6 ms·

This way more serious than a 'huge disappointment'. The platform seemed to be based on some weird 'forms' based application builder when it was released ten ye

by mianos 4y ago

This way more serious than a 'huge disappointment'. The platform seemed to be based on some weird 'forms' based application builder when it was released ten years ago. It is flakey as hell. Ugly I can deal with, we have ebay and it still works fine, but even the most basic things you would expect, for example when you press tab the cursor to follow the order of forms on the page, does not work. Often when you submit a form the focus ends up on some text field. The integration with other services, such as Medicare, barely work. I have spent endless calls on the phone to near useless support staff trying to get emails reset for old mother. The support staff are friendly but don't seem to have any ability to do anything but reset things that take several hours to complete. The tax and business functionality is completely senseless. They got the paper forms designed in the 50s for batch mainframes and coded them into web forms. You have to do things like copy the same value into multiple fields marker T8 and T2. The instructions say just that: "Copy the value from T8 to T2". If you don't it fails. The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants. I work here in Sydney and I know, from first hand experience working with them, these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers. The odd technical person they have is spread across so many projects they are pretty much useless. They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything.

volcanok 4y ago
>these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers. This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing. I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.
- n-e-w 4y ago
  > The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing This observation is absolutely spot on. An ignored element of meritocracy is visibility -- and, perhaps, as you suggest, inertia. And then we end up back at the black hole of designing the 'right' incentive schemes... sigh
- flukus 4y ago
  > how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? You don't. There's an inverse effect where you don't really want the clients that go for these big consulting companies because there's just as much crap on their end and they'll drown your skilled team in bureaucratic nonsense. You want the smaller clients where your technical skills complement their domain knowledge. There's still a lot of marketing and management, but the people that actually do things can talk to each other.
denkmoon 4y ago
>The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants. Just so we're all clear here, this is by design.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Why do you think this is? The UK central gov is a notable exception, (if you exclude the corruption with track and trace) why might that be?
  - ecdavis 4y ago
    > Why do you think this is? Successive Australian governments since the early 90s have expanded public service outsourcing dramatically. Here's a comprehensive discussion from the early 00s: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0001/01CIB18#Value https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart... The basic argument is that competition reduces costs and improves quality, therefore we should introduce competition into the provision of services to government.
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    The stated reason: Outsourcing improves efficiency and decreases costs. The real reason: It provides a mechanism for political kickbacks, vendor lock-in, and shifting blame.
throwaway897987 4y ago
I currently work in NSW Health. The quality of what we deliver is to the bottom. Millions of dollars spent on project that have 0 unit test, 0 integration test where we as developers don't have any ability to talk to users. Every piece of code I see has inconsistent style with nobody bothering to write clean code. I am trying hard to bring more best practices and less cow boy programming but this might be a lost cause if you're not a professional politician. Everytime I hear my wife talking me about budget cut in her hospital as a nurse, I cringe of the absurd waste that happen on the application development side I'm involve with. Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-toolkit/design-system/component-library https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool... Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with
- seibelj 4y ago
  Well when you work for the government you never see a dime for improving things, and as a leader you get more prestige and promotions by having bigger budgets and head count, so all of the incentives are misaligned.
- robbiep 4y ago
  You're in eHealth NSW or Ministry? reach out for a chat. We could have an interesting conversation (platform deployed in 10 of the LHDs)
  - djbusby 4y ago
    Wild this connection is happening on HN and not some internal water-cooler system where teams could work together.
    - phs318u 4y ago
      Many years ago I did some consulting at Telstra and I needed a billing module for their upcoming online gaming platform. Another division had almost the exact thing I needed. I asked my stakeholder if we could reach out and talk to those folks, get a copy of what they'd done and implement with few changes. He almost laughed out loud at the suggestion and told me it would just be far easier to a new one from scratch. Internal barriers are sometimes far greater than external ones.
throwaway-aogS8 4y ago
> They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything. Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.
- herodotuscat 4y ago
  Not true. I worked for large multi-national contractor on a current Australian government project. 90% offshore "talent". Most of the time these employees actually had no previous work experience; just some training offshore and then projects on their CV were a complete fabrication. I'm assuming the contracting company does this on purpose so they can charge at a much higher rate.
  - angry_octet 4y ago
    The contractor employs the off shore workers, not the Government, but the problem bis that the people who sign off on the plan of work have little to no experience. And why would you continue working for the Government when you could make 50% more even working for a dogshit company like Accenture?
- girvo 4y ago
  Most of it. Some of the Australian contracting companies some government projects are handed to use external contractors themselves to varying extents. Though I do believe it isn't that common as IIRC most contracts explicitly disallow it.
hnick 4y ago
There was also a pretty basic SSO security issue a few years back, and I tried and tried and could not find anyone to report it to beyond regular customer service. Maybe they've fixed it but basically you click to look at tax stuff, it takes you to ATO online services, you click back to mygov then sign out. Sign into another account and click and now you're looking at the original person's tax stuff since it's still signed in. Not a problem for myself and my wife, but potentially an issue for abusive relationships or shared resources like a library computer.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  The experience of many reporting security issues to the Australian government is to be harassed, so I'm sure many such issues have been picked up by people and not reported out of fear or just not being willing to deal with the drama. One wonders how much this applies even to the developers.
  - hnick 4y ago
    Yeah having worked in a big company or two, "you find it you own it" is a real issue. Easier to keep your head down when you know it'll be an 8-month back-and-forth meeting-fest to fix a basic issue.
    - mianos 4y ago
      Another similar issue is, if you see a huge problem that will take lots of time to fix, and, if you take it on, your timesheets don't have enough time on the other approved new work codes. For this you will eventually be punished in the corporate way, sidelined, no promotion, no pay rise (.5%) and assignment to failed projects where anyone else who worked on them has long gone. The net result of this is a wasteland of rubbish as far as the eye can see.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
smackeyacky 4y ago
I think this is all a bit harsh. Compared to having to front up to the tax office or Centrelink or (in NSW) the RTA to do things, MyGov and the Service NSW system are a modern miracle. You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny. However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Sounds like a classic government IT project failure. They basically codified their internal Kafka-esk bureaucracy in UI form and projected their collective incompetence by insisting the project must be built exactly according to their (wrong & incoherent) requirements. I can imagine the long documents. This is classic waterfall. They would have insisted on that even. The project was doomed as soon as they started writing those documents. So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better. Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done. The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.
- gamelodge 4y ago
  Exactly this… They are not willing to invest in quality dev/product/project managers instead they pay below market rates (see jobs on seek) yet there are endless budgets for consultants and outsourcing.
  - angry_octet 4y ago
    Government has frozen APS salaries for a decade, and refused to have pay rates based on specialist roles (except lawyers). They are capped in headcount so they can't tackle really big projects like myGov. In contrast, the Government has no cap on consultant spending.
PickledHotdog 4y ago
Think my phone died or something. No problem, should be able to log in to MyGov and set up authentication again. Nope. Had to nuke the whole account and start again. Had to relink all services. Lost all communications in the "inbox". I had to laugh. The alternative was too frightening.
- hackerfromthefu 4y ago
  Same thing happened to me just the other day. Including the forced clenched teeth laughing to avoid the alternative.

