Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think this is an issue in most countries.

Government Development jobs just don't pay enough to be competitive for talent. So instead talent goes to outsourcers. Here in the Netherlands that has meant most big government development projects are done by outsourcers. Which leads to bad incentive alignment. Yielding cost overruns, projects that are DOA, and projects with way to large scope. And at the bottom line, the consultancies are better of keeping it this way than to improve things.

But government is not agile enough to pay fair wage for development work. Besides, it would be unfair to all other government employees if these developers made so much more money with less time on the job and the same level of education. (sarcasm)

Government employee in Canada here. The pay itself is not necessarily the best, but top notch benefits, generous vacation (maybe a moot point in Netherlands but definitely not here), a rock solid pension make it a lot closer than the salary number alone.

There's also the fact that the number of hours worked is always fair, and that you can move within the public service very easily.

How many big projects are handled mostly "in house" by the government in Canada. And for the outsourced ones, how much input / leadership do the internal government people have?

Because it is largely the outsourced big projects where our Government fails.

The situation is not very different here: the outsourced projects often fail, and lots of the big ones are outsourced. Definitely not a good use of public funds (my opinion), especially since the funds spent for such projects are often stratospheric. Also, the amount of talent in government is not THAT small, so often these decisions seem very political.

Exactly. Even in Malta, most government IT projects are partially outsourced to local or international companies for many of those reasons. Developers don't usually want to work for the government at the start of their career.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com