a messy eater will get you much further. If you piss of enough tech billionaires, look no further than the last election to see what happens.

virbtb 5y ago
I have interacted with a level of the US DoD that is far removed from actual politicians. The situation there is closer to what others described: a pervasive, penny wise and pound foolish fear of being seen to spend money. It really affects everything: an entire professional workforce hired at well below market salary, wasted man-hours due to restrictions on equipment purchases, frequent reorgs to shuffle budgets around, etc. If this is anything like that, I bet they gave this to the cheapest bidder without consideration of much else.

foepys 5y ago

Weirdly enough, the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), Germany's cyber security authority, is actually very good and has very competent security experts. I bet the officials never consulted them about Luca.

g_p 5y ago
I've seen authorities like this "not consulted" deliberately, on the basis that there's a more expedient need for the product, than for the product to be secure. If the experience of the procuring department is that "BSI finds everything is insecure", then you procure without letting BSI know or have a say in it, and then you look good for getting the procurement completed. Getting cross-department cooperation on anything complex tends to be the exception rather than the rule - it's much easier for everyone to make the same (avoidable) mistakes over and over again, apparently, than it is to accept the process doesn't work and fix it. "Intangible" non-functional requirements are simply something that don't translate well into the procurement world, and are the first thing dropped to try and lower the "headline price". Being secure enough to get past BSI is a cost that your competitor likely won't be factoring in.
- themulticaster 5y ago
  > If the experience of the procuring department is that "BSI finds everything is insecure", then you procure without letting BSI know or have a say in it, and then you look good for getting the procurement completed. Sounds plausible. Especially looking at years of (German) data protection officials recommending against using Windows 10/Office 365 in government agencies, followed by officials explaining that only Microsoft's products are able to fulfill their "extremely complicated requirements". I'm not entirely convinced that only Windows 10 has the necessary features for registering a vehicle title...
  - g_p 5y ago
    Of course it doesn't! I've yet to meet a procurement team that actually understands what they are buying. Companies like Microsoft focus heavily on "training" and "awareness" of their products and solutions - pure slideware, but speaking the right language. At enterprise-scale, I must concede that Microsoft have a really sleek sales pitch. Group Policy in AD offers a level of "managed desktop" that a low-pay, mid-skill sysadmin can operate. That lets you set and enforce "policies", and they get enforced on the computers, and this is something that entirely non-technical senior managers can understand and feel confident in. Any OS could be used to register a vehicle title, but MS' option gives you a fleet of relatively cheap and accessible talent with an "official certification" (MCSP or whatever it has become) - governments love certifications, as it helps them de-risk things they don't understand. The clever enterprise vendors understand this, and try to ensure the market is awash with "their people". It's probably controversial to say, but governments love technology that is able to be run (by-design) by hiring mediocre people to run it. Windows Server with a shiny GUI to edit group policies and apply updates hits that spot for many organisations. I wouldn't be surprised to find the "extremely complicated requirements" for the vehicle registration government agency are the ability to run some (procured) proprietary endpoint protection client (which probably runs everything it sees unsandboxed, as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM [1]), and enforce a whole host of client-side restrictions (which could easily be network-layer) to prevent people using personal email on managed devices. [1] https://www.recon.cx/2018/brussels/resources/slides/RECON-BRX-2018-Reverse-Engineering-Windows-Defender-s-JavaScript-Engine.pdf https://www.recon.cx/2018/brussels/resources/slides/RECON-BR... like Windows Defender did (!)

varispeed 5y ago

> There is so much incompetency in governmental IT/software decisions and software it's actually sad. Most likely because a company with lowest bid wins or a company that has connections with government, so they get selected based on friendships rather than competence. Then such company typically sends least experienced developers working for pittance and they hope project will last long enough that it gets scrapped before it gets completed, so they will not be held accountable for anything.

m463 5y ago

If you were a top computer person (software, security, IT, etc)... emphasis on top... would you want to work for a government? Would they value you?

Krasnol 5y ago

I know one even worse: health IT. The prices for crappy software/hardware solutions are mind boggling. I guess this is how it is if you just can afford it.

vbsteven 5y ago
Don’t forget that pretty much all software that touches medical data will have to go through various approval and regulatory processes. Which sometimes take up even more time than actually writing the software. Hence high costs in this industry.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  It is true for actual patient touching software/hardware but it doesn't stop there. If the licence for a single scanner the lady on the registration uses to scan your referral sheet is 500€, than it's clear that this is a "because we can" price and not something which would have some real life connection.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Is it a product of smart people simply not working in this sector or corruption? Depends on the country/jurisdiction. This reminds me of a story: college career fair is held in January. Government is there and takes resumes. Candidates start getting callbacks for government positions in late April. Do I even have to explain that those still available late April for the summer maybe were not... the sharpest tools in the shed?

salawat 5y ago

I turned down a contracting opportunity that would have been exceedingly lucrative for me because the contractor wanted me to take liberties with what I've done all in the name of greasing RFP's for government procurement. Was initially stoked and honored to be considered, but the longer I thought about it, the more uncomfortable and heavy the thought of how it all worked started to sour me to the entire idea. Never realized how pervasive the whole practice was til then. Thought it was a rumor or story... Turns out...

nikanj 5y ago

Due to various reasons, government IT jobs pay a fraction of private sector jobs. So they tend to have slim pickings when it comes to hiring skilled people.