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Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
671–680 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into pred…
I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).
That is certainly one viewpoint. Personally I try to make changes in the place that i work and with the people i work with to push the culture in a different direction.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Before DOGE it was USDS and they had lots of gs-15s. Especially back when they would just straight up match private sector salaries.
In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.
My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a fairly recent interview where he was asked about DOGE, Bill Gates estimated 10-15% waste in government spending. Saving that amount is not worth all the collateral long term damage Trump is doing. You may not put much stock in another billionaire's opinion, but personally I think he's been engaged with our system enough to have a good perspective on things. That doesn't mean every government operations are 90% e…
First of all, my comment has nothing to do with Trump, so let's leave him out of it. I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority. But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count…
I'm not totally disagreeing. But the problem is that there is not just the dollar cost of contracts.
If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging.
A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people see corruption or legal corner cutting they will believe it's acceptable to do themselves. There is a broken windows or slippery slope situation.
Legible but inefficient systems can be corrected through sensible redesign. Corrupt systems are a cancer that spreads as good actors are pushed out.
I would be supportive of a DOGE style effort that actually looked carefully and critically at systems to rearchitect them. But accepting illegality will simply produce a low-trust society with many bigger problems.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
First of all, my comment has nothing to do with Trump, so let's leave him out of it. I would doubt Gates's number because I have never been in a company that had 15% or less waste. e.g I don't think you could find a tech company out there that couldn't reduce its AWS bill by 15% without any service degradation, but it's just not a priority. But the meaning of "waste" is highly subjective so some people wouldn't count…
I'm not totally disagreeing. But the problem is that there is not just the dollar cost of contracts. If the governor's cousin cuts corners to save money, it puts lives at risk. Or the thing doesn't last as long and costs more money later. The cost difference is rarely just pure price gouging. A cop planting evidence to make an expedient trial is also a form of cost cutting that I really don't want. But when people se…
I don't really see the bureaucracy as preventing that sort of thing. The $800 million Obamacare website was both a complete waste of money and it didn't work. A corrupt contract might even be less likely to be a failure because the governors cousin knows that if he fails to deliver there will be a public outrage and he could go to jail. Whereas there are almost no consequences when a government contractor screws up after having gone through the legal process.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, those are only the options - social security or hunter gatherer.
What version of society are you proposing we go back to then?
I’m actually proposing a new one - not a going back. One where we fix our budget to be sustainable and better help our citizens.
I’m open to proposals about what to do about social security because it MUST change.
How about instead we have a forced savings account that you cannot withdraw from. And the government has some matching component.
Senior centers also seem to be a low cost community investment.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
And California is an incredibly successful economy and people dream of living there.
I live in California and I do think there's a lot going for it, but do you think the government is efficient ? Are you really making that argument?
Yea. California’s government delivers a lot of services that protect ecosystems, a healthy economy and quality of life. All three of those examples are mutually beneficial.
You can disagree with some services but that’s because the state does so much, for example I think there is too much wasted on the carceral and military side.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#678Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla. This is a bad take. Nobody can compete with BYD. This isn't a Tesla vs BYD issue, this is a Everyone vs Cheap labor and deregulation issue.
Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be competed with It would simply take a government capable of recognizing the multifold benefits of EV transition: environmental, geopolitical oil independence, energy efficiency, associated alt energy rollout and grid adaptation, lower total costs and associated economic benefits, reduced cancer and air pollution death rates, reduced logistics costs. That's just…
> Byd is a product of CCP subsidies, of course they can be competed with
If you ignore the 1/5 (not exactly sure, but somewhere in that ballpark) labor cost, sure. And that's one example.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#680Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is close to what I wrote myself, but the problem here isn't being able to fire people because they underperformed. The problem is what to do about temporary jobs that finish. They performed exactly as expected, maybe even exceeded expectations, but when the work is finished, you still need to get rid of the position, and they can't do that with permanent civil servants.
We need to get rid of this insane idea that a job exists for any reason other than the value your work provides to the organization.
On one hand it's true, on the other people want stability in their jobs. You need a compromise between flexibility for the employer and stability for the employee, and one such compromise (in this area) is having a consulting company whose contract with the client can be easily terminated, while keeping the actual people doing the work with a job and stable income.