[stewx]

I read one expert describe the Phoenix pay system as "garbage in, garbage out". The government signed hundreds of separate collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions, each with their own different rules for pay, overtime, etc, making the system highly complex. Because of this complexity, the software handling it is full of bugs. Arguably it's partially a failure on the government's part not to negotiate a standard set of pay practices.

[halostatue]

The Phoenix pay system is something crafted by the previous government (under Harper) with the idea of creating a "Shared Government Services" department so that each department would not have its own pay system, its own email, etc. The only redundant systems permitted were those related to national security (and AIUI, that was grudgingly given).

It’s completely unsurprising that a top-down mandating of shared services requiring a rewrite / reimplementation of pretty much everything that government departments use would go bad very quickly and have lingering effects. It’s also understandable that it was impossible to reverse the course once started, because institutional knowledge was lost (people who knew how the old systems worked retired out or quit, etc.). This, of course, has led to throwing more money at a money pit.

Fortunately, it looks like they’ve finally filled it—but that doesn’t do anything for the thousands of people who were broken by this boondoggle.

[shagie]

That reminds me of "Why Payroll is Hard" - https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyIsPayrollHard

However, that isn't an excuse for the "we need to be able to audit the system and explain where each cent in the deductions goes." For anything dealing with money, that is a fundamental and necessary requirement.

Bugs happen. Payroll is one of the the more complex systems. Payroll without auditing is something that is unforgivable.

[tablespoon]

> The government signed hundreds of separate collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions... Arguably it's partially a failure on the government's part not to negotiate a standard set of pay practices.

Honestly, I doubt the fault lies with unions. Did their previous pay system handle this? Don't private sector companies handle lots of different union rules? Doesn't stuff like SAP handle far more complicated legal and accounting rules across many many nations?

My guess is what really happened is they cheaped out given their requirements and/or adopted too-aggressive deadlines, and the failure proceeded from there.

> Because of this complexity, the software handling it is full of bugs.

The world is complicated. It's hella backwards to expect it to twist to conform to what would be simple to implement in software.

[ptudan]

Or, they could have built a system capable of having a bunch of different knobs and levers that each CBA represents.

Life is complex, technology should support that. We should not have to dumb life down to match.

[stavros]

> Life is complex, technology should support that. We should not have to dumb life down to match.

This sentence implies that the opposite of "complex" is "dumb", though.

[ptudan]

Ignoring that this is pointless pedantry, I don't really think so. I think it says that complex is on the high end of the scale, and dumbing something down slides it towards the low end of simple.

[stavros]

I think things can be simpler without being dumb.