I understand the annoyance of it being replaced for a more complex more expensive system, but I would also like to know: What was the reasoning provided and what did decision makers truly believe about the whole thing?
It was an open government tender process, for which I, or the company I worked for was not eligible, despite the tender being "open". You see, a decade-long pedigree of actually having implemented the software used for this purpose did not qualify us for replacing it with a v2.0.
There are rules, you see? They have to be followed! Or else.
Or else bad things might happen, like money being wasted.
The fact that the end-result of this process was that a 9-digit sum was spent on something I spat out in my spare time in under a year -- and was used for a decade -- was of no relevance.
> what did decision makers truly believe about the whole thing?
Their concerns started only when the whole thing blew up and started making headlines. Then nothing happened to them personally, so their concerns evaporated along with the taxpayer funds they had wasted.
I think most readers, including myself, empathize with you and understand the frustration and absurdity. But you are also telling just one side of the story (yours) and I imagine that v.2.0 specs had certain requirements and features, possibly required by legislation, that needed to be followed and implemented. When you say, dismissively, There are rules, you see? They have to be followed! that's when I, and likely others, start to wonder if you are really providing the full story, or if you actually even understand the differences between your simple app and the updated version.
Nah, this is full story 99.9% of the time. I worked for government and this happened all the time - nobody ever got fired for choosing 500x more expensive IMB general solution versus something that you customized for the stakeholders and has 0 issues and million users and 0 incidents. I had personaly many such products being on the side of the government once, and on the side of the private vendor after that.
One example - I created Help Desk system for the public finances of entire country using Redmine and other FOSS tools. The cost was 0, the time to implement it was single year of not so focused work and it served hundreeds of thousands of people. Then IBM took over with its service desk, implmenting it for years and costing infinity. They could get into tender, I could not since I and my team are small company. The funny thing is that stakeholder subteam abandoned it and returned to my solution (with 0 maintenance since I left the company).
This is typical. You need to know how government works to understand it. I understand it, but do not approve it. I am also not frustrated about it, its just how this world works currently, in majority of the countries as far as I know.
> Nah, this is full story 99.9% of the time. I worked for government and this happened all the time
Same experience, also in the private sector.
> This is typical. You need to know how government works to understand it. I understand it, but do not approve it. I am also not frustrated about it, its just how this world works currently, in majority of the countries as far as I know.
Yep, I mean the issues with unnecessary jobs and inflated projects and budgets is not exactly news, I think it's just part of society's struggle to adapt to a post scarcity economy, while not shortening the amount of working hours. It's not really surprising that it also affects software.
No this is really how stupidly it works.
Government software consulting is insane.
The licensing/certification stuff basically creates monopolies.
My spouse worked at a digital agency a decade ago, that it turned out was basically a near-monopoly provider of certain types of software for the local government.
The thing was, none of the work was actually done by them.
It was all subbed out to 3rd party dev shops who couldn't qualify themselves for the required licensing.
Further, they subbed out all the dev offshore.
So the government was both overpaying for offshore devs, and thinking they were spending money locally because the intermediary happened to be local.
They could have gotten the same work for 40-50% cheaper just skipping the front company, or spent the same and hired actual local devs they thought they were.
You're either preaching to people who agree with your perspective or talking to a well-tread HN persona where all management is incompetent nincompoops and the world would be a better place if only devs had unilateral powers in all areas, including those where they have no experience or even visibility. You are being quite charitable to place the majority in the former category. See follow-on comments (both current and soon-to-come) for supporting evidence.
Just to agree with the OP, I've just gone through a government tender process to buy a piece of software for my organisation. The number of people who could bid on the tender was incredibly limited. We've ended up with a 'solution' where the best and cheapest company was excluded from bidding. Mainly cause they struggled with our byzantine tendering process, that gives us 'best value' according to our procurement team. It's not the only broadly failed IT system that we have which has gone through these processes, so it's not a one off either.
We're currently busy throwing away solid pieces of open source software that have worked well for years in favour of enterprise garbage.
Government software contracts are never meant to succeed. They are meant to burn as much cash as possible. Everyone I know who has worked in Arlington has the same story. Huge headcounts. Billable hours. Literal coked out VPs on yachts.
This is too simplistic view of the state of the affairs.
If that was so, countries would not work at all. There is always a service that needs to absolutelly work, or your government is fucked and lots of its people. For those projects you absolutelly need to hire those that will provide desired outcome without failure. Most of the services are not so crucial and in those you can have such failures without much of a problem, it even seems "good" sometimes as you must employ number of people to fix service mistakes constantly.
Your only mistake, then, was that unlike a consultancy based solution, not enough people were able to take credit for it. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but to sell an idea, it's best to make every buyer think it was theirs all along, then only will it stay in place.
In the US, especially with federal money, this would be ample justification for a congressional inquiry and a potential fraud, waste, and abuse claim.
The usual outcome of the investigation is uncovering a bunch of people just saying that they were doing what they were told to do, and no one taking the common sense approach of looking at the current vendor. It might push one or two incompetent middle managers into retirement.
That said, it may get fixed for the next round of bids. It may have long term change depending on which congresspeople were involved.
The only result of this would be millions more dollars "investigating" version 1, led by the bureaucrats who made the decision to build a v.2, including paying an army of consultants to find every possible flaw and non-compliant feature, in order to justify their decisions. The horns will really come out then... v.1 did not achieve 100% accessibility according to OSHA, cookies had the potential to leak data, the JS packages underneath were not vetted and compliant, no guard against denial-of-service, the list of possibilities is endless... point being, when you force gov't officials to find a flaw in something because their job is being questioned, they essentially have unlimited resources to find that flaw and justify their own existence.
Yes, government tender has rules. And if the decision makers don't follow the rules, they can suffer all kinds of consequences, including personal bankruptcy and jail time. Obviously they wouldn't bend the rules just because it would save government money and lead to a better outcome.
Reasoning? Hah-ha. Haaaaa...
It was an open government tender process, for which I, or the company I worked for was not eligible, despite the tender being "open". You see, a decade-long pedigree of actually having implemented the software used for this purpose did not qualify us for replacing it with a v2.0.
There are rules, you see? They have to be followed! Or else.
Or else bad things might happen, like money being wasted.
The fact that the end-result of this process was that a 9-digit sum was spent on something I spat out in my spare time in under a year -- and was used for a decade -- was of no relevance.
> what did decision makers truly believe about the whole thing?
Their concerns started only when the whole thing blew up and started making headlines. Then nothing happened to them personally, so their concerns evaporated along with the taxpayer funds they had wasted.