> It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you

> It's not THAT infuriating that the product is so thoroughly _NOT_GREAT_, until you find out that the budget for it exceeds by orders of magnitude anything you've ever seen. I once interacted with a private government contractor. They did an adequate job on a project. It worked, and it wasn't terrible. But they billed $5 million for a project that could have been built for $50 thousand, or—once you put up with a drawn-out sales process, endless client meetings and the occasional change request—more like $500,000. The simple fact is that many large organizations, public or private, couldn't do a $50,000 software project. It costs more than that to close the sale and negotiate contracts. As Joel Spolsky pointed out, once you need to put salespeople on airplanes, even shrinkwrap software costs $75,000: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-duckies/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-.... > I have no doubt that many, many private corporations have the exact same problem. (I've seen the inside of the average insurance company, and my god are those places bloated). Yeah, that has often been my experience. Sufficiently large companies tend to be deeply inefficient about small things. Partly this is because they're optimizing for different needs than you might think, and partly because $1 million is basically pocket change if it actually solves a problem. But also, once a company grows beyond a certain size, it operates internally like a centralized command-and-control economy. Internal politics matter far more in the short run than any market feedback. If anything, governments can have a slight advantage if they keep things in-house. Government employees are often slightly more idealistic than their private sector counterparts, and they're definitely paid less. So an organization like the US Digital Service can outperform the original private contractors who built healthcare.gov. The USDS was staffed by idealistic FAANG developers working for the common good at below-market salaries. They did a better job than CGI Federal, the original private contractor.