Is it not also because the government contracting system is FUBAR? I.e. only certain kinds of companies can contract on the big projects, you need certain clearances for certain kinds of works, and the pay gap between public and private sector SWE & security?
Also aren't their some pretty tough mandates like x% of companies must be minority owned etc. I imagine it allows those companies to charge extortionist rates because they hit the relevant quotas and nobody else does.
My first job out of college was working for a IT consulting firm on a project for a state government. All of this describes that experience precisely.
> Also aren't their some pretty tough mandates like x% of companies must be minority owned etc. I imagine it allows those companies to charge extortionist rates because they hit the relevant quotas and nobody else does.
One thing I saw was that the big players will have employees who fit the desired characteristics, and they just spin those employees off into their own corporation as needed.
Many of these complaints would apply to physical safety too. But we don't just wait for buildings to burn down to teach organizations a lesson about their heating contractors -- we have fire codes, and inspectors with teeth.
Is there any chance that something like this might be done for IT? Or is it all too young to be done sensibly?
>But we don't just wait for buildings to burn down to teach organizations a lesson about their heating contractors -- we have fire codes, and inspectors with teeth.
Sure, I agree that fire rules are written in blood. But not the blood of every single district. Once we've decided, we impose these rules across many cities, millions of buildings.
An individual city council is not free to learn the lessons again the hard way, no matter how tight the budget and how close the elections. Either it meets the code, or it gets closed down.
The second call back is always more expensive for them, but sometimes someone needs to touch the stove themselves to see it’s hot.
If you genuinely can’t afford it, I’ll help for free, but there’s only so much time in the day and I won’t eat the cost of stupid or politics.