[stupidcar]

You demonstrate intellectual fallacies common amongst software developers:

1. Believing that your experience in one particular field makes you qualified to make pronouncements regarding others about which you know nothing.

2. Believing that problems in other fields are inherently simple to understand and solve, and that the reason they aren't must therefore be due to the malice or incompetence of people working in those fields.

3. Believing that software and software development processes are a universal model that can be applied to any other problem via trite and reductive analogy.

[devonkim]

With these considerations taken we can apply the same problems to people in industrial scale manufacturing that have typically managed many organizations that are now in charge of software projects. Then comes no real effective incentive structure with how most federal contracts are written despite billions spent on lawyers to protect the government and to get the most for the government's dollars supposedly. I've seen far too many projects with clearly the most talented and well-managed contractors getting tossed for actually finishing their deliverables while those that didn't get through 40%+ got renewed because they were just too critical to the political success of the greater project. And they'll continue to cite the project as past performance and renewal as an indicator of competence.

The fact there's so much opposition to USDS and 18F that's greater than any other group ever is the best indicator that the fat, bloated Beltway bandits are worried about their easy road to retirement. This isn't to say everyone's lazy - far from it. But government contracting has been largely insulated from the realities of most commercial enterprises through the politicized veil of "protecting veterans" and "defending the country" and for every legitimate, honest worker there's at least two that just want a cushy 9-5 for 35 years.

[8note]

while i frequently agree with you, i disagree here.

both code and travel regulations are lists of rules written in a terse language, and both are subject to bloat all of the time, abd parts become deprecated as times and priorities change.

these are very comparable things, e cept that code can change quickly at a low cost, while regulations are costly to change.

Because of the cheapness, software folks have put a lot of effort and study into optimizing how you make rule changes, which makes it very applicable to some other problem spaces

[rosser]

> ...except that code can change quickly at a low cost, while regulations are costly to change.

And you don't think that's a salient difference? Particularly in light of the adversarial nature of politics, which was one of your comment's parent's points, and which is a major contributing factor to such changes being so costly?

[dave_sullivan]

Yet the information density of the parent comment is so much higher. You have 3 statements that can be reduced to "Things that work in programming don't necessarily work in other fields." No kidding? Then what's your solution for operational efficiency in government?

[stupidcar]

Some of us believe detail and nuance add power to argument, rather than rejecting them in favour throwing around basic, unsupported claims.

And your reduction is not even correct. Assuming that problems in other fields are inherently easy to solve has nothing to do with the applicability of software engineering techniques. Assuming those working in other fields are incompetent or malicious has nothing to do with the applicability of software engineering techniques. You say my post was lacking in information density, yet you apparently weren't even able to grasp the arguments I did make. So maybe I needed more explanation, not less?

And are you implying that unless I come up with a solution for efficient government, it somehow renders my — entirely unrelated — argument invalid? That's nothing more than a lame attempt at argumental misdirection. But hey, I'll bite: My solution for operation efficiency in government is for everyone to think and act in the complete opposite manner to you. Is that reductive enough for you?

[dave_sullivan]

> And are you implying that unless I come up with a solution for efficient government, it somehow renders my — entirely unrelated — argument invalid?

I'm implying that you're long-winded and it weakens your argument. If I reduced your response, I'd reduce it to, "You hurt my feelings and I'm angry about that." Fair enough, but the rest is so much filler.