Comment by bezout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bezout | Hacker News Reader

The way it works in Italy: the design and implementation of the algorithm in Java 8 or an even older version of C# was probably outsourced to one of the Big 4 consultancy companies.

A group of underpaid graduates was put together to crack the problem. All of them crammed for their algo & ds exam since that’s what the Italian university system incentivises so none of them did actually remember a thing about algorithm design. They googled a bunch of words and forked the first PoC they found on GitHub.

Everything was wrapped into a nice PowerPoint full of corporate BS and delivered to the government.

Edit: As expected, the algorithm was developed by a company owned by Dxc Technology [1] and Leonardo which is the Italian defence company. The contract was worth 5 million of euros.

[1]: https://www.wired.it/article/algoritmo-scuola-supplenze-mini...

I don’t see what “Java 8 or an even older version of C#” has to to with the correctness of the algorithm or its implementation.

It doesn’t. It’s not an attack on the programming languages. It’s just that they have a sweet spot for using old ass versions which might or might not have known vulnerabilities and they don’t care about updating it.

FYI, OpenJDK 8 still receives regular security updates and will continue to do so for at least three more years (Temurin, RedHat) (or, according to Oracle, until end of 2030). It’s still in production in a lot of places.

Doesn't have anything to do with correctness.

Has everything to do with "we won't challenge the system and propose changing how we actually build software because doing so will lead to us losing the contract, so we'll build upon these antiquated frameworks that will become harder and harder to support and sweep the problem under the rug long enough for me to buy another $EXPENSIVE_THING"

From a technical perspective, this is a terrible approach.

From a "look, we all just want to make money here, right?" perspective, makes total sense.

5 million, at 100,000 euro comp per engineer and a 2x multiplier for total cost per head, that’s only a team of 8 for three years.

Not that more money would have fixed it, but good software is not some $200k affair.

This program really could have used a small software verification team.

Software engineers in Italy don't earn 100k.

For a just graduate it is less than 30k

ofc dxc would be behind this.

(dxc was owned or spun off from HP Enterprise, HPs consulting arm)

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