Comment by Cthulhu_
2 hours ago
Because too few IT capable people are willing to work under the government's pay scales; in most cases going private / corporate earns more. So most Dutch IT projects end up with private companies, which also means that, in the case of DigID and the secure / official messaging platform, the hosting party can charge exorbitant rates. Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox? So when the government does its annual "it's time to fill in your taxes" message, they have to pay millions. Assuming they don't get a bulk deal, anyway.
There are plenty of people who are willing to work for the government and the pay is pretty decent. But their stack is often Microsoft based and their IT is located in Apeldoorn.
Who in their right mind would want to travel all the way to Apeldoorn.
A good example of internal development in the government is the police. They have internal development teams.
Most people managing stuff running in a datacenter don't live near that datacenter, it really doesn't matter where it's located. Also, the Netherlands is so tiny that crossing half of the country would still fall under "reasonable commute" in many places
Maybe that’s a reasonable commute to the US mind who isn’t used to work/life balance and likes spending unpaid hours in their car losing precious time with their family.
For me, a reasonable commute is a 10 minute bike ride to the office.
Apeldoorn is actually a very nice place, surrounded by nature.
For the record, Logius (the government owned enterprise dealing with DigID) vacancy for Java developer: https://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/vacatures/lead-java-devel... . 92k EUR per year for whatever they measure as 40 hours a week (I bet they close the shop at 4 pm).
>Did you know it costs 25 cents to send a message via the Berichtenbox?
In a country with paid toilets what do you expect lol
That doesn't sound bad at all. At least for me as a German that would be a salary that you wouldn't get at every random company.
Maybe the Netherlands are different (country can vary a lot with what is included in a salary) ?
1. Neoliberal doctrine: government=waste, company=efficient, let's privatize.
2. The ruling party for over a decade is the VVD, a Republican Party with training wheels, with Tea Party like spinoffs in varying degrees over rabid idiocy. The VVD heavily depend on a small network of big donors and as such are strongly nudged to source the policy advice from those networks. The IT backbone of those government agencies are thus run by big corporate IT shops, which is also politically convenient as you can shrug of responsibility when it turns out there is some light between the theory and the practice of the neoliberal doctrine.
I know people that work as contractors for the Dutch government. The government doesn't save money by hiring them through contractors. They cost more through contractors. But contracting allows private companies to act as gatekeepers and pocket some cash for essentially supplying full time employees. It's a form of corruption by well connected private contracting companies.