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Why does so much government tech investment deliver so little?
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- solatic 3y agoIt's more than that, it's the cover-your-ass mentality that develops when every small part of your job is dictated by reams and reams of bureaucracy and policy. Building successful products requires direct communication with users and organizational tolerance for making mistakes. Government replaces direct communication with requirements documents, and tolerance with "accountability", lest taxpayer funds be "wasted".
- geraldalewis 3y agoThis seems like barely-massaged LLM content and/or just a bad marketing page.
- monero-xmr 3y agoThe government is a very poor allocator of speculative investments. The people who select what gets invested in do not have their own money at stake, so they are able to choose based on priorities other than profit maximization. The government should stick to enabling fair play in the private sector and stay away with gambling taxpayer dollars.
- DiabloD3 3y agoGovernment tech investment delivered the Internet, the single largest advancement to humanity, even bigger than the moon landing. It's also like he doesn't know what investments are: a gamble that you think the proposed company/solution/whatever is going to succeed, and that the few successes will be far more valuable than what was spent on all the investments, successes and failures combined. This is like if I wrote an unhinged rant about how Y Combinator wastes money and is stupid because most of the picks have turned out to be shit choices, and ignoring the fact that the few that survived, found their market fit, and succeed were highly profitable and helped fund future rounds to continue the process.
- lr4444lr 3y agoThere's a big difference between government contract work that results in lackluster results and cost overruns, and research grants. I think the article is focusing on the former, but the title is admittedly vague.
- moralestapia 3y ago>Government tech investment delivered the Internet Hmm ... nah. The internet would have happened anyway. Also, we owe its growth to plenty of ISPs everywhere and quite possibly ... piracy and porn. Even if it was true and the government single handedly created the whole www, that shouldn't be a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way. Also your bit about YC, YC is private money, they could throw all of it into the ocean and I wouldn't bat an eye. The government, however, takes almost half of what I make, for sure I'd like to know, with unprecedented detail, where and why my money is going to. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried to, lol.
- avmich 3y agoSounds... strange. > that's not a carte blanche to just waste money that could otherwise be invested in a better way. What are some of the better ways to approach investment by the government today, compared to what we have?
- 3y ago
- whatscooking 3y agoBecuase software development is hard and most people, even those who call themselves software engineers, cannot do it
- bdangubic 3y agosoftware development is not hard at all. the reason everyone thinks it is hard is that there are too many software developers and 99% of them should have picked a different profession
- whatscooking 3y agoif 99% of people cannot do something, then it is considered hard
- sirspacey 3y agoBecause tech is really process orchestration and automation Most gov offices have individuals who run processes with no concept of why they are getting what they are getting, why they are changing it, and where it is going Compartmentalization is great for blame management, but terrible for efficiency
- feedforward 3y agoWhen I want to look at my localhost and do "host ::1" or "dig -x ::1", my machine spits back something about ARPA. What is ARPA? It's how the US government paid for decades for the R&D to create the Internet. Just like how the Air Force paid Fairchild to make semiconductors. Or the CIA paid Oracle to create relational databases. Technology was created in the US via the funding of the YS taxpayer, sent to the Pentagon and then sloshing around. Years or decades later it is ready to be a product and given over to private profit.
- _gmax0 3y agohttps://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man7/inet.h.7posix.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man7/inet.h.7pos... The joys of socket programming.
- p-e-w 3y agoThe answer to questions of the type "Why are governments so bad/inefficient/wasteful/slow/etc.?" is always the same: Because they have no incentive to do better. When you are literally the one who makes the rules by which the game is played, it's insane for others to expect you to make a genuine effort. Apart from the (infrequent) elections, which provide at best a very weak control mechanism, governments are free to do as they please, with almost zero external pressures, while also being able to tell all other players what to do. The results are completely predictable, and indeed unavoidable unless the framework were altered radically.
- Barrin92 3y ago>with almost zero external pressures a lot of government action happens in the context of competition between nation states with stakes that can be much more intense than in the private market. That's how you got the Meiji Restoration, The Prussian education system that's now everywhere, lots of fancy tech during the Cold War, and much of China's gains during the last 30 years. Much off the innovation in the US is government driven, military technological superiority. The Silicon Valley far from being some sort of private market Mecca has its roots in the defense sector.
