|
FWIW, I've done some work in the UK public sector, including but not limited to the NHS. In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-house, the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground engineers) were some of the smartest, most motivated individuals I've worked with, who pretty consistently gave great output (for e.g., shipping products, system design, software architecture, balancing tech debt with delivery velocity) in the face of almost uniformly painful obstacles, like the tooling they could work, or being jerked around by changing political priorities. OTOH, any time the tech folks were a long-term outsourced arrangement, you could expect to find (WITHOUT EXCEPTION) ridiculous amounts of cruft, hacks and frankly unacceptable shortcuts in the tech systems and interfaces, and the few people of this ilk that I did deal with, were entirely focussed on Goodhart's Law-ing their way to their next gig. (TBH, I can't really blame the individuals as they're merely responding in the most rational manner to their incentives). > I think we also need [...] a policy to rebuild skills and bring them back in. Absolutely 100% agreed, but I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite leadership/management abilities to be able to do this in a manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs to politically connected mates. P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader app that I use. |
Lions led by donkeys as they used to say.
> I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite > leadership/management abilities
I'll differ a little here. I think we can have capable people at all levels and I am generally confident in the UK to come through in the end. We can do good leadership too. The reason the donkeys won't carry their load is that they're corrupt, undisciplined and disloyal. They're there to serve us but we forget who holds the stick.
> manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs > to politically connected mates.
Precisely. My guess is Nick Clegg and Priti Patel are the tip of a gargantuan iceberg. We're becoming a vassal state to the third richest "nation state" on Earth [1], because they have our politicians in their pockets.
[1] The combined wealth of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook now places them collectively above Russia as the number three "superpower". https://www.wired.co.uk/article/big-tech-geopolitics
> P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader
Yes, Emacs, Well spotted. Yet another fingerprint to watch for! :)