Can anyone explain what's so complex about a "payroll system"? Presumably you just have a table with people with salary, and every month you wire the money and record information about the wire or otherwise have a way to record when the person has taken cash. You might want to have more complex rules for determining schedule and amount of salaries, and support for contractors, unpaid leave, taxes, etc. but that doesn…
Remembering and tracking all the agreements made with workers and unions going back decades and handling the cases where workers change jobs and union designations (or even move from one union to another). There are thousands of byzantine rules in the contracts and agreements, some mutually contradictory. The old code likely contained a lot of business logic that represented an institutional memory of how to handle a…
IBM promised a big bang that would be finished before the election. What could possibly go wrong?
I think that there is a positive aspect. Other governments will learn from mistakes when ordering expensive projects like this.