189
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
189 points (95.7% liked)
Programming
17314 readers
47 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The notion that creating a half-decent application is quick and easy enough that I would be willing to transform their idea into reality for free.
I'm pretty sure that government software always blows because they think software can be written according to a fixed schedule and budget
It's tempting to think it's like building a house, and if you have the blueprints & wood, it'll just be fast and easy. Everything will go on schedule
But no, in software, the "wood" is always shape shifting, the land you're building on is shape shifting, some dude in Romania is tryna break in, and the blueprints forgot that you also need plumbing and electric lines
Well, that’s probably true for the most part but by far the reality is that it comes down to lowest bidder 9/10 times. Unrealistic budgets and unrealistic time frames with as cheap labor they can find gets you a large amount of government funded projects throughout all the years.
One of the most common problems of government or other big organisation software is that they don't scale, either "not well" or "not at all".
Some guy hacks up a demo that looks nice and seems to do what customer wants, but then it turns out a) that it only allows for (number of open ports on one machine) users at the same time, and b) it only works if everything runs on one machine. Or worse, one core.
it never goes according to schedule eve if there is blueprint & wood
Building a house (or any construction project) is notoriously impossible to be on schedule and on budget too.
I have a hypothesis that a factor is that government needs to work for everyone.
A private company can be like "we only really support chrome", but even people running ie6 at a tiny resolution need to renew their license.
I believe this is usually covered by the fact that you can do just about anything you need to do over mail. I once ran into a government site that only worked on Edge.