Good!
UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
141–150 of 219 posts
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#142This is good, I hope they hurry up and do the same with health planning
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#143Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at N…
I think we just start calling it what it is: TREASON. These are traitors to our country selling out our national assets to a foreign country.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas…
Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#145A sane UK tech decision for once. Seems some people recognise a Trojan when they see one, be it a virus or an evil American company with a free offering.
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Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year Just keep in mind that if you pay someone a salary of £100k, your expense for that employee is actually much higher. So £120k would be less expensive and you also don’t take on thr risk and cost of developing a system (you’re getting “off the shelf”).
You can also (generally) turn off the taps of the cost of the £120k/year incredibly quickly.
By comparison it is much harder (and also much more likely to generate negative newspaper headlines) to make 500 people redundant.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#147Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at N…
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
Yes, it's the fairy tale from the 1980s that if you privatize a public service it magically becomes "efficient" and cheaper. Those who believe this BS must be really bad at arithmetic.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#148Palantir is very expensive. This is because: 1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model. 2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means. This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data…
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
They do this because the UK is a failing nation state (it's poorer than the USA state of Missouri) that needs to make goodwill with any country willing to trade with it. So of course they will go full tilt into USA branch of neoliberalism. Expect them to talk about privatizing more of the NHS to "save the budget" too come 2030.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#149Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at N…
It’s the same as any enterprise software: it looks good to the higher-ups that hold the purchasing authority, but they never have to actually use it.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good. Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales. FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.
They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.
Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.
Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.