My hell as a 911 operator

I would say very rarely does it come down to simply being the lowest bidder or nepotism.

Yes, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Sorry, I know it's trite, but there's some truth there. Being ignored for years is not necessarily a reason not to do something. In some cases it's the very best reason to do it.

[EDIT] - would those people down-voting please explain why?

Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which essentially maintain a strict control over all IT contracts that come out of the public sector. Massive corporate entities with an entrenched web of influencers at every level of government, ensuring that only a select few even have an opportunity to realistically compete for the jobs. The amount of overspending that could be eliminated with the disruption of those entities probably represents a significant portion of local, state, and national budgets, not to mention the likely better solutions that could be presented by folks more accustomed to working efficiently.

I'm not necessarily saying the 20 somethings who were going to make "Snapchat for dogs" could do a better job as government contractors. But certainly someone who designed infrastructure for Twitter might have some interesting perspective on how to manage 911 traffic.

10 years ago I was briefly employed by a contractor for a state government that was working on a system a bit like this, although not hardly so life critical. The original system had been written and customized by the one of the big names like Lockheed or CSC and was pretty good as these things go ... but the state put continued maintenance out for bid and gave it to another company. With no transition, and really counterproductive budgeting.

I.e. around a year previously another guy was hired to do what I did, and let go after a month or two because of money.

What was I hired to do? The most difficult job of software archaeology I've ever attempted, not counting one code base that was impossible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092960). The original programmers, probably on site, used SCCS (!) ... until they stopped some months before producing the binaries running on the system.

Other minor details: the system ran on DEC Alpha hardware and their version of UNIX(TM), and of course by then it was a doomed system with no migration path for binaries. The state budgeted the project and made its milestones based on estimates made by another consulting company, and those were not based on reality.

I bailed when it became clear there was no possible way to meet the state's demands, e.g. a point when I realized that if there was a way to recreate the production binaries I wasn't going to be able to find it, and they were assuming the sources were in a lot better shape.