Comment by nateb2022
3 hours ago
> Bespoke software can be orders of magnitude less complex.
Not in government. For payroll/HR, we're talking about hundreds of pages of legislative mandates, union bargaining rules, Title 5 statutory compliance, and FISMA/NIST regs. Just customizing something like PeopleSoft to fit is a large task in itself, let alone trying to implement bespoke software using an engineering pool that isn't even large enough to modernize the software it currently owns.
Bespoke sounds nice and works well in startups but that's not the context we're discussing. Check out Phoenix Pay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system and understand the US is even more complex.
I’ve worked on HR software. There are currently at least 3 large scale, bespoke, homegrown payroll/HR systems in use by the Federal government. There used to be many more. There are many reasons to outsource software but the government can’t hire enough engineers is not one of them. It’s clearly been done before.
>Just customizing something like PeopleSoft to fit is a large task in itself, let alone trying to implement bespoke software
Customizing large enterprise software is more like writing bespoke software than it is what most people think of when you use the word customization. You end up paying enormous vendor margins on top of the costs for something that is effectively bespoke software.
There is so much bespoke software out there that is at least as complex as government payroll software.
This AI phase reminds me of the early web, when "my cousin coulda done it in a week". Folks fail to appreciate the complexity of commercial realities.