[MattGaiser]

Former municipal software engineer, that built a product to serve other municipalities.

That, and nobody pushes back on what they order as you can just bill them more. We had governments move single buttons (literally, they wanted the stock application, but with one particular button on the right instead of the left), get to use a paint bucket to set colours throughout the application (not a theme, but customise by button), want different fonts, want the order of items in a table swapped, etc.

They tend to get whatever they want, whether or not what they spec out leads to a messy pile.

[mgkimsal]

> as you can just bill them more

I've done a bit of municipal work, and had the opposite experience - there's almost always a fixed budget, and while people may ask for loads of changes, no one ever had authority to authorize a single dollar more for the project.

It probably depends on the project and more likely the people involved, but "you can bill them more" isn't a given in all situations.

[throwawayboise]

Depends on the municipality. Small ones don't have a lot of flexibility. Big ones (Chicago, etc.) have lots of wiggle room especially if you're willing to kick back some of it to an aldermans's preferred subcontractors, etc.