by mianos 4y ago

volcanok 4y ago

>these large consulting companies have the same or less technical expertise. What they do have is huge sales teams and even larger teams of project managers. This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing. I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.

n-e-w 4y ago
> The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing This observation is absolutely spot on. An ignored element of meritocracy is visibility -- and, perhaps, as you suggest, inertia. And then we end up back at the black hole of designing the 'right' incentive schemes... sigh
flukus 4y ago
> how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? You don't. There's an inverse effect where you don't really want the clients that go for these big consulting companies because there's just as much crap on their end and they'll drown your skilled team in bureaucratic nonsense. You want the smaller clients where your technical skills complement their domain knowledge. There's still a lot of marketing and management, but the people that actually do things can talk to each other.

denkmoon 4y ago

>The article mentions the huge problem with them having no in-house expertise so they bring in consultants. Just so we're all clear here, this is by design.

diordiderot 4y ago
Why do you think this is? The UK central gov is a notable exception, (if you exclude the corruption with track and trace) why might that be?
- ecdavis 4y ago
  > Why do you think this is? Successive Australian governments since the early 90s have expanded public service outsourcing dramatically. Here's a comprehensive discussion from the early 00s: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0001/01CIB18#Value https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart... The basic argument is that competition reduces costs and improves quality, therefore we should introduce competition into the provision of services to government.
- denkmoon 4y ago
  The stated reason: Outsourcing improves efficiency and decreases costs. The real reason: It provides a mechanism for political kickbacks, vendor lock-in, and shifting blame.

