[listenallyall]

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.

[majkinetor]

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.

[pojzon]

The same experience in public healthcare.

I see the project paid for few willas of ppl involved at the top and was discontinued due to missed deadlines and missing functionality.

Noone was fired, sued or even scolded for wasting millions of taxpayer money.

All you can do is laugh. This world is a joke.

[thow232329]

> 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.

[steveBK123]

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.

[skeeter2020]

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.