Slashdot Mirror
NYC Drops $722M On CityTime Attendance System
theodp writes "New York City is reportedly paying 230 consultants an average annual salary of $400K for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission that the computerized timekeeping and payroll system — dubbed CityTime — is 'a disaster.' Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600K annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000. The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500K a year. Some of the consultants have been working at these rates for as long as a decade."
What is the purpose of an attendance system? To make sure someone is getting to work on time and not leaving before quitting time?
Sometimes people say that government employees should have greater scrutiny due to their being paid by the taxpayers, but I'm uncomfortable turning them into slaves.
... oversight is on vacation? What does a project have to do to get sh!t canned? I could have not delivered a timekeeping and payroll system for 1/2 that!
Is New York City going to follow Washington's lead and tax itself 10% for this custom software? :D
Wait. How would that work?
We would have done it for half that!
I guess they need some kind of system to keep track of their timetables and salaries!
Isn't it?
Where do I apply?
there is no spoon
at least NYC will get an extra 5k tax break per person...
i'm cheap. $200k would be sufficient.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Where do i sign up?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Coming Soon
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
This defense contractor SAIC is just a symptom of the special interests that are running this country. Multiple it by 1,000,000 and you understand why our country is going bankrupt. The nature of our DOE, NASA, and DOD budgets allow for this type of uncontrolled spending. People need to take charge of elections and actively support smaller and more responsive government.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
I didn't RTFA, but according to Bob Cringely, this is basically IBM's current business model. Looks like it may be sustainable.
If you RTFA, the people that are getting the highest salaries are "Project Managers". Generally these types of people don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and don't actually contribute to doing any work because they have no idea what it is they're doing. And these people are likely the reason the project isn't actually getting done. In fact, the people actually doing the grunt work on the project are likely making 10% of the stated figures.
This sort of thing happens in many, many businesses. The difference is that many businesses aren't required to report those figures and even then they are under far less scrutiny. I assure you this is about par course for American business in general both public and private.
There are better ways to do things, but until we vastly change the corporate culture that everyone is used to operating under we aren't going to see more efficiencies. The reality is that it's not the "government" wasting money here because this is what everyone that goes into these projects expects to be doing. And this is generally something that scales with said project; so cheaper projects get cheaper prices on management but it is still disproportionately higher than those that are doing the actual work.
Governments waste money.
It's not a waste if you're in the business of government. As long as the money passes through your hands, you win. It doesn't matter whether the project succeeds or fails -- what matters is that the money passes through your hands, giving you the chance to exploit it for personal gain.
I guarantee the overpaid consultants aren't the only ones banking big time on this project. In the business of government, spending is always good for the bottom line. After all, they're not spending their own money.
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
230 highly paid people and it has been underdevelopment for over a decade?
1 person should of been able to get it done in a decade.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"City Council to probe CityTime; timekeeping and payroll system costing city $700M"
"The IT Employee Confidence Index increased 0.6 points to 50.8 in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a recent survey commissioned by Technisource®, the technology placement division of Spherion Corporation "
"As a technology executive, you are constantly expected to do more with less. Technisource offers specialized IT consulting and outsourcing solutions through The Provali Group®, a division of Technisource launched in March of 2009"
how do I get a job in there?
2300 high lever bureaucrats @40k/year or,
4600 low level bureaucrats @20k/year or,
9200 Mexicans @10k/year or,
23000 interns @4k/year or,
Give everyone a bonus for working late till 5 am.
Hell, I've got 15+ years of experience with computers and some big name corporations (e.g. Time Inc & Oracle) in my resume. I'd be willing to do the job of two of the consultants for half as much.
The real question here is *who* is responsible for the project and is employing these people (who clearly seem to have no interest in getting the job done)? For example, if two or three individuals can rewrite a relatively robust DBMS (Oracle) in less than 2 years (circa 1983-84, the Oracle Version 3-->4 rewrite) having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
Consulting: When you're not part of the solution, there is good money in prolonging the problem.
