[Cthulhu_]

Because too few IT capable people are willing to work under the government's pay scales; in most cases going private / corporate earns more. So most Dutch IT projects end up with private companies, which also means that, in the case of DigID and the secure / official messaging platform, the hosting party can charge exorbitant rates. Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox? So when the government does its annual "it's time to fill in your taxes" message, they have to pay millions. Assuming they don't get a bulk deal, anyway.

[mechazawa]

There are plenty of people who are willing to work for the government and the pay is pretty decent. But their stack is often Microsoft based and their IT is located in Apeldoorn.

Who in their right mind would want to travel all the way to Apeldoorn.

A good example of internal development in the government is the police. They have internal development teams.

[usrnm]

Most people managing stuff running in a datacenter don't live near that datacenter, it really doesn't matter where it's located. Also, the Netherlands is so tiny that crossing half of the country would still fall under "reasonable commute" in many places

[Aaargh20318]

Maybe that’s a reasonable commute to the US mind who isn’t used to work/life balance and likes spending unpaid hours in their car losing precious time with their family.

For me, a reasonable commute is a 10 minute bike ride to the office.

[Muromec]

It's about 3 hours to cross the country (Groningen to Rotterdam) on a train and that's assuming you live by the train station and your work is also near the station too, which is mostly not true. I know some people who commute for 1 hour and a half, but they aren't in the office really often.

[edwinjm]

Apeldoorn is actually a very nice place, surrounded by nature.

[WhyNotHugo]

Every person that I've met who worked in government IT in NL said they run on a Microsoft stack.

This puts a huge filters out who's willing to work for them.

[Balooga]

I used to work in Burbank and lived approximately 34 miles away, across Los Angeles. It could take almost three hours for me to drive home on a Friday afternoon on the freeway. This was before Covid, and traffic has only gotten worse.

[tmsbrg]

Apeldoorn? I don't know any government offices there. Most of it seems to concentrate in The Hague, with some agencies spread through the country.

[root-parent]

The whole Belasting is in Apeldoorn....

[Muromec]

Their (Logius) vacancy site says Den Haag, not Apeldoorn on the vacancy for Java developer (another reason to not work there -- java).

[Muromec]

For the record, Logius (the government owned enterprise dealing with DigID) vacancy for Java developer: https://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/vacatures/lead-java-devel... . 92k EUR per year for whatever they measure as 40 hours a week (I bet they close the shop at 4 pm).

>Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox?

In a country with paid toilets what do you expect lol

[Vespasian]

That doesn't sound bad at all. At least for me as a German that would be a salary that you wouldn't get at every random company.

Maybe the Netherlands are different (country can vary a lot with what is included in a salary) ?

[Muromec]

It's a good salary if you don't work for booking, amazon or whatever americans of the day. I got lowballed a few days ago with 85 in a startup. On the other hand this wont buy you a house in Amsterdam on one income.

[rahkiin]

Thats the top level though, attainable with 10-15 years of ‘lead java dev’ experience. That is different from 10-15 years of java experience

[AndyMcConachie]

I know people that work as contractors for the Dutch government. The government doesn't save money by hiring them through contractors. They cost more through contractors. But contracting allows private companies to act as gatekeepers and pocket some cash for essentially supplying full time employees. It's a form of corruption by well connected private contracting companies.

[vanviegen]

I think a large part of the reason is that government hiring is rather permanent. It's often prohibitively expensive/hard to get rid of underperforming or superfluous employees. Contracting is a way around that. That allows hiring workers in a temporary (project) budget. For decades, sometimes.

[exceptione]

1. Neoliberal doctrine: government=waste, company=efficient, let's privatize.

2. The ruling party for over a decade is the VVD, a Republican Party with training wheels, with Tea Party like spinoffs in varying degrees over rabid idiocy. The VVD heavily depend on a small network of big donors and as such are strongly nudged to source the policy advice from those networks. The IT backbone of those government agencies are thus run by big corporate IT shops, which is also politically convenient as you can shrug of responsibility when it turns out there is some light between the theory and the practice of the neoliberal doctrine.