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Paul Jackson's avatar

I was involved in IT before there even was an IT, starting in the mid 1970s when computers first appeared. In the following years I worked mainly as an independent consultant on every sort of application imaginable and from disk storage to cloud storage. Every now and then I had the misfortune to work with government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Inevitably, the same pattern was repeated. The agency would encumber a huge amount of taxpayers money, they would then use their own staff to develop the application; the result would be something with an unintelligible front end, which collapsed if asked to process more than two transactions, which lost data because the back end was so poorly designed, and did not meet any of the specified requirements. At that point they would call people like me to try to make sense of it which wasn’t often possible. As with any government project, the people working on it tend to be the least talented in the field and who couldn’t survive in the private sector and for whom there are no consequences for failure. When something is so poorly designed and so poorly put together then at some point you just run out of band aids.

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