Exactly. Government always wastes money. They should have hired a private contractor instead. It would have turned out much better that way.
being able to prove that you were in fact clocked in and working from 8:55 to 16:05 on monday (and the other 4 days of the week within about 2 minutes) does real wonders for GETTING PAID FOR THOSE TIMES. or for the cases where you actually left on thursday at 20:00 because something went BANG and you had to handle it.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If Governments Didn't Waste Money, where would all the lucrative contracts that keep Wall Streeters and Fortune 500 corporations in fat City?
Its not as if a rag-tag army of teabaggers is going to step in and bring in the bacon from now on. That would be a recipe for total economic collapse in GDP. Besides their share of kickbacks to a Bloomberg reelection would be minuscule anyway nor would their software make coffee for the mayor every morning.
However, it does leave one wondering what happened to that old technology "the punch clock". You wouldn't think it would cost 758 million dollars to upgrade it.
So let me get this straight - you think only governments waste money? What about the billions of dollars in bonuses and severance pay that are given to CEOs and other top level business executives who utterly screw their companies (and their stockholders, and their customers)? How is that not waste on a far larger scale?
No business executive deserves to earn millions of dollars. Use all that money to pay your damn front-line employees and I bet the economy will actually get a lot better very quickly.
The people charging these rates and not delivering and the people hiring them and paying them both should be in jail for fraud. That system can not possibly take that long or cost that must to develop.
Oh? You mean like the military contractors (Blackwater)?
Now I understand why with almost 8 million people in the city, with some of the highest taxes in the country, the reason NYC constantly has no money and has to cut critical services all the time.
Seriously, NYC has some major problems when it comes to infrastructure costs and planning. Just take a look at the MTA countdown clocks and the hundreds of millions they pour into it with absolutely no results, but they can't keep critical bus and subway lines. The WTC is still nothing but a giant hole. The Fulton Street Transit Center is a disaster. Hell, the Second Avenue Subway line dates back to 1929!
*sigh*
the sad thing is that the taxpayers put up with it. and many even defend it.
You are trolling but you are not aware of it because you got a blind spot. Remember those banks that collapsed and took the whole economy with them? Private industry and filled with excessive salaries and people who get golden parachutes when they are "let go".
About the only way to fix this is to cut management down. But what manager is going to say, "we don't need all these managers". I seen these kind of projects, they are pretty common. And it is always a case of management going out of control. You could produce a system like this with half a dozen skilled people. But in reality what you get is hundreds, and most of them having nothing to do with the system at all anymore.
And that happens everywhere. Just why do you think MS employs so many people, and for what? If you took a shotgun and shot everyone with a management title at MS, it would affect their productivity at all. In fact, I am willing to bet it goes up. But nobody is going to do that, because the job you might cut, is your own.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My company has 3 developers working at about 60k, and we have built systems that do a hell of a lot more then this software. Wow what a freaking scan. They are just continuing to milk the system.
They are saving money, because any off-the-shelf time-tracking software would cost much more than $722 million. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
Of course this is disgraceful, but it's by no means limited to government - there's plenty of waste in private industry, we just don't hear about it as much. I have a friend who recently worked as a consultant for one of the big health insurers in California. She talked about a multi-hundred-million-dollar development project on a new IT system that they scrapped before implementing. You'd think someone could have pulled the plug before the project got into 9 figures.
Of course, from a cost standpoint, healthcare is a disaster here in the US (I think we spend about 2x as much per-person as the next highest country, and I suspect it will only get worse under the new reforms). Having relatives who work in healthcare, and seeing the mess that's resulted from multiple, independent providers who don't share data efficiently (i.e. hospitals, doctors and clinics) and multiple, independent insurance monopolies that negotiate separately with each provider, I can't imagine a public healthcare system wouldn't be better than what we have. Of course, half the country seems to think having the government involved in healthcare is 'evil socialism'... at least until they hit 65 and go on Medicare, at which point most of them seem to like it.
