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While I'm not attempting to come off contrarian, I should say that trading potshots at government workers for potshots at government contractors seems short-sig

by bmelton 13y ago

While I'm not attempting to come off contrarian, I should say that trading potshots at government workers for potshots at government contractors seems short-sighted and highly hypocritical. Having worked in both, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses. Where you would fault contractors though, I would generally fault the contracts themselves, or the faults of the contract overseers. Government contracting is adversarial, and where contractors have made major gaffes, in most of those cases you'd find that it was the government itself to blame. There's a reason it takes several hundred thousand dollars to be the lowest bid for standing up a standard Wordpress website, and I promise you, it isn't because the contractors don't know Wordpress.

jowiar 13y ago
Based on my experience, agreed entirely. I've worked with stellar people at multiple large and small government contractors. The structure of the contract just doesn't lead to a mentality of "let's make something great", but rather "lets get these boxes checked".
- bmelton 13y ago
  Let's get these boxes checked... while attending two meetings a day with different groups of stakeholders with entirely different visions for the product, that want to use it completely differently. Let's get these boxes checked... while every stakeholder wants to see our project fail because they'd rather waste a few million dollars and get a proof of concept so that they can then hand the contract off to the vendor they wished had won the bid in the first place. (Note, this happens to ALL vendors, because every group has a different favorite.) Let's get these boxes checked... while having to justify every single change to the environment to the Enterprise Architecture Board ("Why do you need to use Python? Can't you build it in Java?") as well as to the Change Control Board ("Why do you need to open port 80 to this server? Can't we simply proxy that through our dated and oversaturated proxies? Why won't your load balancing work without sticky session support?") Let's get these boxes checked... even though the government has given us three conflicting visions of the project and now refuses to pay us because we're behind schedule because we cannot meet all the new feature requirements that have arisen. Etc., etc. It's a hellish game.
- greenyoda 13y ago
  The structure of the contract just doesn't lead to a mentality of "let's make something great"... This mentality is probably true for most systems that are built for the internal use of an organization rather than as a product that has to compete on the open market. For example, software built by IT departments for use inside large corporations is notoriously badly designed and hard to use.
  - tracker1 13y ago
    I think it depends on the organization and how many hands in the mix... If you have one or two stake holders and one person taking charge of the direction of development, it can come out pretty well. On the flip side it isn't always management.. I've seen developers create forms that should be simple with really weird layouts on screen that make absolutely no sense at all.

by bmelton 13y ago

jowiar 13y ago

Based on my experience, agreed entirely. I've worked with stellar people at multiple large and small government contractors. The structure of the contract just doesn't lead to a mentality of "let's make something great", but rather "lets get these boxes checked".

bmelton 13y ago
Let's get these boxes checked... while attending two meetings a day with different groups of stakeholders with entirely different visions for the product, that want to use it completely differently. Let's get these boxes checked... while every stakeholder wants to see our project fail because they'd rather waste a few million dollars and get a proof of concept so that they can then hand the contract off to the vendor they wished had won the bid in the first place. (Note, this happens to ALL vendors, because every group has a different favorite.) Let's get these boxes checked... while having to justify every single change to the environment to the Enterprise Architecture Board ("Why do you need to use Python? Can't you build it in Java?") as well as to the Change Control Board ("Why do you need to open port 80 to this server? Can't we simply proxy that through our dated and oversaturated proxies? Why won't your load balancing work without sticky session support?") Let's get these boxes checked... even though the government has given us three conflicting visions of the project and now refuses to pay us because we're behind schedule because we cannot meet all the new feature requirements that have arisen. Etc., etc. It's a hellish game.
greenyoda 13y ago
The structure of the contract just doesn't lead to a mentality of "let's make something great"... This mentality is probably true for most systems that are built for the internal use of an organization rather than as a product that has to compete on the open market. For example, software built by IT departments for use inside large corporations is notoriously badly designed and hard to use.
- tracker1 13y ago
  I think it depends on the organization and how many hands in the mix... If you have one or two stake holders and one person taking charge of the direction of development, it can come out pretty well. On the flip side it isn't always management.. I've seen developers create forms that should be simple with really weird layouts on screen that make absolutely no sense at all.