[Balero]

The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired. It is not necessarily true that a publicly run system will inevitably be crap/inefficient/archaic. A good example is the British gov.uk group, who have made some well thought out, usable and technologically sound systems.

Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your public digital systems. Don't let them use "Public tech must be bad" as an argument.

[kodablah]

Is there a meme that we can use for "most" or is it a lie because you can find outliers so every single government entity technically isn't terrible at technology? What I grow tried of is the defense of general government ineptness using outliers.

Can't call a spade a spade because of the minuscule amount of times it might be a shovel. I suppose when making the comment GP made, they have to put an asterisk to say "most" lest the first comment immediately point out that there are exceptions.

[Balero]

It's the expectation that I dislike. Feels like people are resigned to poor systems.

"Hey most public stuff is crap, this is bad" - Fine by me. "Don't make that public, it'll be bad because public stuff is bad" - Not fine. Also it implies the inverse, that private is always good, or at least better.

Good is good. Better is better. Private can be good, and is best for most things. Public can be good, and is best for some things.

[kodablah]

Sure, yet another way to say "expectation" at this point is learning from past mistakes. Is it fine to say "don't give these institutions money that have made bad public stuff"?

I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.

Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).

[sshine]

Tired but true.

There are good examples of government IT infrastructure done right (e.g. https://e-estonia.com), but the economics is stacked against them in many ways.

It doesn't have to be bad, but it almost always is.

[cabalamat]

> The meme that (all) government is terrible at technology is getting tired.

And obviously wrong, when you consider the origins of the computer, the internet and the WWW.

[MrEfficiency]

What happens in a country 1/5 the size in population and 1/10 the size economically shouldnt be expected to perform the same on something literally 10x bigger.

You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.

Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.

I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be competent.

[Balero]

In the UK, voters are a fair bit closer to MPs than people in the US (where I currently live) are to their congress representatives. Though much much further from Members of the House of Lords than from Senators. However there is a complete missing segment of local politics that exists in the US, and that has good engagement, that is much less powerful/engaging in the UK (State and city level, compared to County/city Councils)

Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.

There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.

"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.

I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.

[clintonb]

USDS and 18F are staffed by confident people from industry. The federal government, when it comes to software, is not as incompetent as you think.

[dragonwriter]

An organization staffed by competent people that reports to people that are neither competent in the relevant domain nor willing to defer to those that are remains, as an organization, incompetent. As USDS and 18F are both in the executive branch entities, their organizational competence is limited by the leadership of executive branch; this is particularly true of USDS, which is in the Executive Office of the President.

[MrEfficiency]

This is literally the problem.

Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.

Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?

[dragonwriter]

At least part of the original idea for those entities was to serve as a cadre to improve competence government wide.

Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the idea wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.