Analysis using BuiltWith shows that the site is coded with PHP, Perl and Java. Smells like real enterprise decisions right there. I’m no expert but I’d be guessing that the Perl is likley the remains coming from the old code base. That’d be fair yeah? Haven’t heard of many people coding websites with Perl in 2025.
Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
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Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#12Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#13Absolutely crazy. I'll negotiate on your behalf next time; just give me 10% of what I save you.
Yes, but what special relations do you have with the purchasers?
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#14Should've made it a nice round billion and sprinkle the necessity of AI to usher in the new era of meteorology
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#15> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said.
This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#16Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…
I doubt that the consulting firm seriously overbilled.
To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants or consultant days:
Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.
To increase the bill, every highly qualified consultant that is necessary for the project "needs" a lot of support personnel (senior consultants) so that the senior consultant can 100 % concentrate on their work (otherwise the customer would pay insane hourly rates for highly qualified experts to do "grunt work" - no customer would "want" that). This way, you sell a huge number of senior consultants (this is rather some low rank) to the customer.
And, by the way: since of cause many consultants you sell to the customer shall be highly qualified experts in their discipline, and the project trivially consists of a lot of disciplines, the number of subject-matter experts that can be sold to the customer can be increased by a lot. In some ordinary software project, you would simply use a small team of good generalists (jacks of all trades, master of none) who can do most things in the project, but of cause, as a consulting company, you rather sell the customer "some of the greatest experts that money can buy" (without mentioning that these are insanely expensive and not really needed for the project).
That's how you do it; scamming or billing unrealistic hours is for amateurs.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#17Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website.
Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a button to publish with a custom domain and it went live. The entire process took 5 minutes.
I'm sure I can make a weather website with a map for $96k.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#18> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said. This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.
The private consultancy likely outsourced pieces of the work to (far) lesser-paid subcontractors, too.
I would imagine the margins on that project to be astronomical.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did you get 11 members from?
Just a hypothetical. If you have a team of 11 devs billing $500 / hour, every hour of the day, all year round, that comes out to a hair over $48 million a year. Do that for two years, and you have the $96.5m bill. Not necessarily rooted in reality.
Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.
Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign
#20Analysis using BuiltWith shows that the site is coded with PHP, Perl and Java. Smells like real enterprise decisions right there. I’m no expert but I’d be guessing that the Perl is likley the remains coming from the old code base. That’d be fair yeah? Haven’t heard of many people coding websites with Perl in 2025. https://builtwith.com/bom.gov.au
It has data-drupal attributes in the source. Not sure where the Perl and Java things would have come from.