Really, this article is just a whinge. I'm an Australian. MyGov is fine, I interact with it as a citizen regularly. Government needs to outsource implementation of this kind of stuff because it's extremely hard to build software teams and manage their performance in permanent government roles. And those costs are reasonable - particularly for anyone that builds teams of software engineers and knows what aggregate team costs are like in Australia.
The hard part of the MyGov platform is the inter-department stuff, and I don't think that's a software issue, that's bureaucracy.
It’s difficult because civil service is designed for stable professions, clerks, attorneys, finance people. IT is too variable, and it’s usually impossible to attract mid career talent. So you hire early career talent, especially second career people, and “grow them”.
Usually gov IT is not a sexy place for smart political people to land. That is the key talent you need. You can always get smart technical people. Big 5 consultancies will deliver, but you need to always keep them afraid, and that’s a political problem.
Smart IT professionals specifically EXCLUDE working directly for Australian government organisations because of the dysfunctions and politics. Even being one of the consultants working 'for' them is bad but not as bad as being directly employed if you prefer doing IT to politics and bs.
I mostly second this. I use MyGov mainly for taxes, and it is fine in that regard.
To be honest, my interactions with the Australian government websites + apps has mostly been positive. There are some truly horrendous websites from other nations' governments out there.
You mean it's extremely hard to hire a full team of competent people when you're tethered to the APS pay scale and the federal government won't let you increase public servant headcount.
And those competent people would have to put up with career position squatters who can't be fired but are just obstructive, or political career squabblers as bad or worse than private sector.
I switched to beta a month or so and I can't even tell what the difference is, other than it being slightly shinier.
MyGov just seems like a portal containing bookmarks to various other services anyway, right? It consolidates your records for Medicare, ATO, and if applicable, NDIS, Centrelink etc. Seems kind of basic. Although I understand there's a lot of hidden complexity underneath these things, especially surrounding ID verification. But even so, I couldn't tell you the difference between the old mygov and the beta version.
That's part of the problem noted in the article: they haven't even implemented style changes that they could have - why are simple changes taking so long?
Ah, yes, the ASIC portal is hot garbage. I don't think it's really changed from when it was slapped together in the early 2000s...
No reason they couldn't put some money into fixing it - they're absolutely flush with cash from charging every company in the country an annual review/audit fee every year and then doing very little actual auditing... It's basically a $280 (and increasing) fee every year for them to just send you a letter with your company's name, registered address and list of directors. It's a massive scam.
Agreed, I’ve linked several services over the years and it all works when I need it. I can’t imagine the struggle it would’ve been to get all the various ancient systems and bureaucracies working together
I think you're missing the point. For the amounts paid given the relatively small tasks involved this whole thing is outrageous from a tax-payer's point of view: how much of even your personal tax dollars went burned on this? What else could that money have been spent on?
>how much of even your personal tax dollars went burned on this?
Australia has a population of 26 million, so that's like $1.50 per capita, once, to create a new system that will reduce the amount of bureaucracy and bullshit in our lives.
I'd gladly pay 50x that amount if they could get VicRoads on board.
Fellow CEO here. I've tried a few things over the years and have now had an EA for at least 5 years so I think I've got a good grasp on what works and what doesn't.
Many years ago, I tried a remote VA. I'm on my second in-person EA. I've tried delegating a lot of different stuff - some works, some doesn't.
In no particular order:
* Remote VA. Don't even bother. They're of limited usefulness and it will come down to more work in communication for you in the end. They don't know your local environment, city, employees, customers.
* Personality. You want someone that's competent, smart and capable, but also humble. Would you be proud to have them talk to your best client to reschedule a meeting - would it be a great customer service experience? Do they make people feel welcome and offer them coffee? Is nothing beneath them - they're just as willing to put coffee cups in the dishwasher as well as update a spreadsheet? You want a great, friendly attitude and competence.
* Trust. You have to trust them. This depends on them as well as you: will they do the right thing? They will require time to figure out what your preferences are. It's unfair to expect them to read your mind. You need to coach them on that. But they also need to have an innate sense of what good looks like.
* Some things delegate well and some don't. Especially some personal items. An EA is ace at scheduling a 12 person meeting, venue, lunch, catering, and making sure it suits you. But it's a pain in the ass to get them to update your auto insurance, because they won't have authority on your account and it's such a pain to get it.
* Letting go of the small stuff. Do you care about exactly what kind of wine a client gets as a gift? That's hard to delegate time effectively. Or is it a price range and the EA's choice? Much easier. Similarly with scheduling meetings. You need to give your EA carte blanche on your calendar - within the expectations you agree. I don't do meetings before 9am or after 4pm. But within that, she is fine to schedule what is needed.
