Not to downplay the quality of this work, but being able to extensively plan and specify requirements ahead of time is a luxury that a lot of engineering teams at private companies would love to have.
Having done a lot of work in both spaces, trust me -- there's nothing luxury about getting this work done in the public space.
Also, extensively planning and specifying requirements ahead of time is exactly the opposite of how you pull off delivering well-designed public UX like this.
In the public space you inherently never have a single person who can call all the shots, because organizationally you're accountable to all of the public. Orgs have to be set up to carry on operations resiliently outside having a controlled lineage of management. How you do things is far more directly and heavily influenced by legislation, and that landscape is constantly shifting over the course of your project.
BY FAR the private sector is where engineers can enjoy far more luxury.
I second this sentiment. I would like to add that in public sector, deadlines are absolute. That new law? It will be effective from January 1st. So you have a deadline. Now the law is not in effect yet on _any_ of your dependency systems until the deadline so testing is a nightmare. And if you make a mistake, someone might not get their benefits or miss their parole. And the public will be furious.
In private sector I have met a lot more understanding with regards to managing risk in a smart and scalable way.
Yes, they would love to have the luxury. I doubt the parent comment is saying that engineering teams would not want to be able to produce something like that, but rather given the confines of the lust for ever increasing profit, they can't.
“Lust for ever increasing profit” is one way to put it. You could also say that private companies have requirements that are constantly moving as the market changes and must be discovered and adapted, rather than legal requirements that are roughly static and well-specified.
They gotta fill a request for proposal in order to outsource a project, then there can be multiple rounds of back and forth to review and revise proposals. That includes quite a few documents, covering requirements among many other things.
Yet doing it lowers costs, improves quality and reduces development time. It's not so much a luxury as an investment; an investment that, true enough, a lot of engineering teams can't afford - they need to churn out something awful right NOW because the investment wasn't made when it should have been.
It is astounding how high the quality of software can be, if what the software is meant to do is known before it's written.
