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Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

reuters.com

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Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#511

Post by const_cast »

mattfca wrote: post #328
miltonlost wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission. There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the agencies, both of which have been gutted by this administration. > I'm not defending the specific actions of this admini…

you cant call out a bias when you are doing the exact same thing.

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Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#512

Post by grandempire »

snake42 wrote: post #464
grandempire wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society existed before social security.

So we should go back to being hunters and gatherers?

Yep, those are only the options - social security or hunter gatherer.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#513

Post by Den_VR »

prepend wrote: post #446
Taikonerd wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "grade" would a senior dev be at? Pay scale for the DC area: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Senior devs are usually gs-15, step 10 which is about $195k in DC I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.

Where have you seen gs-15 senior devs? That oddball org that turned into DOGE? Seniors developers top out GS-13 without supervisory responsibilities.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#514

Post by aprilthird2021 »

grandempire wrote: post #417
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying what's waste and what's important. And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste, with some findings released to the people about what the plan is going forwa…

> 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, This is a subset - the one the media choose to highlight and that’s occupying your mindshare.

What's occupying my mindshare is that we are firing hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately veterans, while at the same time raising prices of everything artificially. Welcome to stagflation.

EDIT: Also, should anyone with a criminal background be in charge of what they're currently doing? I'd say no. That's just me

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#515

Post by nonameiguess »

NegativeK wrote: post #433
leguminous wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead. (Of course there…

Pay is a common one from the employee's side. From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.) I have an unsexy government job. I've seen…

I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each.

The government got angsty about being bilked by monopolies and started trying to mandate that contracts be split and awarded to different contractors. The first time they did this, they took the contract away from Raytheon and gave it to Lockheed, who probably felt the way the average reader of Hacker News feels, that surely this was a weekend project that five guys could do for a hundredth the price. It was not. Their solution completed the process of turning raw downlink data into human-legible imagery hundreds of times slower than Raytheon's. The government caved and gave the contract back to Raytheon.

A decade later, they overhauled the entire geoint enterprise to try and modernize it, bringing it to the cloud and using Kubernetes for everything, and did the same thing again. They gave the orchestration contract to Raytheon and the processing algorithms contract to Lockheed, with a rule saying the contracts can't go to the same company. Lockheed in this case just subbed the actual work back to Raytheon. The only way they could really do what the government wants, and have Lockheed employees working on this, is if they hired all the people who currently work for Raytheon, not out of any kind of nefarious underhandedness, but because these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#517

Post by treis »

mediaman wrote: post #284
whimsicalism wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is there is literally no incentive to make sure you are hiring the right people in government. nobody is sacked if you dont make your numbers, xyz. higher salary bands are a neccessary but not sufficient condition to get competent operators.

Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their “work from home.” It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people. This…

It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor.

The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.

All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.

That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.

Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.

But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.

That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.

I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#518

Post by cafard »

Having worked for a government contractor, I decided that the government was using the Charlie Sheen principle: not paying them to come around, but paying them to go away. I have no idea what they billed us for to the government, but I doubt we were getting paychecks equivalent to what the government folk we dealt with got. (To say nothing of benefits.) But I assume that it was far easier to let contractors go.

Actually, the friction of hiring and placing made it relatively hard to let contractors go other than through downsizing. People showed up drunk or stoned, and hung on for a month or two.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#519

Post by const_cast »

umvi wrote: post #272
tw04 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.

Maybe the federal government needs a reset/dismantling/pruning/whatever you want to call it. With any "normal" president (including Kamala Harris), the federal government would likely be expanding spending and gov't programs right now even though the debt is so huge that interest payments on the debt now eclipse the defense budget, which itself exceeds the next 9 defense budgets in the world combined.

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Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#520

Post by FloorEgg »

immibis wrote: post #466
FloorEgg wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do? It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't bee…

I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff. The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not t…

I think that the most appropriate strategy depends on the specifics of the situation. For some types of problems the best course of action is to do nothing, some times the best course of action is to make small adjustments, sometimes do less, sometimes do more, sometimes slow down, sometimes speed up, and sometimes the best course of action is to make radical changes. I don't over-generalize and prescribe the same ideological answer to everything.

I have also witnessed first hand how new terminology can have very different meanings to different people. Ask 100 product leaders to define what a "customer need" is and you will probably get dozens of different answers. Ask 100 CIOs to define what a "data mesh" is, and you will probably get dozens of different answers.

I think that when an environment is changing at an accelerating pace, its necessary for the organisms living in the environment to adapt at a similar pace in order to survive/thrive. I also believe that our environment is changing at an accelerating pace.

I suspect that you think I have reverse the metaphor because you have been paying more close attention to recent rage-baiting news, and I have spent a longer time paying closer attention to "boring" economic analysis. My model of the situation includes many historical examples of hyperinflation and what led to them, the consequences of Muammar Gaddafi dropping the petrodollar, the impact of citizens united on the military industrial complex, the exploding web of "NGOs" meddling in world affairs, how technology is an extremely deflationary force and how regulatory capture shifts economic benefits of new technology from the consumer to industry incumbents, how the Bretton-woods era started and ended, and how the neoliberal era started (and was ending regardless of political party), etc, etc.

Despite all this perspective I mentioned, I feel as though I know a tiny % of what is important to know in order to judge the situation accurately. The more I learn the more it seems like I don't know, and the more curious I get. Color me in the Dunning Kruger "valley of despair".

So no, I don't think the simplistic blanket decision making protocol you defined describes me.

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