[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.