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

>> 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.
>
> What you describe is a hundred times better than the reality... most of
> them actually get _expensive_ junk with some kick-back ;-)
>
I concede.

You're right.

I recall being told by one project manager I knew years ago who had an
opportunity to create a bid for an RFP issued by Transport Canada (long long
ago).  He refuse, so his employer prepared the bid.  He refused because the
RFP was a joke.  There were absolutely no functional requirements, nor
non-functional requirements, identified in the RFP.  His company didn't get
the contract, but being a bidder they did see the winning bid.  It was just
as ludicrous!  It, too, failed to identify any requirements, and so it did
not actually promise to deliver anything, working or not!  They would have
satisfied the terms of their contract if, after a few years, and hundreds of
man-years, they walked away without delivering anything.  That tragedy cost
Canada hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars (I don't know if
any final accounting was ever done - that would be opposed by the "civil
servants" responsible lest they should be criticised for their
incompetence), and ultimately nothing was delivered because the next elected
government cancelled the project, refusing to through more money into their
opposition's money pit - they prefer, of course, to through it into money
pits created by their political supporters. The decisions to create the
project, and to cancel it, were political, but the incompetence really
responsible for it was lower done within the ranks of the civil service.
The project could have delivered something good had the civil servants
involved been competent!  Similar nonsense happened with the firearms
registry.  For most of the early history of it, the software systems used
where so bad, and inappropriate, that the clerks that had to use it could
have been ten times more productive if they had the use of properly designed
and implemented software.  I can not understand how it became so
outrageously expensive when the real needs for it were so simple (relative
to products I have worked on).  I'll bet real, genuinely capable, software
engineers could have delivered a gold and platinum plated product for just a
few million dollars; nothing really relative to what it ended up costing us.

I know contractors that refuse to do business with the government because of
this sort of nonsense, and I know, from discussions with ex-civil servants,
that such incompetence is the norm in government.  I know engineers who have
been burned by government by investing a fortune in new products or
services, and then educating relevant civil servants WRT to the new science
or technology involved, only to find these same civil servants give
contracts to provide the new product or service to incompetent bozos who
didn't know the first thing about it.  They just happened to be cheaper.
Why waste time and money developing a product or service that is really
relevant only to government when the risk of such unethical conduct by
government is so high?

I don't support anyone out there can describe a project or three where
things were done right, to provide a cure for the depressing and
discouraging nature of what this thread has turned out to be?

Cheers

Ted