• phx@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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

    • jadero@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • jadero@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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. :)

          • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Tech companies have no trouble building software products for the private sector compared to government