Your idea is honorable, but do governments have the know-how to do it? It's not only about costs and responsibility, I don't think this could be feasible in most countries, maybe only in China and US.
Lol this is kind of funny given my other post but in addition to having worked in government I’ve also worked in healthcare.
I made about 50% of what I do now at that vendor and was glad to leave. I truly think if people had an incentive to make things better in government and healthcare then things would get better. It was a terrible job but a good starting point. I wonder if health care vendors paid as much as google or Facebook how good things could be.
In fact there are a few people that do try to make things better, but they value their progress over money. Same with teachers. We know they make a fraction of what a tech worker does but the value they provide is immense.
I don’t know if you’ve lived on the west coast and worked in tech but if you have surely you know someone who makes an absurd amount of money at Facebook, or google or whatever and also hates what they do. Imagine if you could pay people faybu bux but to make government work. They would do it. There would be an impassioned soul who is want to make government better and would do so. Instead the government pays half rate and gets half rate old dudes who want to retire in place.
A former Googler got called in by the Obama administration to try and put healthcare.gov back on its rails after the disastrous launch, and the things he learned about it were fascinating. He talks about some of them here
It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.
One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.
> I don’t know if you’ve lived on the west coast and worked in tech
No. I don’t live in the US and don’t work in tech. I work in healthcare and have done so in the private sector and public sector. I don’t think you have pay a an amazing amount to get good people. Decent conditions go a very long way. My public sector pay isn’t worse than my private pay, and depending on how you measure it, the public pay may be better.
Would I be right in thinking that your healthcare experience was all private sector?
Not especially. Government has largely predictable load, and hosting on third parties is eyewateringly expensive (only approved suppliers, who overcharge).
In jurisdictions I’m familiar with it would require (nearly impossible) reform of the bureaucracy to make it possible.
> Your idea is honorable, but do governments have the know-how to do it?
Yes. Governments hosting their own servers is still the norm if anything, the same is true in plenty of large companies. It's not exactly black magic, especially with modern technology. Outside the HN bubble the cloud hasn't really taken over.
> I don't think this could be feasible in most countries, maybe only in China and US.
Smaller countries are easier, there is far less scale to worry about and computers are powerful enough that most government services could just about be run on a single server (in practice you probably wouldn't).
