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UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

bbc.com

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Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#211

Post by selfhoster1312 »

flawn wrote: post #174
pjc50 wrote: post #113

Earlier 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.

And as if there isn't a middle-way here to have short-term contractors _not_ from large consultancies. Or rethinking approaches, and doing such work via OSS, and paying maintainers to keep code up to date, which France has been doing iirc.

France is a very bad example if you're gonna talk about State corruption (and taking insane amounts of public money into private pockets) and FLOSS maintenance. There's very isolated cases of public services producing free-software, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to the billions siphoned out of our pockets for Microsoft, Palantir, or other profoundly-incapable consultancies such as Atos, Bull, Thales, McKinsey.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#212

Post by selfhoster1312 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #154
tim333 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.

> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension. Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.

I don't know much about the UK, but it's really common here in France for public servants to be fired. Including for very wrong reasons such as being unionized. The accountability problem lies with the managers imposing meaningless KPIs (even in life-threatening scenarios such as hospitals and police stations) and high-level politicians who are parasites sucking off public money to destroy public services and give it all to their private-company friends who are going to employ them for very high salaries right after they leave the public service, a practice known as pantouflage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantouflage

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#213

Post by selfhoster1312 »

andsoitis wrote: post #116
PaulRobinson wrote: post #84

Earlier 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”).

Here in France pay for IT jobs in public services is more around 20-40k€/year, while consultants brought from the private sector cost somewhere between 500-3000€/day.

Let's be very pessimistic about it (in real life it's much less), and say the public servant is gonna cost you 80k€/year. That's still at the VERY least ~50% cheaper than the 150k€/year consultant.

It's mathematically impossible for a consultancy putting money into shareholders to be more economically-efficient than a public administration. There's not a single historical example of that. Privatization of railway, energy and hospitals here in Europe was supposed to bring better service and reduce costs: it has done exactly the opposite.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#214

Post by selfhoster1312 »

ChrisRR wrote: post #44
RealCodingOtaku wrote: post #27

The contract with NHS is about 300 mil, public don't want it, most GPs don't want it, so let's drop that next.

Developing a replacement system is still going to cost a hell of a lot. It's not like if you dropped palatir then we'd suddenly have a free drop-in replacement and everyone can have their fiver back

I don't know the specifics of that deal, but hospitals operated very well for hundreds of years without computers. I've often heard friends who work in hospitals complain about the software. It may be worth considering if there needs to be an IT solution at all, and if so, if simple scanning/archiving software would better fit the bill than any proposed "solution" that misses the mark.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#215

Post by bit-anarchist »

forlorn_mammoth wrote: post #165
robertlagrant wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. repeated like a mantra. As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies. And how do we even measure efficiency?

You have it backwards. All governments are megacorps and have the same inefficiencies as them, plus the inefficiencies of being able legally stea- tax.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#216

Post by spwa4 »

regularfry wrote: post #209
spwa4 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus it just isn't fair. You're making other people work for you without anything in return.

The alternative is a society that says "work or starve". I don't live in that society and I don't want to.

Nobody starves in western societies.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#217

Post by robertlagrant »

forlorn_mammoth wrote: post #165
robertlagrant wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. repeated like a mantra. As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies. And how do we even measure efficiency?

> As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies

No one is saying megacorps don't have inefficiencies.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#218

Post by alt227 »

RealCodingOtaku wrote: post #204
alt227 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just sounds like 'We have too many systems, so lets build another one to solve the problem!" https://xkcd.com/927/

No it doesn't, people are against it due to their ties, not because they don't like the service.

The solution here is quite obviously unifying the NHS IT under a single system, not cobble together another one to interface between all the old incompatible ones.

Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system

#219

Post by alt227 »

spwa4 wrote: post #216
regularfry wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is a society that says "work or starve". I don't live in that society and I don't want to.

Nobody starves in western societies.

You forgot the /s
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