"Dave Briggs" dwb27@cam.ac.uk wrote:
Essentially, for those who can't be faffed to click the link, the government wanted to unify the Magistrates Courts across the country with one system. The tender which won was for £146 million. It has now risen to over £400 million, and the system still does not work.
This is the latest cock up, following distasters with the passport office and the CSA, amongst others. The Public Accounts Committee report [ http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmpubacc/434/4340... ] states that this is the biggest waste of public money yet.
What do we think about this, and how could things be done properly? Would the use of open source software improve matters? Why can't they recruit willing and able software engineers and do the job in house? From what I have hear from various sources, there are a lot of good IT people out of work at the moment. Surely they couldn't do any worse?! <<<<
Just a personal opinion that could be taken as a) ignorance or b) sour grapes:
I'm a professional Java programmer but have never worked on enterprise-level systems. Recently I've found it hard to get mainstream work, since most of the jobs offered are in investment banking (sic) or with other people who make a living out of skimming our money. The usual chicken-and-egg applies that if you've never worked with J2EE you won't get a job but if you don't have a job it's very hard to learn J2EE. And it's J2EE that's behind most of the large-scale web-based systems these days.
However, bitterness aside. From what I can deduce, the reason employers want J2EE skills isn't because they want creative, committed problem-solving types. No sir. J2EE is all about applying standard methods, plugging components together like so much Lego, with oodles of XML schemas. Imagination is not an asset in these areas. Indeed, in the only project I've ever worked on as part of a team of more than four people, questioning the rules and assumptions wasn't exactly encouraged and finally got me invited to leave the project. Which collapsed about a month later under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Does this go any way to explain why large public projects have a habit of going tits up? I think it does. Most accountants think of programmers as a commodity. If you run out of nails you go out and buy another bag from the local hardware store. If you run out of programmers you go out and buy another bag from the local agency. Yep, that's about it.
Until managers start to think of programming as a art rather than as a learned skill, nothing will change.
I've mentioned it before but at http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/ is The Programmer's Stone, whose purpose is "to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming". Here's just one paragraph:
------------------------- "Software engineering is in a terrible pickle. The so-called `Software Crisis' was identified in 1968, but despite thirty years of effort, with hundreds of supposedly fundamental new concepts published, the general state of the industry is horrific. Projects run massively over-budget or collapse entirely in unrecoverable heaps. Estimating is a black art, and too many projects solve the customers' problems of yesterday, not today. The technical quality of most code is dreadful, leading to robustness problems in service and high maintenance costs. And yet within the industry there exist individuals and groups who enjoy staggering, repeatable successes. There are many ways of measuring the usefulness of programmers, but some are rated as over a hundred times more useful than most, by several methods of counting. If only the whole of the industry performed as well as the tiny minority of excellent workers, the economic benefits would be immense. If it were possible to write sophisticated, reliable software quickly and cheaply, the intelligence of society would increase, as everything from car sharing to realistic social security regulations became possible." -------------------------
-- GT