I’m going to attribute some of that to greedy contractors who will absolutely milk gov’t contracts while often providing low -quality results, however I wouldn’t be surprised if a decent part of this is also due to government staff not knowing what the fuck they want and constantly “amending” the scope of the work
staff not knowing what the fuck they want and constantly “amending” the scope of the work
… is pretty darn common across the board. I’ve never done any government contracting but I find it hard to imagine that it could be worse than the private sector.
Government is really bad at project managing and/or procuring software, because they treat software projects like a construction project of a building. A giant monolith that needs to be master planned from the beginning and with every possible bit of scope crammed in because you can’t change it later.
I think that’s more of a “huge organization” thing than specific to governments. Over my career, I found that the larger the company, the more like quicksand or a vat of molasses the projects were.
Manufacturing facility with fewer than a couple of hundred employees seemed like the sweet spot, especially when still run by the founders or taken over by long term employees. Multinational mining companies – not so much. :)
This actually makes me feel a little bit better: it’s not me specifically they’re passive-aggressively refusing to cover, they’re just incompetent.
After Phoenix, you’d think that anyone taking on a government contract would make sure they’re adequately staffed to handle the workload.
After Phoenix, they realized they don’t have to.
I’m going to attribute some of that to greedy contractors who will absolutely milk gov’t contracts while often providing low -quality results, however I wouldn’t be surprised if a decent part of this is also due to government staff not knowing what the fuck they want and constantly “amending” the scope of the work
… is pretty darn common across the board. I’ve never done any government contracting but I find it hard to imagine that it could be worse than the private sector.
Government is really bad at project managing and/or procuring software, because they treat software projects like a construction project of a building. A giant monolith that needs to be master planned from the beginning and with every possible bit of scope crammed in because you can’t change it later.
I think that’s more of a “huge organization” thing than specific to governments. Over my career, I found that the larger the company, the more like quicksand or a vat of molasses the projects were.
Manufacturing facility with fewer than a couple of hundred employees seemed like the sweet spot, especially when still run by the founders or taken over by long term employees. Multinational mining companies – not so much. :)
Tech companies have no trouble building software products for the private sector compared to government