[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

This is the way it seems to go in the public sector, at least here in Norway.

1. Get an n year government contract for some huge public IT overhaul. E.g building a new hospital journal system for a large region(this example is real, google "helseplatformen")

2. Spend years developing this huge proprietary .net monolith with a waterfall model, and minimal user interaction and testing during most of the contract.

3. Release an MVP by the end of the contract that's barely suited for the task(inevitable due to inherently broken dev model) and causes a huge amount of problems

4. Get another n year contract to fix the thing

5. Print money.

[matsemann]

I've done big government contracts for many years as a consultant in Norway, and haven't really seen this. Guess it's because Java is so much better than those .NET monoliths ;)

But seriously, I guess it depends on the maturity of those writing the tender / anbud. Too often they get bamboozled by big4 like consultancies (Accenture, Sopra Steria etc..) that act more like project managers and sales people than developers.

The company I used to work for actually stopped giving offers on lots of these kind of projects. None of us wanted to work on these kind of bureaucratic nightmares where one is set up to fail. It's much more fun to deliver something of value, even if one doing something else could've squeezed out some more money. We "fired" clients that didn't give us opportunity to actually do good or have an impact.

I think more of these public sector tenders should stop focusing on "projects", and instead focusing on just getting the correct people that can help them iteratively move in the correct direction.

Unfortunately it's often hard to get money for this. Easier to say "we need X millions for this huge project".

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Thanks for the insider perspective. My experience as a dev in this sector is limited to interviewing for a few consultancies and noping out once I got a look at the code. But most massively public systems I interact with regularly seem to track with both our POVs. Of course the client side is definitely at fault too, for being naïve about these consulting firms.

I wholly agree with you that big projects are not the way to go. I think a push towards open source would greatly improve accountability. And I don't see why say the tax reporting system needs to be proprietary besides a thin veil of security through obscurity.

[matsemann]

I was at NAV during their big transformation. The first year I was there, it was this huge billion kroner project. Probably more money was spent on business consultants speccing the project than developers. My company constantly complained about this way of working, that it will only lead to failure. Of course it did with missed deadlines etc, and eventually the huge project was scrapped.

They got a new director of IT, and managed to hire some hard-hitters internally as well. No longer listening to snake oil consultants, they finally started working the way we wanted. Smaller projects, if projects at all. More continuous deliveries. We got ownership all the way to production instead of just sending our code to some server people to deploy 4 times a year. All the code got open sourced etc. And us as consultants actually preferred this. Our company got paid essentially the same, but now we actually delivered value and worked with them instead of an uphill battle "against" them.

[actionfromafar]

Job security through obscurity.

[jongjong]

The worst part is that the people who work for these companies who work for the government think that they're efficient. In reality, there are often startups out there which could build the same system better in 1/10th of the time.

The bigger an organization is, the more easy money they have, the worst their expectations are when it comes to software development. I once worked for such a company as a software developer and I was shocked that I kept getting positive reviews in spite of being the laziest I had ever been. I was spending most of my time watching videos on YouTube; but the little work I did between YouTube videos was somehow better than that of their average employee...

[ozim]

Worst part is that even if you are efficient startup you are not going to get government contract because of red tape and also to get such contract you have to know right people.

Then even if you get such contract you probably stop being efficient - because of red tape and lack of incentives to still be efficient because money will flow either you are efficient or not.

[kabes]

I've been involved in some big public sector projects and it indeed went like this, but I'd say most of the blame was on the government.

The tender requirements were written by a general tender-writing team of the government.

We only got to meet the actual users of the software-to-build after we'd won the tender. Apparently what was in the tender was a complete mismatch with what the actual users wanted (as far as they actually knew what they wanted).

What the users wanted didn't matter, because payment was based on checking off all tender requirements. Oh, one of the tender requirements was "all business logic needs to be configurable by the users" and more gems like that.

[saiya-jin]

Definitely true in Denmark too, their back in 2010s new tax IT system (skat-something) made a friend of mine who was sub-subcontracted from his 1-man company a wealthy man (wealthy as fully pay for small flat in central Prague, then for big flat a bit more off and then land & building a house a bit further away, only from income from this within few years, with 2 kids and wife not working).

When you get most of daily contractor fees directly, you easily end up with 15,000k$ net monthly income, working mostly remotely, in a country that had median monthly income below 1,000$.

Not that he worked hard or anything, frequently fridays looked like 'ok I am free give me some work' which almost never came. It was done on some ancient long dead weblogic/wslt things, stuff I can hack together in ie apache camel or similar in few afternoons (not 100% of it but core definitely yes).

Definitely a fault of government, no private company will come and say 'hey we can do it in 10% of the time / costs but we wont be using these big brand technologies (TM)'. Can't imagine there wasnt some big corruption too. IIRC prod launch was some major clusterfuck which filled newspapers for some time.

[ElfinTrousers]

Sounds like my experience with software procurement in state government in the USA. The basic problem as I see it is that the companies that get contracts aren't especially good at writing software, where they really shine is in understanding the intricacies of the procurement process.

[magicalhippo]

> The basic problem as I see it is that the companies that get contracts aren't especially good at writing software

At least here in Norway, a huge part I think is that the buyer doesn't have a good grip on what they need. The people making writing the bids or managing the projects are too far removed from the day-to-day operation to write down proper requirements.

Don't get me wrong, it's hard. But for these large projects I think many would have gone a whole lot better if the buyer had spent more time understanding their own organization and their needs before doing these large projects.

[pryelluw]

Bad software is universal. It’s purpose is to milk the public tit. Not to deliver actual value. The value is in the money being paid.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Sounds like defense industry software. You have super geniuses laying down the actual design and hardware in a few years and troglodytes writing the code for 20 years.