4 ms·

As a sidenote, it's crazy how bad some of the government IT projects are. In the country I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure corruption plays a big role in it, but

by dmos62 5y ago

As a sidenote, it's crazy how bad some of the government IT projects are. In the country I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure corruption plays a big role in it, but even so, you have to be very illiterate in IT for it to not be obvious that the contractor didn't do their job. I guess a lot of the administrators responsible for evaluating the project's status are too old to have grown up with internet and computers around them.

rjzzleep 5y ago
I think there's a lot of corruption there, but it goes beyond that. Government IT consulting is a very exclusive niche that's hard to get into. None of the managers are willing to risk losing an IT contractor/or product no matter how terrible they/it are/is. There are basically two IT choices that they do: 1. Choose a really big expensive company that is in Gartner(they do have the best dinners though, also you get to travel business class to visit them for seminars). 2. Choose someone that they know through somebody. It's quite amazing that Matrix has managed to get as much government traction as it has. I've seen a person not willing to kick out a product where I had to walkthrough the creator of it on a Teamviewer on how to debug his own app in the web inspector, and it was unable to display pdfs if they were in landscape(for years). And everyone knew they were bad, the managers would joke about it. As they say, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. These people are absolutely terrified of making a bad decision that may cost them a promotion in the future.
- dmos62 5y ago
  I'm having a hard time understanding this dynamic. I just can't imagine a professional environment like this. I feel like people involved at all stages should understand that they're doing the wrong thing.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
    They don't have the knowledge / skillset to do the right thing.
    - wil421 5y ago
      Ignorance is bliss in Government IT.
- javajosh 5y ago
  It's not really corruption. It's moral hazard, and its self-reenforcing. The moral hazard is that the people paying for the solution don't make it and don't support it. They make poor decisions based on what they can see and don't know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions about complexity. It's self-reenforcing because the kinds of people who do know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions usually have little interest the work of keeping fundamentally broken systems alive on life support, and their thoughtful improvements will go unnoticed or worse, taken as evidence of incompetence. (I suppose the value proposition of some companies is that they can do both; I have doubts that that has ever happened.)
  - medstrom 5y ago
    In Nassim Taleb's words, the decisionmaker doesn't have "skin in the game" e.g. they won't be punished or shamed when the decision turns out badly.
    - dmos62 5y ago
      Won't they? Won't your peers know what you've done?
      - javajosh 5y ago
        If your job is to allocate money to the actual doers, and they don't get it done, is it the allocator's fault, or the doer's fault? The best case is when you get the authority but no responsibility for failure, which is precisely what many modern American middle-adminstrators do.

by dmos62 5y ago

rjzzleep 5y ago

I think there's a lot of corruption there, but it goes beyond that. Government IT consulting is a very exclusive niche that's hard to get into. None of the managers are willing to risk losing an IT contractor/or product no matter how terrible they/it are/is. There are basically two IT choices that they do: 1. Choose a really big expensive company that is in Gartner(they do have the best dinners though, also you get to travel business class to visit them for seminars). 2. Choose someone that they know through somebody. It's quite amazing that Matrix has managed to get as much government traction as it has. I've seen a person not willing to kick out a product where I had to walkthrough the creator of it on a Teamviewer on how to debug his own app in the web inspector, and it was unable to display pdfs if they were in landscape(for years). And everyone knew they were bad, the managers would joke about it. As they say, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. These people are absolutely terrified of making a bad decision that may cost them a promotion in the future.

dmos62 5y ago
I'm having a hard time understanding this dynamic. I just can't imagine a professional environment like this. I feel like people involved at all stages should understand that they're doing the wrong thing.
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  They don't have the knowledge / skillset to do the right thing.
  - wil421 5y ago
    Ignorance is bliss in Government IT.
javajosh 5y ago
It's not really corruption. It's moral hazard, and its self-reenforcing. The moral hazard is that the people paying for the solution don't make it and don't support it. They make poor decisions based on what they can see and don't know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions about complexity. It's self-reenforcing because the kinds of people who do know enough to ask deeper, relevant questions usually have little interest the work of keeping fundamentally broken systems alive on life support, and their thoughtful improvements will go unnoticed or worse, taken as evidence of incompetence. (I suppose the value proposition of some companies is that they can do both; I have doubts that that has ever happened.)
- medstrom 5y ago
  In Nassim Taleb's words, the decisionmaker doesn't have "skin in the game" e.g. they won't be punished or shamed when the decision turns out badly.
  - dmos62 5y ago
    Won't they? Won't your peers know what you've done?
    - javajosh 5y ago
      If your job is to allocate money to the actual doers, and they don't get it done, is it the allocator's fault, or the doer's fault? The best case is when you get the authority but no responsibility for failure, which is precisely what many modern American middle-adminstrators do.