I’ve seen that in every sector (.com, .edu, and .gov) — there’s a huge management culture pushing untruths (e.g. “a good manager can manage anything”) and contempt for the actual workers which causes those pathological outcomes anywhere so afflicted. Part of what makes it popular is that when one contracting company produces another 8-9 figure write-off you can blame them and try again with the latest set of expensive suits swearing they’re completely different, but it’s harder to shirk responsibility if it’s people who report to you.

This is more common in government due to politics: if agencies aren’t allowed to hire competent technical staff, the contractors will be poorly supervised but when it fails the same people who cut staffing will use it to argue even more things need to be contracted out. Again, the problem isn’t the sector but the lack of an effective feedback loop.

the lack of an effective feedback loop.

Of course. The feedback loop for government is different from that for business. Failure in business means going out of business. This powerfully incentivizes business to stop rewarding failure. Like when Alexa lost $billions and Amazon cut off its funding.

No such feedback exists for government operations.

Feedback loops definitely exist for government: contracts are cut or sent to other companies, agency heads are grilled by Congress and replaced, budgets are cut / reallocated, entire agencies are combined or split apart, and politicians win or lose elections. They're not necessarily as effective as we'd like but they certainly exist.

> Feedback loops definitely exist for government

I didn't say otherwise. I said they were different loops.

Do you mean Alexa instead of Azure?

Yes, thank you for the correction. Azure is Microsoft's!

I don't think your theory "Company efficient and rewards good work, Government inefficient and punishes good work" holds in reality. From what I have seen most large organizations are full of people that are good at navigating organizations but don't really care about the end product. And they keep hiring similar people so bureaucracy keeps growing. I have worked at Siemens, IBM and now a medical device company and it's been the same everywhere. Enormous amounts of money are spent on things that make no sense and nobody in power cares as long as they look good. And the paper pushers keep growing.

That's why big companies stagnate and fail, and get replaced by younger ones that haven't accumulated all the bloat yet.

But government departments and agencies are never axed, no matter how useless they are.