[mmedellin]

This is most acutely felt in acquisitions where those responsible for deciding what to build and buy have very limited understanding of software development. The failed rollout of healthcare.gov is the billboard for this problem.

There's an effort to train civilian acquisition professionals on how to buy and build better software, but they are pretty quickly hired by contractors or the commercial sector since their new skillset fetches a larger salary than what the government can pay (even with promotion).

I agree there needs to be a special schedule. I do think an overhaul of the civilian service is worth exploring.

[mistrial9]

second hand knowledge in California is - the State is large and wealthy enough to have some echoes of the actual Federal govt.. and repeated words from direct software project participants was .. that mid-level bureaucrats from the "controlling" contract originator, would spuriously and without warning change the requirements.. sometimes so much so that it would invalidate large'ish portions of completed work.. and this happened all the way into the final month of a supposedly serious deadline, with failure to perform clauses and all that, at stake.

A first-hand voice from California State software projects said - that the required prime contractor had 10+ person teams and $1m+ budget, and failed to build useful results. The final result from the project(s) more than once, was "oh oops, doesn't fit with -other framework- cannot be deployed". In other words, literally making things that are abandoned on Day 1 of deployment, for large money, with plenty of apparent pressure on "workers" to perform. etc..

[wslack]

> I do think an overhaul of the civilian service is worth exploring.

There are decades of reports and proposals about this. Unfortunately, we keep learning the same lessons over and over.