[mjburgess]

Yes, that's exactly how it reads.

It bends over backwards to say that somehow this approach meets some non-functional reqs. But it cannot plausibly meet any such requirements well. Even praising the "quality" of the haskell code whose job it is to provide a casio-watch level of compute power over an immutable distributed ledger. For $250m!

It would be fascinating if, eg., the Australian gov forced Accenture to release their internal docs. I imagine there are several versions of me with with much much more strongly-worded things to say.

This feels like it would go well in a netflix documentary retrospective on the "blockchain con" and how it duped gen-z and ceos.

[blitzar]

The bit I never understand, and these projects crop up all the time - for 250mil ... seed a company that you 100% own to build the solution.

Or if you have to pay 100mil for the drop in already complete solution (which sounds insanely expensive).

[mjburgess]

When you outsource dev, you also outsource responsibility.

Much of what board members do is play games to keep themselves in power.

[blitzar]

Major IT projects are a graveyard for executives, anyone who could reasonably succeed knows they are destined to fail, and they fail so often that big co's now have so much legacy chewing-gum holding together their systems that implementing any system is destined to fail.

The most likely to work solution - rip out everything in the company and start from scratch. Short of that you are looking at - $50mil to modernise with a drop in (fully functioning) component in a 2 week install + 5 years and $100mil to write translation layers to all the other systems which will still fail on edge cases.

Every now and then the executive that believes in sunshine, rainbows and unicorns comes along, slaps down a stupid budget and tries, with good intentions I might add. They however, are predisposed to buy into the people and vendor that sell magic beans. And they cycle continues...

[mrjin]

It was never about outsourcing.

[mrjin]

If you interpret it from a different angle, it would be much clearer.

1. Those made the decisions are smart, really really smart people. If they were dumb, there is no way they can get to where they are now. So if the decisions look questionable, they probably are indeed questionable. But that does not mean they made a mistake. Smart people don't do obvious stupid moves, if they do, there must be some reasons we don't know.

2. If the budget is not used, at best it lapses or worse will be used by someone else. So do whatever they can if they have nothing better to do with it.

3. If you do something for someone-else with someone-else's money, neither the price nor the quality would be much of your concern.

4. After handling meat, you know, there is oil on your hands.

Put all that together...