[DanielBMarkham]

It's really hard to overstate how bad the government is at software development. I've worked in several contracts with various agencies, and I know people who still stay in the game, and the best ones I've seen are ten years behind everybody else and spending about 50x what they should to get things done. They're simply swamped in bureaucratic molasses.

For instance, even though the "business" of the government (things like tax collection or tracking shipping containers) uses much less data than say a Google does, not only do they have a CIO, they have an entire battalion of CIOs. There's a whole club of just government CIOs. Each of those, of course, has a full staff. When contracts are paid, it usually goes through some completely different set of people than the people who actually receive the value.

If you're a company trying to help the government, you'd laugh your ass off if it weren't so damned sad. Your programmers -- and you gotta love this -- are all considered little cardboard cutouts, like cookies. If you have a problem to solve, the correct answer isn't what technology you would use to solve it. Usually that's outside your control anyway. The correct answer is how many "standard" programmers it would take to get it done. The quality of a "standard" programmer varies, but it's usually somebody with a few weeks of training and a desire to be anywhere but here. Many times your government partners are incompetent and a danger to themselves and others when it comes to technology. They want the moon but they don't want to take any political risk at all. I had one guy just flat out tell me: you guys make all the tough choices and if it goes well I'll take all the credit. If it fails it's all your fault. At least he was honest.

I could go on, but I don't want to get into a rant. Ever wonder how the IRS spent billions on upgrades with nothing to show for it? Or how the FBI's new case management system was a total Charlie Foxtrot? Geesh. 33.3 million is getting off lucky.

[yen223]

Ex-employee of Accenture here. Accenture basically earns most of their money selling horrendously overpriced "solutions" to customers who don't care about cost.

The thing is, the bureaucracy that you mentioned, it's not just the government. Too many large companies, especially non-IT ones, assume that you can complete a project by throwing 100 mediocre programmers at it.

[DanielBMarkham]

Your point is well taken. It is not just the government.

The thing is that most private systems operating like this go broke -- unless they have lots of federal protection. You can't spend billions in the private sector without people noticing. The same is not true in the government sector. While all big organizations are like this, the government wastes money on IT at another level entirely. (I know, I've worked with lots of both government agencies and large organizations)