* Training yourself. You need to learn to use an EA if you haven't had one before. Surprisingly, this takes a while. It's much harder to delegate control your personal items - including your calendar - than delegating other items. You might think that because you have staff you're already ace at delegation, but this is different. You're actually giving up some personal choices in order to get more time. It was also much harder for me to ask someone to go out and buy X gift for my wife urgently than to delegate other functions. But you get used to it.
Hope that helps. Overall EA's are a massive time saver and make some administrative tasks just disappear. Really valuable for me.
My kids are 5 and 2. Nothing really seems to recharge the batteries. Aside from some chill time while they are in bed. It starts to get less intense closer to 3, but nowhere near what it’s like without kids. We went on a 5 day beach vacation recently and set our expectations low - it was great, but also exhausting.
I'm considering eye surgery. I'm mildly farsighted and have strong astigmatism, so I'm not suitable for LASIK and have been recommended Implantable Collamer Lenses (ICLs, sometimes known as contact lens implants).
I'm very interested to hear from people that have had positive LASIK experiences or even an ICL procedure done. So far on this thread it's mostly negative.
Oddly enough I find the track pad on the Surface Pro 4 keyboard to be the absolute BEST track pad I've ever used on a PC (even better than the one I played with on the Surface Book) which is...just absurd and odd. But hey I thought it was interesting just how much I liked it compared to everything else.
I found that the gestures were odd, coming from a MacBook. I also notice that my MacBook's touchpad (whilst great in macOS) being absurdly dumb when I reboot to Windows on the same hardware.
Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of features, yes - but that's what's good about it.
If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in a professional role, nothing beats Outlook.
The issue is, that Outlook sends crappy emails in the default setting. And since nobody changes those everybody is sending crappy emails. Also, we are talking about email. Maybe it is good for an address book, calendar, tasks, etc. pp. But as an email client it is awful, also because it is as complicated as mutt but actually less powerful.
My biggest complained about Outlook is actually a bug in their HTML engine. From Outlook 14:
> font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
What's the issue here? Simple, if Calibri isn't there, my browser looks for a font called "sans-serif" and doesn't use the default sans-serif font, the result the email is presented in a serif font. Correctly, it should look like this:
> font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;
I know this is nit-picking but for me it is annoying.
Equally baffling is that quotes, which should simply demarcate regions within which special characters are ignored, have special semantic meaning to a CSS parser.
That narrative, however, isn't one for which we can blame Microsoft.
Going from one job using a "startup-y" Gmail company account to another job using a "corporate-y" Outlook solution was a tough transition. Outlook has loads of features, but the UI simplicity (relatively speaking) of Gmail makes most of them unnecessary in the first place, plus it was a little less frustrating to use. Meanwhile, Gmail still had calendar events, reminders, google drive integration, etc. in ways that seem on-par with features in Outlook.
Disclaimer: I'm not a PM/executive who has to juggle meetings and communication all day, so maybe I just ask less of email.
I use emacs with notmuch for my email. I have never found anything better, and yes I've used Outlook.
Searching with notmuch is blazing fast and works better than gmail search.
HTML email is handled by w3m. The new "eww" would probably work also but I haven't tried that yet.
It's possible to send HTML email by writing in org-mode markup, but I haven't done that either. If people can inflict their HTML email on me, they can deal with my plain-text replies.
Well, that's your opinion. Support that garbage like I do at work, and your opinion will change.
Again, popular does not mean good to me. That is the point. I have seen Outlook peg processors and waste disk IO with all those features.
I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal and some of us pray for mandates of no-fat client email, even to spite myself, because of Outlook and Thunderbird users.
> I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal
Have you tried Google's Inbox on an underpowered Linux box? It's horrendously slow, in my experience. Gmail is fine though. Some web based software is really good, but others can definitely be a CPU hog.
I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and mail files and do their best to scramble things up.
I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2 multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each (probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated), and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of filter sync with Exchange.
As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock solid.
Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.
Bummer, can't order this from Australia. Really want to get one of these for some testing. Anyone with inside info as to when these will be available outside the USA?
Could not find it in search. Also looks like it is for Amazon Prime members only.
Borderlinx chat person said: "You are welcome. We can ship the item without any issue." but also "Regarding the Amazon prime membership issue please be advised to check further with merchant."
This was probably downvoted as it didn't help OP, however, this is really good advice. I'm doing it now - 2FA is enabled for all my work stuff but I hadn't gotten around to enabling it on Amazon. Didn't know they had it.
The hard part of the MyGov platform is the inter-department stuff, and I don't think that's a software issue, that's bureaucracy.
MyGov isn't perfect, but it's fine.