"it appears that the word wrack ... have been replaced by the word rack"

Unlike Texas, where the state government employs thousands of programmers because they are so liberal. I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of government programmers from Texas. They'll all tell you the same thing - getting stuff done within red tape of a government agency takes them twice as long as long as it took them in the private sector jobs - unless there is a federal grant or contract involved, in which case it takes twenty times as long.

One project they did last year was for a federal government contract, for OSHA. They spent a year and a half developing the system, then during the beta test OSHA cancelled the project. This is after the feds had them write a system where it would print all the database records on paper, to be sent to the feds, who would manually enter it into a computer file, then send that file back to Texas, right back to the same agency who had sent it to them in the first place. That's about typical for the federal government. Government is one thing - it's supposed to be fair and deliberate, not far and efficient. The FEDERAL government is something else entirely.

Just think of it as a jobs program/economic stimulus/enrichment of a random company on the public dole. It makes perfect sense if you buy into the economic value of the government scaling big bureaucracies that depend on a competent contractor to help them scale so big being beneficial to the economy. Just think about how much more beneficial it is, then, to have it done three or four times to get it right.

On the other hand, consumers could have spent that money rather than paying the government to pay those extra contractor costs. But then again, consumers tend to over-spend anyway and corrode the economy. Sometimes that's to the point that the government has to choose between bailing out the banks and bailing out the consumers. Then again, the government encourages that, too. And of course rather than bailing out the consumers they bail out the banks so they can create more consumer debt and start all over.

The main difference between big government folks and small government folks, you see, isn't that one thinks the government is well intentioned and the other thinks it is evil and needs to be kept in check. That's certainly a factor, but it's not the main one. The main difference is that big government people have an idealized concept of the government as a doer of good. Small government people are skeptical that anything too big and too detached from the lives of real people can reasonably accomplish good things for the majority of people on a regular basis.

Why did the perfectly spherical chicken cross the road?

To get to the black hole (or neutron star).

Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards! ;-)

And, then contrast that to how much controls were on the people who oversaw it, how well they communicated/knew the requirements, how often they changed them, and how much political infighting they did.

I've been on several projects trying to replace legacy systems. And, as often as not, the client is fighting among themselves, the definitions are either never nailed down or are constantly shifting, and the people involved have no actual experience in managing large scale IT projects.

I'm more likely to think this is a management issue than an issue with who was doing the work.

Ask anybody who has been involved in such a project.

I was on one project that had 11 PMs (no, I'm not kidding), all with their own agenda, and no two of them could ever agree on anything.

It was a truly terrible experience. The people in charge of the existing technology didn't want change and actively sabotaged stuff. The various stakeholders were all trying to carve out their own little fiefdom, the users weren't consulted until late into the project, and the specs might as well have been written in smoke.

The people trying to actually build it were constantly being told "no, don't do that, do this" only to have someone else say "why the hell are you doing this when we told you to do that?". Heck, I've left a meeting one day where everybody said "OK, we agree to do this", only to have a directive come down a day later which said "we can't possibly do that".

Combine that with vastly complex legacy systems nobody really fully understands, because it's been hacked, extended, patched, and a zillion other things for a few decades and you end up with a complete mess.

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, my money is on a failure of the owners of the project to actually take ownership and responsibility, instead of endlessly changing their mind and finding other people to blame. Documenting all of the bullshit becomes a full time job, because you need to CYA for when things go wrong later.

Some problems simply can't be fixed with good technical staff. Because the technical staff is just there to be yelled at and be scapegoats for management incompetence.

And, now they'll say it was all the fault of the contractor.

In reality, I suspect it's government infighting, poorly defined (and constantly changing) specs, and congress-critters trying to get a piece of the pie for their own districts.

They always blame the contractor but usually it's being managed by incompetent people without enough accountability and controls.

In fairness, I've seen a lot of legacy migrations fail, because it's often damned near impossible to understand the existing system well enough to write a replacement for it, and then you end up breaking everything which has been integrated with it for years.

I've been on a few large legacy replacement projects which fell squarely on their nose as the project progressed, largely because the system is vastly more complex than the initial analysis, and people make it impossible at every turn.

These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.

Oh, well then, why didn't they just say so?

I knew chicken was the universal standin for what things taste like, I had no idea it was also used for what things look like. :-P

Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.

WTF does a large neutron star look like then?

If we start getting regular turn-over of elected officials then the back-room deals, the special interest groups, the lobbying all become less effective as they're starting from 0 every election cycle

Not really, the former elected people just become the new lobbyists. Or the former lobbyists become the new political appointees.

And the cycle continues.

If the signal wasn't scrambled, all those naked blue-colored girls I saw on a TV as a teenager may actually be naked blue-colored girls... from SPACE!

I'll be in my bunk. ;-)

In order to compensate you for our insecure products and indifference to your privacy ... we're giving you more of our crappy, insecure products?

Wow, did Sony write this settlement themselves?

What a joke.

Of course they get measured. In the long term if they deliver too many screwed up projects, their superiors stop giving them projects.

Sadly, in my experience, they blame it on their team, and get promoted.

Bad managers are surprisingly good at making it look like someone else's fault.

Gender is not binary. There are, I believe, quite a large number of transgender, transexual and gender fluid people in the slashdot community. I do not know about the person you are arguing with but I suspect they should and are losing their arguments. However if you attack them on the basis of expressed gender then you are going to alienate a lot of transgender people if your attitude to them is that they are prima facie liars. I would think it best to drop the gender issue. [Demena, 2014-07-20]

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I support the transgendered community and certainly don't consider them liars. But it seems very unlikely that Jane/Lonny Eachus is part of that community. If I'm wrong then I'll apologize, retract my accusations, and support Lonny Eachus as she transitions to Jane.