How does one go about getting contracts like these with the government to do trivial tasks for exorbitant amounts of money?
The cost and job security comes from the fact that you have to do it in Lotus Notes.
I wouldn't say anything, given that we know very, very little about the system in question.
The point is that the job is essentially data management.
You might be right, but you could so easily be wrong. You really have no idea what the job entails. The software might be great, it might be a nightmare to maintain/operate.
What I do know is $88K/year for any consultant typically doesn't get you much.
The guy I responded to implied that the fact that it is for the police department made it more difficult. My position is that that has no bearing on the difficulty of the task.
Who's saying it would be a necessary one? If you inherit an awful system that's time consuming to maintain and operate, you have a few options. You can simply maintain it and bill for that, or you can improve the system. Sometimes it's easy to improve the system, sometimes it's not. It all depends on the circumstances.
I'm sorry. What point were you trying to make?
> The guy I responded to implied that the fact that it is for the police department made it more difficult.
Do you think that's an unreasonable assumption?
Forget whether the systems are actually mission critical or not. The only thing that actually matters when it comes to billing a customer are the terms of the service agreement. I've worked on government contracts where my company was significantly fined if the system did not operate at some minimal operational threshold. The system was definitely not mission critical, but we built it like it was and billed them for it. (We also got a bonus for getting the job done early)
I don't care if he's only working on the parking ticket system. If it's clear from the service agreement that it's going to require a significant portion of his time/energy to service it, the last thing you want to do as a consultant is to underestimate the effort.
I have no idea if this guy is taking advantage of the Baltimore PD or not. Neither do you. What I do know is $176K for two years is not a lot for an organization the size of the Baltimore PD.
> My position is that that has no bearing on the difficulty of the task.
I agree. The terms of the service agreement combined with complexity/maintainability of the system determine how much effort is involved. Again, life/death doesn't dictate the price. The service agreement and expected level of effort do. However, knowing a project is for an organization like the Baltimore PD, it's not crazy to assume they might be more demanding than other customers. State and local governments can be a real pain the ass sometimes.
My position is you're pretending like you know this guy's business. You don't.
Never mentioned this. Never said boo one way or another.
Read what I actually wrote and not what you wanted me to write.
I said nothing about whether the cost is justified or not. I said the cost comes from getting someone who can program in Lotus Notes. That's all I said about it.
It is an unreasonable assumption to think that who you're building for makes the actual task more difficult.
> I agree.
Then what's up? You're agreeing with the only thing I'm actually saying. You had one guy saying it was trivial and another saying it was very difficult because it was for the police. I was saying it was neither. That it was equivalent in difficulty to another data management task. If anything people are downplaying the logistics involved in modern retail. Data management is a serious business.
> My position is you're pretending like you know this guy's business. You don't.
And his business isn't dealing with the police department. Because the guy I responded to isn't the guy in the article. So he doesn't know the business either. You are trying to chastise me for making an assumption when you assume I don't have experience, but no one else has claimed any experience in this matter either so their claims are just as invalid as mine according to your standard. They are also pretending to know the business. And so are you.
And by the way accidental and necessary difficulties are covered by Fred Brooks's essay, "No Silver Bullet". Accidental difficulties are difficulties we created. By choice of platform, technology, methodology, etc. So the system being a labyrinthine mess of Lotus Notes code is definitely an accidental difficulty. A necessary difficulty is something about the task itself that's inherently wicked.
So let's not descend into "but lives are at stake" hyperbole.
The vast majority of the database are fines and tickets. And it's likely a lot of this stuff is duplicated elsewhere. If the police have a warrant for someone's arrest, that warrant is also on file at the courthouse where it was issued. If they booked a suspect and he went to county jail, the county jail has that information. If the entire evidence log is wiped out, all of the necessary information is written on the bags.
There is a ton of redundancy both intentional and accidental built into law enforcement. No one is dying because you need to restore the database from a back up because Larry deleted the database again.
And even still. Even if the consequences are that much dire, the work is the same. There is nothing special about the data that makes it any more or less difficult to store.
To be clear; I'm not joking in that regards either. I used to do Foxpro work more than a decade ago and apparently it was still on my LinkedIn profile. About a year ago I got a call from a company that was super desperate; I turned them down because it had been a decade and I didn't feel like I was qualified to help them anymore, but they were desperate. Someone made bank off of that.