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It makes me furious that no one bats an eye at spending a BILLION dollars on a single presidential campaign but they can't sort out pay and benefits for our arm

It makes me furious that no one bats an eye at spending a BILLION dollars on a single presidential campaign but they can't sort out pay and benefits for our armed forces and veterans. Surely a team with a background in large systems could take a set of requirements and produce a working system in 12-18 months.

deleted 13y ago
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jjoonathan 13y ago
> could take a set of requirements I think that's the key problem: nobody has a complete big-picture idea of what the program is doing. Sure, there are people in each service branch that are familiar with subsets of the overall technology, but I suspect that at the overlap of these subsets there is significant disagreement over interpretation & implementation that has never become a visible problem because nobody runs consistency checks. Since compiling the mutually contradictory payroll policies into a non-probabilistic master policy would immediately shed light on these issues, it would be a political minefield. Every choice you make would be the wrong choice and nobody is simultaneously high enough on the totem pole to say "live with it" and low enough on the totem pole to actually implement it.
- gaadd33 13y ago
  Paychex seems to handle payroll policies for a huge range of businesses without too much trouble. Also I'm not quite sure why the DoD would have several different payroll policies? It seems like everything is determined by the relevant laws, similar to how you can look up the pay frequency and amount of pretty much any pay grade.
  - Retric 13y ago
    Laws often say things like 'significant' which are generally interpreted at the agency level. The DoD has a lot of agency's so these interpretations are unlikely to line up.
mpyne 13y ago
The problem is that DoD institutionally is shit at IT now. It didn't used to be this way (DoD was at the forefront in the beginning), but now we just can't do contracting for IT to save our lives. Everytime someone tries to start a system to fix pay they realize that they will need to change all the personnel systems to match, and figure that they'll go and fix the personnel systems too. They tried that with DIHMRS, which actually did involve billions, and the project never even got finished it was such a C.F.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jjoonathan 13y ago

> could take a set of requirements I think that's the key problem: nobody has a complete big-picture idea of what the program is doing. Sure, there are people in each service branch that are familiar with subsets of the overall technology, but I suspect that at the overlap of these subsets there is significant disagreement over interpretation & implementation that has never become a visible problem because nobody runs consistency checks. Since compiling the mutually contradictory payroll policies into a non-probabilistic master policy would immediately shed light on these issues, it would be a political minefield. Every choice you make would be the wrong choice and nobody is simultaneously high enough on the totem pole to say "live with it" and low enough on the totem pole to actually implement it.

gaadd33 13y ago
Paychex seems to handle payroll policies for a huge range of businesses without too much trouble. Also I'm not quite sure why the DoD would have several different payroll policies? It seems like everything is determined by the relevant laws, similar to how you can look up the pay frequency and amount of pretty much any pay grade.
- Retric 13y ago
  Laws often say things like 'significant' which are generally interpreted at the agency level. The DoD has a lot of agency's so these interpretations are unlikely to line up.

mpyne 13y ago

The problem is that DoD institutionally is shit at IT now. It didn't used to be this way (DoD was at the forefront in the beginning), but now we just can't do contracting for IT to save our lives. Everytime someone tries to start a system to fix pay they realize that they will need to change all the personnel systems to match, and figure that they'll go and fix the personnel systems too. They tried that with DIHMRS, which actually did involve billions, and the project never even got finished it was such a C.F.