It's amazing the amount of downvotes on posts that comment just how tremendously difficult it is to plan, design, code, test, and support a website that has to

It's amazing the amount of downvotes on posts that comment just how tremendously difficult it is to plan, design, code, test, and support a website that has to serve literally hundreds of use cases and is meant to last multiple decades and integrate with thousands of other government systems that have been standing since the 60s and all have their own idiosyncracies in protocols, documentations, and bureaucracy. It looks like most people in HN have never actually worked on large systems and have no idea just how costs increase exponentially, how internal politics and policies affect those projects, and how infernally hard it is to think in terms of systems that have to be used by more than a handful of use cases. There's not doubt that government projects have a huge amount of internal overhead, but if you compare them to the stuff that goes on in multinationals that have working systems in the 60s, it's really nothing out of the ordinary. I know a guy who worked in a project related to one of the largest insurance companies in the US. It's a 60 year-old system running on IBM System Zs, AS/400s, Unix and Windows systems, with varying degrees of hardware and software obsolescence, running custom COBOL builds and compilers, integrating with thousands of external APIs, on half a dozen data centers with completely different specs. There was a literal library of documentation spanning millions of pages of requirements to describe how policies flowed through the systems, how batch processes should run, and what tests should be used to make sure a lady who took out an insurance policy on her TV in the 70s can still cash out on it now and withing 20 years in the future. All this does not even include the network topologies spanning TCP/IP, custom frame relay protocols, proprietary NICs, SANs for storage and backup, tape libraries, electrical layouts for data centers, etc. There's more than a few reasons why large software projects fail; I have not even begun to include the intricacies of the aforementioned industry and have not even counted the regular issues of any project.