[TAForObvReasons]

This is honestly a terrible take. NJ did try to modernize the benefits system in 2007, awarding the contract to a company that is now owned by HP. News article: https://www.nj.com/politics/2014/11/nj_ends_118_million_cont...

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes. Parent asserted:

> we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back.

And the historical record showed that NJ made that realization at least before 2007 (which is when the contract was awarded)

[pas]

No, it's not. These state IT systems and this habit that leads to their inevitable downfall needs to die.

They respect nothing. Scope? No, we need to fulfill every need and some. Budget? No, of course we don't have cash, and we have to be very careful, it's the taxpayers' money! Time? It's already late! (Yet they weren't able to get it done in 10+ years.)

They have no real competency, they don't even have competency to delegate this to someone competent. And they lack the competency to manage their own inconsistency regarding these issues.

The linked tweet thread is a perfect example of this. (Rampant project mismanagement; too big to fail; they introduced some Hadoop scoring system to match inconsistent records and whatnot instead of simply throwing out all the bad data and handing the rest separately - eg hiring a bunch of unemployed people to go over them.)

A state that should be at the top of any kind of project management and procurement hierarchies wasn't able to supervise an IT system project. It's so incompetent just thinking about it will lead to spontaneous combustion.

[Cobol78]

Yup. Exactly right. And they think the 26 year old outside consultant knows how to fix the problem better than the 50 year old government programmer, who management has spent 17 years beating down their self respect.

[_v7gu]

Consistently assigning work to big firms who consistently screw up... All they want to do is show that "they're trying", and the charade will continue until someone does get fired for buying IBN.

[lotsofpulp]

I bet NJ wouldn’t accept any excuses from a small business that tried to claim “they’re trying” if they had technical issues with payroll.

[v8engine]

https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440

[robk]

Surely outsourced and offshored isn't something to praise them for

[Cobol78]

Like off-shored protective medical gear, off-shored pharmaceuticals manufacturing, and now a country full of unskilled 20 somethings that can only do phone apps and coffee baristas.

Companies will not like it, consumers will not like it, State budgets will not like it,

But like cobol programmers, we need to learn how to make things and build our own supply chain.

My old employer did not listen last year when I retired. Nobody was assigned to make an annual change to a REXX program. I learned it on my own because it predated me. But the process was so rigorous because we had to be our own RACF Admin to make our own RACF I’d to get to the datasets to change, then run the programs, but they got rid of printers connected to the mainframe and tighter up FTP so much that if took days to refresh passwords and ftp print files to your pc hard drive. Then run programs in C# that scalped off the first column and read the mainframe page skips....

Am I was suppose to teach this to a C# programmer who would not need to run this for 6 more months. I blame management. They loved outside consultants and treated our own programmers like loading dock employees, write ups when 5 minutes late for work.

They wanted me to take a brand new high end pc with me when I retired. I left it on my desk when I left. They had 6 months to learn it.

[scarface74]

Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

[coribuci]

> Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

Because the only thing they are specialized in is sucking tax money from the government.

> It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

That's their only pedigree. In other countries they also took a lot of money and delivered crap. So people should be aware by now. But with all this corr^W lobby ...