Comment by scarface74
3 years ago
In the US, congressmen make $170K a year, the president makes around $400K a year. Junior developers at large tech companies can make $170K easily in year one or two. Senior developers at tech companies make $400K+. Is the government going to pay tech workers enough to compete?
It could.
Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.
Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.
The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.
The companies bidding for the work would also be private industry. Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?
Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?
Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.
Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?
> Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?
I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.
> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?
It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.
> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?
At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.
3 replies →