[scarface74]

So now you want the government to “build a team” of competent software engineers and the government is going to have to compete with the private sector for talent. The average enterprise framework developer in the US costs at least 3 times as much as the average teacher.

Now on the other hand, return offers for interns at my BigTech company is around $150K. The average salary for the superintendent of schools for larger cities is $167K. Where is the government going to get the money to compete with the private sector?

[Dylan16807]

I'm pretty sure the context here was entire countries switching, not single school districts. The money is there.

[scarface74]

In the US, congressmen make $170K a year, the president makes around $400K a year. Junior developers at large tech companies can make $170K easily in year one or two. Senior developers at tech companies make $400K+. Is the government going to pay tech workers enough to compete?

[Dylan16807]

It could.

Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.

Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.

The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.

[scarface74]

The companies bidding for the work would also be private industry. Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?

Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.

Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

[Dylan16807]

> Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.

> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?

It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.

> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.

[scarface74]

It’s not just the hardware, it’s building out the competencies in house. Companies like Netflix, Disney , Intuit (TurboTax) explicitly decided that it wasn’t “cheaper”.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?

Let’s say the government wanted to “leverage” open source, do you think they could make a better version of ChromeOS than Google?

You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?

The original poster said:

i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).

They don’t want any private company involved in government IT. That means the government has to build everything out themselves without using contractors.