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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

The system that won the bidding is called DUBU. https://www.kombit.dk/dubu

The system that does the same thing DUBU does today, and the next DUBU will, good enough is called sbsys.

It’s not a secret, the 120 million might be 128 million though, but it’s not completely unreasonable for what it’s meant to do, the politics involved and so on. It’s just hilarious that communal co-ownership of software did it for 2 million. I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.

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> I mean you could argue that it’s illustrating how silly enterprise software companies are in general, but it is what it is.

Enterprise software companies know exactly what they're doing - fleecing the government for every single dime they can.

You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders.

Blame the government for its ridiculously bloated procurement process, uncompetitive career opportunities and a broken management system.

Government waste is utterly gobsmacking.

I’d say the same thing for enterprise companies though. It’s not like they bank that money.

They use it on project management, sales management, key account management, four layers of testing setup that still lets bugs slip into production, and a whole lot of other useless stuff.

I mean, the budget is transparent, they spend less than 20% on actual development and makes less than 10% out as profits, so that’s 70% inefficiency, and they only won the contracts because all the big companies are like that.

You’re not wrong though, turning it political isn’t really great for building software. My point is just that a big company is almost as political as the public sector, and sometimes they are less adaptive because their political leadership and vision changes slower and has smaller range.

The equivalent system sbsys was also build by private sector developers you know, but here the political side handled the project management and codebase leadership, and apparently we’re just a lot better at that.

Oh yeah, companies of substantial size have large/meaningless overheads too. That's the unfortunate consequence of having a lot of people work together with varying opinions/motivations.

They also have to spend a lot on warm bodies/lobbying to get those contracts in the first place.

I'm not letting the enterprise providers off the hook. Just pointing out (as you note) that true responsibility lies with the project managers. Ineffectual project managers mean overblown budgets and undercooked results.

> You can't blame them - they're just acting on their natural capitalist instinct to maximize their return to shareholders.

Yeah don't blame the exploiter, blame the victim!

I am sickened by this philosophy. Why do we let people get away with doing horrible things because "they're just doing their job". This sort of thinking breeds more immoral actions that are easily excused.

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