- nickpp 3y agoWhen a government is a regular client (even if one with a very fat wallet and lots of requirements), it is the private free market that researches and develops the solutions and products, not the client.
- hooverd 3y agoWe also don't allow your government to develop competencies. All those examples of government failures in tech are failures of private sector consultants because we're allergic to allowing the government to develop in-house expertise.
- magicalhippo 3y agoHere in Norway our IRS has long had very good web pages, including ability to edit you tax return (pre-filled), unlike most other agencies. Turns out they do most development in-house. Most other use consultants, both for project planning, management and development. Go figure.
- nateglims 3y agoThis article is all over the place. Large organizations, corporate or government or other, eventually ossify and fail to adapt. Some find ways to reinvent themselves. But the framework is bizarre. Under the model that tech investment is taking a bet, these values are in contention. You simply don't hear about startups that did not pan out and ate all the capital invested. And these truths are not centuries old, we reinvent our view of capitalism every few decades. The defense industry in most western countries is a good example of this where it's still very Keynesian.
- landemva 3y ago> You simply don't hear about startups that did not pan out and ate all the capital invested. I recall reading about a big flush just a couple weeks ago. "Convoy, valuing it at $3.8 billion just 18 months ago." https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/19/bezos-backed-freight-firm-convoy-shuts-down-read-ceo-memo-here.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/19/bezos-backed-freight-firm-co...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mullingitover 3y agoThis article is higher education research erasure. The private sector gets absurd amounts of benefits from university research technology transfer. That's government tech investment that's handed to private companies on a silver platter.
- valenterry 3y agoSurvivorship bias. If a tech company (especially a small one) sucks, it will disappear rather quickly. So you only see the ones that made it work. If the government IT sucks, it won't disappear.
- srvmshr 3y agoI think the view is a bit myopic. Certainly, government projects have inertia & cost overrun. But over the last six decades, here are some of the initiatives on my mind, which couldn't have been done without government investment in technology: * Internet, as many people pointed out already. * Nuclear energy & commitments to nuclear projects e.g. nuclear medicine, nuclear chemistry, medical research, particle physics & major instrumentation grants * Space technology. Ability to understand the cosmos, origins and the unanswered questions about the eventual fate of our world & mankind. Including some flattering moments such as Apollo program. * Meteorology & mapping: This is usually the underdog. We owe a lot to meteorological studies and USGS. Humanity (not just the US) has managed to stave off famines, several natural disasters or be prepared to face the next simply because how well we have mapped earth and it's resources by remote sensing technologies, many of which are government developed or sponsored in large. I think what is rather true is government projects are endurance races. They aren't as flashy as SpaceX or ChatGPT, but without them the next glitzy tech will be arduous to get. As with all races, one can't win everything & the slow nature of it makes us question its worth sometimes.
- landemva 3y agoAlso, Fauci helped fund gain of function experiments in Wuhan labs. Those had to be done by government because a private person would catch criminal charges. https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/faucis-agency-admits-it-funded-gain-of-function-work-in-wuhan-what-else-are-they-keeping-from-us/ https://nypost.com/2021/10/21/faucis-agency-admits-it-funded...
- kortilla 3y agoDisagree on Internet. The demand for fast information exchange was already apparent with phone networks, telegraphs, and the mail. Once we had general computing, there was going to be something to fill the void if DARPA didn’t fund TCP/IP. We would probably be dealing with AT&T addressing schemes instead…
- piva00 3y agoThere was going to be something to fill the void, the questions there are "when?" and "for how much?", no private company would deploy novel inter-networks communication for cheap since it was an unproven technology. No private company would want to make it open for competitors to use the network, monopolistic tendencies don't naturally go away in the private sector, much the opposite.
