[trhway]

>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security.

where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..?

> So a few parents decided, since the data is basically their data, to build their own better version. A couple of months later, @oppnaskolplatt was ready.

Bad precedent that must be squished ruthlessly. Otherwise next time they would decide to have their own better roads, police, government... that slippery slop of "we the people".

[T-A]

> where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle? IBM? ..?

According to [1], no less than four contractors: Tieto, Ping Pong (apparently responsible for security), Unikum and Nova Software.

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=https:/...

[progre]

Tieto, Nova Software and Unikum are well known players in the edu-it space with Tieto beeing the big one (they are in a lot of other industries as well). Normally they are in direct competition with each other.

[tephra]

The best quote pertaining to Tieto that I'll never forget is when they one the contract to build a new system dealing with something around people with cancer in Luleå. One person on IRC simply stated: "Well now I'm really glad that I don't have cancer _and_ lives in Luleå".

[progre]

I've worked quite a bit doing migrations and integrations against one of their products. The database schema is... interesting. This thing obviously started as a Sweden-only product, so the database schema for the Swedish version has Swedish column names (first mistake here). When they wanted to build a version for the larger Nordic market they decided to translate the column names to English (well, ok...). But since they already had a lot of customer installations using the Swedish version they have maintained 2 parallell database versions, essentially identical - except for all column names - for something like 20 years now. For this product they have also maintained a home grown version of Visual Basic for automation tasks within the system. Essentially VB6 except lots of bugs and quirks that are so old that if they fix them now, literally millions of man-hours will be required to migrate the existing automations that rely on those quirks.

[marvin]

In Scandinavia, contracting agencies are king. We've brewed up many local varieties of these, that are much smaller, probably a bit more skilled and generally don't deliberately take money from customers that clearly don't know what they're doing.

Directly employing most of one's required software engineers is largely a very new phenomenon, and not yet widespread.

In Norway, you'd have e.g. Evry, Itera, Bouvet, Miles, Computas as well as international companies like Steria, Accenture and CapGemini. They contract out developers at ~$125 an hour and pay a regular middle-class salary. A large portion of software engineers are employed at a company like this.