[eshyong]

Or underestimating the bureaucracy of the system. I did some work for a startup that interfaced with the government, and basically the government insists on doing everything in triplicate, getting approval from multiple layers of hierarchy, and does things on a yearly cadence.

I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.

[treis]

Most large organizations are like this. At the megacorp I used to work for the running joke was that any change, no matter how small, to the legacy systems started at 1 year & 1 million dollars.

[spc476]

At work, our customers are the Oligarchist Cell Phone Companies (about three at this time). As I was joking with a higher up about adapting agile programming, it doesn't matter if we're on a two-week sprint when our customer is on a two-year sprint. And yes, it took over two years to get them to adapt a change.