[Jean-Philipe]

I actually had to work with two German government agencies, digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them. There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle, but no show stoppers.

I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.

[danjac]

Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether and create a government digital agency (whether at local or national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov project seems to point the way.

[nickkell]

They have one already, but it's probably not as big: https://digitalservice.bund.de/

[nicbou]

I have worked with some of those people, and I can say that the agency is in really good hands.

[jupp0r]

This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.

[gwright]

> There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles.

I can imagine a lot of ways to interpret this but none really make sense in the context of your post.

What "equality principle" leads to a conclusion that a government employee doing X must be paid a fraction of what a private employee doing X is paid? I'm confused.

[jupp0r]

There are salary tiers that are the same across all government employees. A new grad software engineer with a master's degree will earn the same as a new grad biologist, even though the outside government salaries for the two might differ by a factor of 2. There is no practical way of paying somebody more than this narrow wage band even if it's impossible to fill the position with somebody competent. You end up not having good engineers working for the government, unless they are willing to take an extremely steep pay cut.

[gwright]

OK, I'm not sure I would describe that phenomena as an "equality principle" though. That is just a misleading label for a misguided bureaucratic rule.

[jupp0r]

Sorry for the confusion. Not a native english speaker here (although I've been living in the US for a few years).

[dmoy]

Equality among tiers of government employee. A similar though less pronounced issue exists with the US and the General Schedule. Entry level SWE who get lucky and enter at like grade 9 make maybe 50% of what they could at FAANG as a new grad. For seniors it's even worse.

[nisa]

I don't think that's true - the pay is still good for eastern germany and outside of bigger cities and if there would be an honest effort I'm sure they'll find qualified personell. Additionally it's possible to have a non-profit company or a corporative.

And maybe that keeps the enterprise java and cloud architects away so projects could actually succeed without complexity or cost explosion :)

I guess it's because the state is forbidden to compete with the private sector by law/regulation (thank you neoliberals / capitalists...) so it just can't start something like this and the other big problem is due to the federated nature of german governance everony like to be the king in their area of control and collaborative projects tend to fail due to that. That was a huge problem during covid when every health department did their own thing regarding managing the data...

Additionally lot's of the personell that would be in charge for that is unfortunatly either delusional or incompetent from my limited experience so this could also backfire and turn into a subsidy for the buddys of the person.

But it's even basic things that are broken. Why has every city / municipality reinvent the wheel and organize their it stuff on their own... a non-profit or coop on the state level could just support them, do procurement and initial setup - this would result in more security and stability and less costs. There now some talks in that direction - it's 2023

[nisa]

Very happy to hear that! Heard similiar stories but usally it's on a lower level where things can go right more often than not. The bigger the projects the bigger the problems.