Many Times, Customers Create Their Own Problems
I had a few thoughts on this. In my experience, customers tend to cause this problem and bring them upon themselves.
About 15 or so years ago, I talked with some folks that wanted me to do development work for the state of NY. They weren’t going to pay much, like 28% of my rate and expect me to travel on my dime. that just struck me as so unrealistic that I didn’t really know what the issue was beyond there being an ulterior motive. My assumption at the time was that it was just a front for h1-b mill. The idea being that they had to talk to US citizens to confirm that they couldn’t find anyone that could do the work to justify hiring h1-bs.
I’m sure that the above is true, but I think that there is more to this under the covers.
When you go looking at the root cause of these problems, they tend to be caused by the actual customer themselves. Someone comes into purchasing, or legal, or somewhere in the chain and says, “I can get you a better deal, just watch this.” They end up laying down a bunch of unrealistic rules and rates and requirements that are meant to make them look like tough negotiators. I can hear it now, “we’re getting a better deal for the people of NY!” And they get thunderous applause. In reality they get shit, but you don’t know that until later on. When you put unrealistic requirements out there, the good people run away and they won’t work under bs requirements. You get stuck with the bad people who game the system and commit what appears to be fraud.
To fix it, they always have to go back and start over. Bad software is a sunk cost, it’s over. You have to go back and start over. I suspect that this is what is driving this deep dive and finding fraud. “NY is having a bunch of failures of projects, they start to go back and look at this and say that the people brought in didn’t actually have the qualifications that were claimed.” I bet that if you look one level blow this, the actual driver is that there is a problem in several failures in Albany. Why are there failures? Because of the unrealistic requirements that someone that doesn’t know the first thing about software has deemed as a requirement. The media won’t tell you that actual cause.
The next step in this is that some “experts” in software will start pitching magical software development processes like scrum, agile, tdd, etc. I can just hear the sales processes now. The reality in all of this is that you have to have good people doing the right things. Good people cost money. You are actually better off with fewer people that are expensive than a bunch of low cost people. The low cost people can never produce or they take so long to produce that just paying more on a per hour basis would have cost you less over the entire project.