61–70 of 434 posts
With prison incentives being what they are, it’s hard not to think that it’s beneficial for the profession to hold on to inmates longer.
This is an outrage. It is also a perfect example of how software is used to create increasingly more elaborate and faceless bureaucracies that force individuals to spend more and more time contending with them. Somehow software has become the ultimate vehicle for bureaucratic violence. Software is simultaneously infallible and the perfect scapegoat. The inmate who lost their phone privileges for 30 days is an example…
I find the government "requirements" process tends to create situations like this. Rather than build flexible software that puts some degree of trust in the person using it, they tend to overspecify the current bureaucratic process. In many cases, the person pushing for the software is looking to use software to enforce bureaucratic control that they have been unable to otherwise exercise, with the effect of the people the project initiator wants to use the software simply working around it. They then institute all sorts of punishments and controls to insure it must be used. This then results in the kind of insane situation we have here, where you can't do something perfectly legal because "computer says no".
This isn't a "bug". The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements Bugs are when software does something it isn't supposed to, or doesn't do something it is supposed to. In this case, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was implemented and put into service. Since then things have changed, so the vendor needs to implement the featur…
But even if it was a bug... I don't understand why software would prevent somebody opening the gate and letting the inmate out...
This isn't a "bug". The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements Bugs are when software does something it isn't supposed to, or doesn't do something it is supposed to. In this case, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was implemented and put into service. Since then things have changed, so the vendor needs to implement the featur…
If you have a choice between the regional furniture store and your state government, I'd have a hard time advising you on which one will suck less. It's a tossup. If the owners of the furniture store are old enough to have heirs who are late teens to 30-something, take the furniture store, because you can ask them to intervene.
At some point you have to pay the bills. And destress your employees who are constantly having to hurry up and wait.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1.5 million prisoners in the USA. You want to go through that list, without software?
If the list is public, we can at least do the math independently to hold corrections departments accountable (filing suit to release eligible inmates when corrections won’t voluntarily release because of “software enhancements waiting to be built”).
It's a full-on bureaucracy where only the computers actually know the correct full calculation for every prisoner due to the complexity of the formulas, and when the computers can't do that correctly people get screwed with no recourse because it's humanly impossible to keep up with every detail.
This isn't a "bug". The problem is the software was not designed to do this and needs to be updated to support a change in requirements Bugs are when software does something it isn't supposed to, or doesn't do something it is supposed to. In this case, it's doing exactly what it was intended to do when it was implemented and put into service. Since then things have changed, so the vendor needs to implement the featur…
1 person-year is pretty much the smallest labor unit when quoting for modifications to government contracts. If the government wants to change the logo on the login screen, they're gonna pay 1 person-year. Why would I quote less? It'll take over 1 person-year for another contractor to pick up and start supporting the codebase, and we won't support a codebase that another contractor has touched. It's just the nature o…
It's government work, which automatically means access issues, dozens (or hundreds) of stakeholders requesting meetings, internal politicking, back-and-forth over change requests, etc. All of that costs real money and if you don't plan for it or make contingencies, you're going to be screwed.
These issues are not just limited to government either; any sufficiently large entity will have these same problems. So yeah, one person-year is a reasonable minimum viable contract period unless you have a process in place to fast-track RFP approval.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a lot of reasonable opinions on the topic, but I would consider design and requirements bugs that render the software unfit for purpose to be bugs as well.
If they were design and requirements then fine, but you cannot consider something that was not asked or paid for as a bug. As with many cock-ups, somebody did not know enough to ask for the right thing. On top of that, someone should have been in the room to tell the State Governor that their proposed change was not supported in software and needed something out-of-band to manage it.
The fact that they appear to have identified individuals who should be released, but have not, due to the software not being updated, is frankly disgusting. I believe holding a person against their will is a criminal act - seems like most of the employees of the Arizona correctional facilities are now guilty of crimes worse than the majority of their inmates.
I hope every one of the prisoners held past their release date sues and wins.
The fact that they appear to have identified individuals who should be released, but have not, due to the software not being updated, is frankly disgusting. I believe holding a person against their will is a criminal act - seems like most of the employees of the Arizona correctional facilities are now guilty of crimes worse than the majority of their inmates.
As an outside observer (European) this seems to be the way the American prison system is run. The inmates are not viewed as humans by the people responsible, enabling horrible conditions. Fixing such an issue should be top priority, and in the meantime, you would revert to pen and paper accounting to ensure the correct release of each prisoner.
As an aside, it does really rankle me that a country that won’t shut up about being “the land of the free” is arguably a prison state.