When I see how the US reacts to complex debates like this it's hard to believe we've been as economically and militarily successful as we have.
- ss
Makes for wasteful governments. I am sure IBM or EDS could have quoted a system to take care of employee based on existing code and systems they had refined over decades.
That is why they should do the least and let private businesses compete for tasks.
It is sad that politicians and some in the public think government is THE answer.
"What was your estimate on the last landfill's lifetime, and how long did it actually last?"
I can predict the answer to that question: "50 years, and it's still around." How many of these companies are older than 50 years do you think?
I have a friend who was a teacher in California for a year. She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Do you not qualify for unemployment benefits? Or are you placing some weird distinction on the fact that the unemployment benefits are also paid by the state so somehow that means she's "keeping the same employer"?
Teacher unions are evil. End of story.
Teachers will disagree. Strongly.
Apparently their interests and that of others may not align. Who knew? Who could think of such a thing?
And before you say "Well, if School Boards were free to act on their own, then it wouldn't be a problem because they'd educate the students and attract teachers..."
Yeah, Teachers like Unions and School Boards don't always know shit about teaching students either.
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money? Sure, it's tax-payers' money but aren't we constantly told by various private sector financed think tanks that this public work is best outsourced to the private sector? Well, this is what happens, folks.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land. It's just that they are less liable to scrutiny. When corruption happens in private organizations, it gets brushed under the carpet. Why? Because it looks not only bad for the culprit (obviously) but also the guy who employed him - no matter that he had nothing to do with the scam. Everybody stay silent and nobody gets hurt, right?
I've seen this soooo many times in the private sector - outsourced procurement agencies that charge $1000 for a $500 desktop, outsourced projects that were awarded to a consultancy that was (by shocking coincidence) run by the brother of the guy on the committee overseeing the outsourcing etc etc. In all these cases, it's hard to prove that actual fraud took place (eg, "well, we really did think this was the best offer when you consider all the factors").
And nobody in a private organization is ever, ever going to be prosecuted for these scams. Why would they? Who wants to pursue such cases? The shareholders don't care about such small corruption even if they got to hear of it. The media are not interested (a private company can spend its money as it sees fit). And an employee is only going to ruin his career.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
I have a friend who was a teacher in California for a year. She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
If you tried it you'd be quitting, not laid off. Try to understand the difference.
You can't take the sky from me...
Is it just me or do Americans seem to have some kind of blind spot when it comes to government corruption? In any other country, this would've immediately been called for what it is, plain old corruption, and would be a scandal. It is obvious what is happening here.
No little man. Like the company this article is about. It's a joke. Every time the government screws up at something, the "free market solves everything" people claim that the government is inherently incapable of doing anything right, so they should just hand a smaller chunk of money to private industry and everything would be fine.
Well that was what happened here, and it didn't work. The "government sucks" people step right in without skipping a beat. The thought that private industry shares the blame apparently hasn't occured to many of the people posting today.
Any place where an "overly greedy" human can make an extra buck at someone else's expense, they will. Yes, people should be paid for their work. When they charge so much that the customers can't put food on the table, there's a problem. Or, if dragging something out increases profit, some humans will do this. It'd be nice if we could switch to where profit was based on the task being completed, not the amount of effort that went into the task. Take healthcare. They profit off of treatment. Unethical healthcare companies could choose to not develop better/cheaper treatments, simply because they would lose profit. I'd love to see a system where they only get paid if the treatment works. (Obviously, this is difficult where the current treatments don't always work: cancer, AIDS, etc...)
First, I want to make it clear that I think these rates are ridiculous and I absolutely do not support them. However...
The rates quoted are the rates SAIC is charging. They are NOT the rates the contractors are paid. The article is very misleading on this point and I'm surprised that this hasn't been picked up on here.
