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Hiring DBA or a developer for a school is extremely inefficient use of the budget. School IT must be standardized and automated to the point where you only nee

Hiring DBA or a developer for a school is extremely inefficient use of the budget. School IT must be standardized and automated to the point where you only need 2 sysadmins and few more first line support people per 50-100 schools to run operations and 4-5 companies developing school management systems for the entire national market, with standardized interoperability.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
That standardization and automation you're talking about costs money too. Schools deal with technical debt on the IT infra level much like SaaS companies do. Of course, you should be able to cut a $129k/yr DBA if you just spend the millions needed to streamline the IT systems.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  Simple search shows that there are 130 000 schools in the USA. Spending 10M to develop reasonable IT standards and 120M more on compliant software is just $1000 per school. And this is not a military software, it can actually be developed offshore by decent engineers earning half of that DBA salary (that is, you get 2000 _man-years_ of work for those money).
gamerDude 5y ago
I work with school districts and there are these companies. And they are absolutely atrocious. And they make it difficult to transfer. So schools are somewhat stuck in the old way. Literally every district level person hates the software, but they can't change it.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  This is where government should be able to help with regulation. Nobody should be able to enter or stay on the market without ensuring interoperability, security and accessibility and without transferring certain rights to customers. I’m pretty sure the market will remain attractive for business even with the open source requirement.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    America recently had an administration that prided itself on killing two pieces of regulation for each piece it added. There's a strong social issue with even bringing up the R word right now.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

That standardization and automation you're talking about costs money too. Schools deal with technical debt on the IT infra level much like SaaS companies do. Of course, you should be able to cut a $129k/yr DBA if you just spend the millions needed to streamline the IT systems.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
Simple search shows that there are 130 000 schools in the USA. Spending 10M to develop reasonable IT standards and 120M more on compliant software is just $1000 per school. And this is not a military software, it can actually be developed offshore by decent engineers earning half of that DBA salary (that is, you get 2000 _man-years_ of work for those money).

gamerDude 5y ago

I work with school districts and there are these companies. And they are absolutely atrocious. And they make it difficult to transfer. So schools are somewhat stuck in the old way. Literally every district level person hates the software, but they can't change it.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
This is where government should be able to help with regulation. Nobody should be able to enter or stay on the market without ensuring interoperability, security and accessibility and without transferring certain rights to customers. I’m pretty sure the market will remain attractive for business even with the open source requirement.
- munk-a 5y ago
  America recently had an administration that prided itself on killing two pieces of regulation for each piece it added. There's a strong social issue with even bringing up the R word right now.