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Comment by BluePen7 | Hacker News Reader

Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it.

Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.

80% of public servants had pay issues, many were foreclosed on because they couldn't pay their mortgages, someone even killed themselves.

And we expect the Canadian government to accurately determine ROI on digital ad spend? That's hard enough for skilled people in the space (some who have found it to have no effect altogether). Our government is simply going to be fleeced for every penny they have (and then some).

Remember, these are the same people who shut down the CRA website every night. Can't even access your tax info after hours.

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> Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already.

Do you really believe that this was a result of bad in-the-moment decision-making at all levels, instead of a result of being trapped by previously-negotiated long-term vendor exclusivity agreements?

(In my experience, governments are generally good at cutting their losses — they're far more rational re: the sunk-cost fallacy than individual people are. So it would be surprising to me if this were true.)

Actually, they're as bad as everyone else at that, e.g, Obamacare website; state of Maine website; lots more.

And then we have, by three or four orders of magnitude, the great Sunk Cost Fallacy of all time, by anyone ever:

Not ending World War One in 1915, 1916, or 1917: "All those lives and treasure we've spent! We have to get something for it."

And so we had the Spanish Flu, which killed more than the combat deaths, and of course, the combat deaths.

https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu

Not to mention World War Two.

Sounds to me like you should fix those problems rather than just giving up altogether.

The idea that there is something fundamental about governments that maeks them incapable of doing these things correctly is nonsense.

The people don’t believe in paying for competence in government employees. Then they are shocked and outraged when bottom 10% compensation leads to bottom 10% performance. If you want to hire someone to do product management for a nine figure government project maybe you should pay more than $90k to the product manager if you want it to be managed properly. The government gets exactly what it pays for in these roles.

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