Your mileage may vary, some team in the gov are doing some wonderful things like service nsw which has been creating component libraries available for most popular framework and mock tools: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool... Unfortunatly the internal politics make it we can't use any of the stuff they do in the part I'm involved with

Internal barriers are sometimes far greater than external ones.

Yeah it's like a law of reverse propinquity in government. Working with a team next to you in the org-chart is completely impossible. Working with people far removed from you in the department is easier. Working with other departments easier still. Working with private firms and other governments easiest of all.

You're delusional if you think that the people being in the same building changed that whatsoever. And especially if you think that connections across buildings randomly happened without a specific goal.

Sure, you see them in the hallway or in the street, might even nod into their direction if you're feeling particularly social that day... But that's it. And people working in different cities might as well be separate companies.

[0] https://bcgov.github.io/common-service-showcase/services/che...

This is correct. Consulting is 100% marketing. It appears the problem is, how does a team of actually skilled engineers who wants to get a start in this business compete with these sales companies? The people hiring them have no clue, hence why the marketing is the most important thing, and many of these companies have inertia from a bunch of previous projects they can use in their marketing.

I feel like actually good engineers have the least social contacts, and it is these social contacts that provide all of the opportunities to start building a client-base. This seems to be the case with society in general. Everything is decided by social relationships, and the best engineers are the worst at creating these relationships, or are actively excluded from them as some sort of defence mechanism for social people to maintain power. Hence why we end up with a bunch of terrible products and software. It is all bundled up in a cocoon of social contracts.

You don't. There's an inverse effect where you don't really want the clients that go for these big consulting companies because there's just as much crap on their end and they'll drown your skilled team in bureaucratic nonsense. You want the smaller clients where your technical skills complement their domain knowledge. There's still a lot of marketing and management, but the people that actually do things can talk to each other.

This observation is absolutely spot on. An ignored element of meritocracy is visibility -- and, perhaps, as you suggest, inertia. And then we end up back at the black hole of designing the 'right' incentive schemes...

sigh

Just so we're all clear here, this is by design.

The UK central gov is a notable exception, (if you exclude the corruption with track and trace) why might that be?

The real reason: It provides a mechanism for political kickbacks, vendor lock-in, and shifting blame.

Successive Australian governments since the early 90s have expanded public service outsourcing dramatically.

Here's a comprehensive discussion from the early 00s: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...

The basic argument is that competition reduces costs and improves quality, therefore we should introduce competition into the provision of services to government.

The net result of this is a wasteland of rubbish as far as the eye can see.

Not for government contracts. This fuck-up is true blue 100% Made in Australia.

And why would you continue working for the Government when you could make 50% more even working for a dogshit company like Accenture?

You can quibble over what needs cutting/pasting or whatever on the ATO forms but the system it replaced (the execrable desktop app), the ATO MyGov interface is so far ahead it isn't even funny.

However, I've never had to deal with their helpdesk.

Nope. Had to nuke the whole account and start again. Had to relink all services. Lost all communications in the "inbox".

I had to laugh. The alternative was too frightening.

So, they got exactly the thing they insisted on. And now they are blaming the consultants. Bureaucracies work like this: they are full of useless people defending their existence by participating in endless meetings that will find creative ways to deflect any form of responsibility and accountability. So, bonus points for meetings with consultants. The more expensive the better.

Pass it up the chain to the politicians who will be long gone by the time the whole thing blows up. They absolutely love that; do what the expensive consultant says. Which is of course echoing what they were told by the incompetent bureaucrats. The bigger the egos in the room, the dumber the plans get. Usually these projects start off fine and then some moron pulls rank and derails the whole thing by insisting on adding their own requirements to the pile. Big expensive projects attract that kind of behavior; it's almost inevitable. And then some politician signs off on it. Job well done.

The consultants bill by the hour so they don't mind the endless bullshit and they take notes. And then they do as they are told to take the money regardless of whether that makes any sense. There's almost no way for a happy end in such a situation. Don't blame the consultants; blame the career bureaucrats and the politicians for being absolute idiots, again. This outcome was 100% predictable 20 years ago.

The politicians promote the staff who tell them what they want to hear, and independent advice has been lost.

This is a simple case of objectively government projects around the world failing over and over again for more or less the same reasons. There are quite many studies on that topic. Lots of nice articles that get written whenever another one fails. So, that's not a right wing mantra against big government but a nice argument that maybe they should try doing things differently. Especially considering that there are some well run countries with more success on this front. Quite a few of those countries are what you might label classic big government states. I lived in a few of them (Sweden, Finland, Netherlands). These three have had some duds but also some successes when it comes to government IT projects. Overall well run places.

All software projects are fraught with risk, but when no one takes responsibility for the outcome, and particularly when the people who generate requirements have no stake in its success, the probability of failure increases rapidly. The de-skilling of the public service in favour of advice from highly paid consultants, often the same ones who provide the services, means no impartial advice or trustable expertise, so governments can't be smart buyers.

They are not willing to invest in quality dev/product/project managers instead they pay below market rates (see jobs on seek) yet there are endless budgets for consultants and outsourcing.