- donor20 3y agoHaving been through this two major reasons. they never talk to users. Seriously it’s crazy - you think it’s bad in industry - govt is wild. A bunch of folks 10 levels away decide on things. They will literally never even do one click in a demo - it’s all paperwork based - so when in 10 seconds users can tell it’s hot garbage (ultra slow, ancient Java version required and all) it’s too late. Sane developers are smart enough not to contract with the government. McBride principles compliance? Virgin redwood compliance? Race info on all staff. Ethnicity for all staff? I once escalated to city attorney a compliance requirement that we hand out an IRS form for a program that no longer existed (advance earned tax credits I think) and they said form still had to be handed out (because some political body had required it be) but we could tell employees who filled out the form it was for a program that was no longer in operation and we would not process the form. Multiply by 20. So you get compliance and other middlemen who exacerbate the first issue - the folks developing are super removed from users.
- snowpid 3y agoIt's fascinating how Americans assume 1.) their experience in America is exact the same true for whole world. 2.) everyone in the word understands specific American terms.
- hm-nah 3y agoBecause taxpayers don’t hold govt officials accountable. We’re all too busy working.
- gregjor 3y agoI suspect far more private investment delivers little or nothing. Meta’s billions wasted on “the metaverse” seems on the same scale, if not more, than government tech R&D spending. WeWork, Most of Musk’s projects, Theranos, FTX and almost all of crypto/blockchain investment (speculation) delivered no innovation other than novel crimes.
- PeterStuer 3y agoThe EU research frameworks are first and foremost aimed at building cross-national relations, second at industry subsidising under an accepted pretense, and third at forging academic industry transfers. Getting actually market results from the stated research objective is a far fourth. Think about it this way: if you have a true strategic research objective as a company, would your approach be 'I am going to share this idea with in a not public but not private either research proposal after I have built out a an international consortium and parcelled out different workitems for the realization of this idea to a host of 'partners' whos stratgic innovation ideas allign with my own, the hope for a 5% chance of receiving approval and a partial funding grant 2 years after I got the idea appoved internall, that imposes an extremely heavy reporting and management process on me to monitor and report on a series of prenegotiated 'deliverables' and evaluations over the next 3 years after which we can maybe exploit this resulting shared IP? The unfortunate reality is that as a result most research departments, both industry and academic, spent nearly all their effort on grant aquisition and grant management, and only what is left goes to producing contractual agreements and passing reviews with no further leeway for actual research There are exceptions. I would fully support a strategic EU tech 'decollonization' effort as it is badly needed, but the current programs are never going to succeed in that as they are not set up for this, and getting a true successful effort of the ground would probably meet with substatial political detraction. P.S. Despite the above I have loved working in the EU research space. The International work environment is truely enriching, and most people working in this arena are realy bright and at the top of their game.
- nvm0n2 3y agoI think most industry research departments don't care about EU or government grants at all, unless you work in a very different industry to tech.
- PeterStuer 3y agoAnd yet tech is the most oversubscribed program of all. There are 20x to 30x the number of grant applications to the budget.
- ksec 3y agoAnyone who have experience working inside the Goverment and working in a small company / startup [1] will know. The objective of the tech investment were not to deliver. But to show they have done something. [1] I avoid using the term private sector because lots of big companies have similar attitude.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoAnything today with government has same characteristics, not only tech. The very simple reason is that just ask yourself have you ever even know how these investments are made, and have you ever heard any of these opportunities if you are just a normal guy.
- niemandhier 3y agoOne reason could be that, governments tend to invest in sectors that are not jet profitable. The moment a research area looks as if it is ripe for commercialization, private entities join and for various reasons are much faster. Good examples are quantum computing and fusion. Both were purely government funded, now that the fields approach usability we see private companies enter.
- personomas 3y ago> However, government attempts to spur business to invest in bad ideas distort existing markets, they lead to potentially productive investment being channeled into unproductive ends. > Europe has incredible potential, considering its political stability, world-leading universities, and existing talent. But it cannot and should not throw centuries-old economic truths out of the window to conjure up a simulacrum of technological sovereignty. Superpower status will not come via death by a thousand grants or attempting to recreate Silicon Valley in Strasbourg. It will come from what markets do best: discipline, picking battles wisely, and allowing bad projects to fail.
- nunez 3y agoThis article feels very specific to Europe. I think the US does a really good job of funding tech innovation, especially given its size and how complex it operates.