:amerikkka: why is the government so incompetent when it comes to software contracts? What a disgrace.
I know a guy who works in an adjacent department in the Arizona government that says this problem also exists in their system for unemployment benefits and SNAP. Now I'm starting to think it's by design. I mean, I did before, and even more so now.
As someone that (currently and hopefully for not much longer) works for a company that primarily contracts with the government, where to fucking begin...
The entire contract acquisition process is an absolute joke, and does very little to determine who can actually deliver the software that's needed. There's a ton of corruption and double-dipping bullshit, people that were feds for 20 years leave for a private company and suddenly that company gets a bunch of contracts, wEiRd.
Government officials are still hopelessly illiterate when it comes to technology and can't even be bothered to be trained on something as simple as a WYSISYG CMS editor. They literally only care about their career position and advancing their personal life, even when they have the power to actually improve people's lives. One of my teams was begging to let us use user research to solve problems people actually had, but no buy-in or interest from the fed product owner.
Instead they pushed us to use a platform that never made sense for what we were doing and seemed to have very little impact on real people that could use help. A few years later she leaves and guess where she goes? To the company that owns the software that she basically forced us to use instead of helping people.
It all comes down to what you already know as a leftist, the people making decisions have absolutely no interest in helping anyone.
I could probably write thousands of words on this, but it also makes me incredibly angry so I'm going to stop here for now.