If SAIC charges their client $600k per year for a consultant, SAIC is probably paying that employee, say, $140k. It's extremely disingenuous to state that these contractors themselves are making this type of salary. It is their employer who is billing this kind of money for their employees' time.
I'm sure there's a lot of blame to go around here, but from reading the article the only people I can say are DEFINITELY to blame are the ones at the government who approved SAIC's budget.
www.clarke.ca
The story is inaccurate. The City is not employing these persons and is not paying these persons a salary or any other type of compensation.
The City has hired a company to perform the work and this other company is paying these persons some type of compensation. These persons will never see anything close to the stated "salaries".
The rates being charged are not out of line with rates being charged elsewhere.
It sounds like someone might be constantly changing the specifications. I'm sure like all things political in New York (see rebilding WTC), the contract likely requires EVERYONE who touches the payroll to have a say in how it works. That, along with different trade unions and their contracts' idiosyncrasies, work/shift/OT rules, and I could see how it can become a mess.
I'm paid hourly, and my company uses SAP for HR management. The idea is that all I should have to do is put my hours and on-call time in and the system should be able to figure out the rest. As it turns out, there's a drop down that has about 30 different line items to pick from. Each one will have an influence in my paycheck. Choose the wrong one and it can be a big problem. Then there's at least 2 levels of approval before my time is submitted to get a check cut. Every time I enter time, it has to be broken out by line item. In my case, it is usually 7:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00 since I have to indicate the lunch hour, except when I don't get a lunch. So I have at least 2 lines per day, but there's also on call, call-out, company holiday (which, if I'm on call, has to be broken out in 4 hours because for some strange reason just putting in 8 hours of holiday pay makes the system reject the on call pay). If I'm on vacation is it for medical reasons? Are those medical reasons eligible for FMLA rules? Have I used up my FLMA time?
We live with the bizarre nature of the system because someone, somewhere decided it was the best way to go, and if we want to get paid we'd better do what it says. At least once a month I enter something the wrong way and it gets rejected (usually when I come in at 23:00 doing night work... the system doesn't like crossing midnight for some reason). If you have a situation where everyone involved has a say in the matter, there's no way people would put up with this stuff. And according to the article, they wanted to use biometric systems to make it work. It sounds like someone wanted to be able to have a fingerprint scanner at the front door and employees would get scanned when they came in, scan when they leave and the system can figure out the rest. But there's a problem with that model as pointed out above. Is my scan a call-out when I'm on call or a call-out when I'm not? Straight overtime or call out time? What if I get called in early but continue working (when does call-out pay end and normal day begin)? That may affect my paycheck, depending on the work rules, so it darn well better get it right or there's going to be hell to pay.
And then there's the "does it have to have a blue background" problem, and real or perceived UI issues, and people who generally hate change.
Or maybe the contractor is just incompetent.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Hey folks, it's not as bad as all that (although it *is* pretty extreme). The $600K is what SAIC is billing NYC. That's probably 3x what the actual worker gets, if not more. The $600K includes benefits, rent, electricity, computer rental, office support, management, etc. And NYC *is* an expensive city to buy all that stuff in.
Practically, speaking, this is a REALLY complex job. I'll bet NYC has tens of thousands of different job categories, each with its own idiosyncratic, poorly documented rules, not to mention rafts of collective bargaining agreements that have varying tiers and seniority grades, and probably different sick time/vacation/holiday schedules, not to mention weird shift differentials.
ANd, I'll bet it has to provide interfaces to dozens, if not hundreds, of different departmental payroll systems, because each agency/department has said "I'm not going to change OUR system"
Aaand it's a good time to mention that government employees make 30% more than non-government employees, and that doesn't include benefits (if you want to get around the paywall, check out this link). This shows that in New York at least, the pay isn't spread around equally, some people are getting paid far more than their private-sector counterparts, so presumably others are getting paid less.
