It's extraordinary how far departments (even large companies) will go to avoid in-sourcing work. $AU96M is a small team of developers hired, paid and pensioned for decades.

Anyone rubber-stamping that sort of invoice deserves jail time.

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rurp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is a huge issue in my experience. I've done some work as a government contractor and often the govt offices have been so heavily outsourced there's nobody left with any technical knowledge at all to oversee the projects. Like the most technical person literally doesn't know what a git repo is.

Even if you hire good contractors who work in good faith, the inability to have remotely technical discussions leads to all kinds of miscommunication and mismatched expectations.

Building and maintaining more in-house developers would be vastly more efficient for the govt, but so many people have a religious level hatred of public employees and glowing respect for private ones. So we not only end up in the current situation, it's actively being made worse in the US by the current administration.

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aunty_helen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ok great, in-source the project but we’ve been promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0. Any hires above that require the minister to sign off.

In your team you have, 3 data scientists that have never worked on a software project, an intern who likes computer games and a PM that used to work in the tax department.

This is a 12 month project, everyone needs to also do their own job and if it’s late, they’re coming for all of us in next years budget.

What would you do? The correct answer is to pay an external consultancy to take the heat and an external team to get the right people needed to get it done.

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falcor84 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> promised a yearly headcount increase of exactly 0

That's the silly thing that seems to cause so much trouble. The conversation should be about budget rather than headcount, and the department heads given flexibility on how to manage their budget. There probably is some reasonable amount of budget to bring consultants in for advice on industry practices, but as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, projects like these should generally be managed in-house, and used to build up organisational knowledge, which will be crucial for effective long-term maintenance.

On that note, one of the best uses I've seen of consulting companies, is to have them help define the hiring plan for implementing the project, and sit in on interview panels, to help put in-house leaders in the right mindset of how to assess the competencies that they themselves are lacking.

	▲	aunty_helen 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Opex vs capex budgets is the issue then. The finance people have too much power. For the in-house experience, keeping a core focus is important for any business. “Are we a website company now?” isn’t something I want my government weather department asking. They’re always going to be worse than industry and one website company per gov department isn’t a slope I’d like to slip down. Also, sometimes actually defining at the boundaries the problem helps to solve it ie when the internal team creates a spec doc for the ext dev team. IMHO, the reason government projects end up like this is derisking, pearl clutching, being difficult pricks to deal with and then being uncompromising on process change. All of the worst aspects you could hope to find in the enterprise at the same time, and then they have a monopoly on being the government.

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oliwarner 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not defending the ridiculous politicking about government hiring. I agree, it's a blocker to rational thought.

But there is a third option: don't build the bloody website.

	▲	aunty_helen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m trying to make the point that it is rational thought that leads to these situations. But the constraints put in place, often never having known of or considered that projects like this need to be done, cause decisions to be made that from the outside just look batshit insane. I’ve been through this myself as the software developer who’s contract ends on Tuesday but with a company wide hiring freeze causing the general manager to have to call the global dept manager, someone in charge of 25k people, to personally sign off on extending the summer intern into a full timer. As for not building the website, that’s fine but it will be more expensive tomorrow.

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doctorpangloss an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Another POV is that if you had to cost out a finished product ahead of time, that’s what it costs.

Startups and small teams fail before they’ve spent $100m on product development. The scenario you describe never happens.

You could argue instead for incremental development, but if they’ve already decided they need this whole stack of products (it’s $100m for a backend, supercomputer code, etc) why delay and make it more expensive?

I don’t know a lot about weather websites. For video game engines, I know Unity has put more than $3b of product development into the engine. That’s a lot of money. And they’re still not “finished.”

Anyway, the worst part of the discourse is the jail time thing. Pray tell, who the hell is going to feel passionate about programming for the government if their peers are threatening jail time over budgets? One of the reasons we get to enjoy high standards of living in the west is that we pay for consultants, like expensive secondary medical staff, programmers, etc, instead of only tangible things. In your world, the only big government expenditures that are permissible are roads and shit. It is the very same energy as tariffs, this belief that the only valid labor is manufacturing. It’s dumb.