In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms.
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!
That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.
The Australian federal government goes through waves of "reducing the size of the public service" by firing and/or capping full-time hires, but the work's still there to be done so contractors get the gig.
This is the thing. Its much less expensive to have these sorts of knowledge employees on government staff who just do this sort of work all the time, but governments prefer to spend more (much much more) on contractors. I suspect its partly because they are always wanting to announce down-sizing initiatives to appease the right, but I think more cynically, its because contractors will more reliably give them the 'right answer' than career civil servants and there's also the potential for kickbacks. Some of those profits paid to contractor companies might find their way back into campaign contributions.
At the government level, it’s mostly driven by ideology. I never came across a situation where a service improved after being "liberalized". Never. Not once. It is always end up in a combo of: poorer quality and (much) higher cost.
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.
What does liberalized mean here? Also if you have time which ideology was holding the government/deloitte back here? I'm not sure what the message is here but I'm willing to with some more concrete.
The Liberals are a party in Australia famous for selling off everything the government has and replacing everyone with contractors only for it all to eventually be bought back and people rehired later.
Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ultimate responsibility for all the technical stuff makes 70% of what I do as a consultant working for the state.
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.
As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway.
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.
Usually it’s not the amount of work, it’s whether that work is necessary at all and a question of quality because the interests are largely aligned when they should be in tension and some opposition. Bad things happen when the interests of all parties are in one direction, usually due to a lack of real consequences.
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.
