var a = 1; a = 2;
Before I got any further they blurted out “that’s false! The second line is false” and this was someone who had been writing production code for the government for the last five years.
I honestly just felt really bad for them, more than anything.
I’ve seen some orgs rely on rely bad programmers because they were relatively cheap. Programmers who make changes on the fly in meetings to live production systems or say their test plan is to push it to production and just wait for customers to send in work tickets when they encounter a bug. Or blatantly lie about feasibility because they would prefer to work in an antiquated framework rather than learn a new one.
The govt owns some responsibility for lack of technical oversight but I can’t help but think a lot of it is due to business contracting incentives.
Tbf, many (most?) government websites are built and maintained by private companies. Remember the ACA website debacle a few years back? The government was mad at the contractor for building a shoddy product. They claimed they would take action against them but I’m not sure anything happened. If the government should be held to task on anything it should be an inability to write good contracts or hold companies feet to the fire. I’ve heard civil servants are unwilling to to the latter because they don’t want to hurt businesses or are afraid of legal protests.