Re: OT: Canadian Tax Database - Mailing list pgsql-general

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
To: "Richard Huxton" <dev@archonet.com>
Cc: <pgsql-general@postgresql.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 8:00 AM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] OT: Canadian Tax Database


> Richard Huxton wrote:
>> http://www.thestar.com/News/article/189175
>>
>> "For instance, in some cases the field for the social insurance number
>> was instead filled in with a birth date."
>>
>> Unbelievable. Sixty years of electronic computing, fifty years use in
>> business and the "professionals" who built the tax system for a wealthy
>> democratic country didn't use data types.
>
> This is Unbelievable? This is commonplace.
>
And due at least in part to government (and other institutions operated by
damned fools) opting for the least expensive provider rather than paying for
someone who actually knows what they're doing.  Just as buying cheap junk
always comes back to get you, hiring incompetent fools that don't know their
ass from a hole in the ground will come back to get you too.

This time CRA is embarrassed, but they don't care because the people that
suffer are the taxpayers who ultimately paid for such shoddy work in the
first place.  There's no consequences for the bureaucratic peons really
responsible for it.  They probably even get paid obscene sums in overtime
for the time they spend fixing the problem.  More annoying, for me, are the
scurrilous scoundrels that pass themselves off as competent software
consultants who take advantage of such incompetence in their clients' staff.
I couldn't begin to document all the cases I have seen where either the
wrong software was used (imagine a spreadsheet being used as an RDBMS) or
the right software was grossly abused (imagine forcing a data entry clerk to
enter the same data four times because the developer was too damned lazy or
incompetent to develop a simple form to collect the data once and then
submit it to the four externally owned databases that needed to be queried
using it, and then having to manually collate the results returned from the
queries).  And then businesses operated by capable folk get burned by such
incompetent and unethical scoundrels and swear off custom software because
they'd rather have a COTS product that gives a 80% fit than try for a 100%
fit with a custom product that in the end doesn't work at all.  I have been
told by some of these folk that they have found it virtually impossible to
find capable software developers.  This is because these scoundrels I
mention outnumber capable developers by several orders of magnitude (and the
current state of the curricula at colleges 'training' programmers doesn't
help).

It is soooo easy to get cynical, and very discouraged, when I think about
this.  :-(  Maybe I should have myself lobotomized and become one of the
mindless grunts at Canada post.

Cheers

Ted