throwaway897987 4y ago

I currently work in NSW Health. The quality of what we deliver is to the bottom. Millions of dollars spent on project that have 0 unit test, 0 integration test where we as developers don't have any ability to talk to users. Every piece of code I see has inconsistent style with nobody bothering to write clean code. I am trying hard to bring more best practices and less cow boy programming but this might be a lost cause if you're not a professional politician. Everytime I hear my wife talking me about budget cut in her hospital as a nurse, I cringe of the absurd waste that happen on the application development side I'm involve with. Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-toolkit/design-system/component-library https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool... Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with

seibelj 4y ago
Well when you work for the government you never see a dime for improving things, and as a leader you get more prestige and promotions by having bigger budgets and head count, so all of the incentives are misaligned.
robbiep 4y ago
You're in eHealth NSW or Ministry? reach out for a chat. We could have an interesting conversation (platform deployed in 10 of the LHDs)
- djbusby 4y ago
  Wild this connection is happening on HN and not some internal water-cooler system where teams could work together.
  - phs318u 4y ago
    Many years ago I did some consulting at Telstra and I needed a billing module for their upcoming online gaming platform. Another division had almost the exact thing I needed. I asked my stakeholder if we could reach out and talk to those folks, get a copy of what they'd done and implement with few changes. He almost laughed out loud at the suggestion and told me it would just be far easier to a new one from scratch. Internal barriers are sometimes far greater than external ones.

throwaway-aogS8 4y ago

> They employ hordes of off-shore developers that are managed people with little or no clue about anything. Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.

herodotuscat 4y ago
Not true. I worked for large multi-national contractor on a current Australian government project. 90% offshore "talent". Most of the time these employees actually had no previous work experience; just some training offshore and then projects on their CV were a complete fabrication. I'm assuming the contracting company does this on purpose so they can charge at a much higher rate.
- angry_octet 4y ago
  The contractor employs the off shore workers, not the Government, but the problem bis that the people who sign off on the plan of work have little to no experience. And why would you continue working for the Government when you could make 50% more even working for a dogshit company like Accenture?
girvo 4y ago
Most of it. Some of the Australian contracting companies some government projects are handed to use external contractors themselves to varying extents. Though I do believe it isn't that common as IIRC most contracts explicitly disallow it.

hnick 4y ago

There was also a pretty basic SSO security issue a few years back, and I tried and tried and could not find anyone to report it to beyond regular customer service. Maybe they've fixed it but basically you click to look at tax stuff, it takes you to ATO online services, you click back to mygov then sign out. Sign into another account and click and now you're looking at the original person's tax stuff since it's still signed in. Not a problem for myself and my wife, but potentially an issue for abusive relationships or shared resources like a library computer.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
The experience of many reporting security issues to the Australian government is to be harassed, so I'm sure many such issues have been picked up by people and not reported out of fear or just not being willing to deal with the drama. One wonders how much this applies even to the developers.
- hnick 4y ago
  Yeah having worked in a big company or two, "you find it you own it" is a real issue. Easier to keep your head down when you know it'll be an 8-month back-and-forth meeting-fest to fix a basic issue.
  - mianos 4y ago
    Another similar issue is, if you see a huge problem that will take lots of time to fix, and, if you take it on, your timesheets don't have enough time on the other approved new work codes. For this you will eventually be punished in the corporate way, sidelined, no promotion, no pay rise (.5%) and assignment to failed projects where anyone else who worked on them has long gone. The net result of this is a wasteland of rubbish as far as the eye can see.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

smackeyacky 4y ago

I think this is all a bit harsh. Compared to having to front up to the tax office or Centrelink or (in NSW) the RTA to do things, MyGov and the Service NSW system are a modern miracle. You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny. However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Sounds like a classic government IT project failure. They basically codified their internal Kafka-esk bureaucracy in UI form and projected their collective incompetence by insisting the project must be built exactly according to their (wrong & incoherent) requirements. I can imagine the long documents. This is classic waterfall. They would have insisted on that even. The project was doomed as soon as they started writing those documents. So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better. Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done. The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.

gamelodge 4y ago
Exactly this… They are not willing to invest in quality dev/product/project managers instead they pay below market rates (see jobs on seek) yet there are endless budgets for consultants and outsourcing.
- angry_octet 4y ago
  Government has frozen APS salaries for a decade, and refused to have pay rates based on specialist roles (except lawyers). They are capped in headcount so they can't tackle really big projects like myGov. In contrast, the Government has no cap on consultant spending.

PickledHotdog 4y ago

Think my phone died or something. No problem, should be able to log in to MyGov and set up authentication again. Nope. Had to nuke the whole account and start again. Had to relink all services. Lost all communications in the "inbox". I had to laugh. The alternative was too frightening.

hackerfromthefu 4y ago
Same thing happened to me just the other day. Including the forced clenched teeth laughing to avoid the alternative.