To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!
I’ve seen too many cases where people suffer the consequences of their own ideas being implemented (large or lower scale), convinced that if we just turn this knob a little more, it’ll finally work. Because of that, I don’t spend much energy on them anymore.
This really becomes a problem when you have individual agencies making decisions on contracting resources even though they don’t have anyone qualified to vet the resources they are bringing in. If each agency had a decent to good lead architect around the $200k range they could save so much money on less than necessary contracts and cloud development “deals”. But that pay band tops out around $140k.
The only folks making good money at the state government level are sports coaches and medical directors. The pay for public employees is public so it’s easy to confirm.
At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure.
Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs.
Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year.
It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system.
But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.
In government you have to remember that it’s people playing with other people’s money, thinking all along that it’s their money, i.e., a sense of entitlement. So you end up with many of the same kinds and types of deep problems that you see in things like investment frauds, trust fund babies, spoiled children, and drug addicts. It’s probably not a coincidence that those often heavily overlap, including among bureaucrats and people dependent of government money.
We are talking about a militating of resources and from that comes a whole cascading effect, e.g., the children of someone who has actually produced something well through the effective and productive allocation of resources, resource maxing, so to say; will produce far better progeny than someone whose efforts have never led to anything productive as a bureaucrat that simply brushes one billion dollar failure after another under the rug while coping with ever more vociferously proclamations of how important and good of a job he does.
A good case in point is how America is $38 trillion in realized national debt, all while the “boomer generation” is at the same time declaring how wonderful things are, regardless of the political party. Those two things cannot be reconciled and will not perdure.
