Comment by mcny
3 days ago
It is not just government. Private companies also have the same problem.
One reason why aws got so big is because it took months to get infrastructure to provision a virtual machine.
3 days ago
It is not just government. Private companies also have the same problem.
One reason why aws got so big is because it took months to get infrastructure to provision a virtual machine.
There's an obvious imminent selection bias with government projects because they're by nature subject to public scrutiny, plus the stakeholders are literally everyone. Private companies can waste billions internally and it'll never make it into the news.
In my first big job in a big legacy company, 30% of ongoing effort was "how to implement this feature which needs a database without a database".
We also paid some security company to use it as a proxy in front of our server to implement some server redirects because it was simpler than configuring our own servers. Simple one-liner conf changes were a week of emails with support staff.
something left out there with government though is incentive misaligned and hence corruption, which is smaller in a private scale (exists nonetheless)