The article mentions that in most states with deficits, if pay were more reasonable, it would easily close the deficit in most states that have them.
Qxe4
Since it's effectively little more than a fancy punch clock, I'd think that it'd not be THAT difficult to do. I'm amazed that they're pouring that much cash into a bottomless pit on this- and then doing more of it instead of pulling the plug and starting over.
It's NYC, the City of Graft. This is a city where "working the system" is SOP, where "in the old days" there where many Pisanos that had a "city job" they never went to. It still goes on today. This project is simply following the NYC way of doing things.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You're absolutely right. Corporate welfare is evil. We should stop it. Which party, and which candidates, advocate stopping it? Do you for them, or for their opponents?
do you vote for them, I meant to say. Sigh.
Open source payroll and time management system:
http://www.timetrex.com/
If you had read TFA, you'd know it was a private company screwing the government. Maybe if corporations were banned from using their con$iderable influence on government, things would be better.
..there's plenty of waste in private industry, we just don't hear about it as much.
One word. Dilbert.
Its funny cus its true!
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Teacher unions are evil. End of story.
Huh? What has that got to do with what the original poster said?
You do know what party controls New York, right?
Double huh? How did party politics get involved here? It looks like you are some political Eliza-bot that looks for keywords and spews out canned clichés. Actually, that would explain a lot about mainstream political debate.
She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Yeah, and there's not chance that you'd be able to get unemployment benefits, right? Or is it just that you object to the idea of unemployment benefits.
Why don't governments at all levels have a refund clause for their contractors? If the project is not delivered, working and on time, the government gets all it's money back. Or start charging 1% of the total value per day it is late. Guarantee that the "design a hopelessly optimistic time and budget estimate to win the bid and then take twice as long at four times the cost" business model would disappear.
Just my $.02. Delivered four years from now at $2.00.
I love that one point of the system was to eliminate the age-old abuse of city workers punching clocks for their friends and save up to $60 million a year.
A project to prevent the city from overpaying people for doing nothing is being overpaid to do nothing.
If you really care about your workers, which is more important - making sure they make it to work on time, or making sure they have the means to get there in the first place?
Ref: nydailynews.com
If you want something done by a contractor on a budget, get a fixed bid. That will give them incentives to move Heaven an Earth to keep the margins fat and timelines short.
Of course the contract should include a series of binding quality criteria, else "fat margins" will equate to non-performing "product".
I've been on both sides of the fence, and that's the best way for both contractor and contractee to have a fruitful relationship.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I'd mod you up but I prefer to chime in. I have a punch clock at $WORK, and since the setup is well done it's surprisingly painless, even agreeable. I'm supposed to work an average of 7h48m per day, sign in in a 90-minute window, sign out in a three-hour window, work at least five and at most ten hours a day, with automatic carries of +- 3 h/week or 4h/4weeks. With regular working hours you only notice when you forget to punch or when you're absent without warning. Then you get an automatic mail.
Now, with those working hours, I most certainly do not earn USD 600K per year, not even 543,698 like the guy on a 30-hour week at CityTime. 600K should be enough for all the software, maybe even including the servers... Feature creep maybe, but near-criminal mismanagement, most certainly.
I believe its worth noting that SAIC was behind the disaster that was the FBI's Virtual Case File project.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
``And yet many of the same people who will cry foul over this will be first in line telling the government it is morally obligated to provide X social program or prop up Y industry "for the good of the country." Surely that isn't a colossal waste, won't go to lining the pockets of consultants, won't get dragged down by graft, won't go over budget estimations, et cetera.''
I think you're conflating two issues there. Allow me to explain.
Your whole post is full of examples of government inefficiency. They are good examples, and I am completely with you there. Government is inefficient, and we know it.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is no inefficiency outside of government. And indeed, there is plenty. However, there is a key difference between inefficiency in government and inefficiency outside of government, and that is that, outside of government, you have a choice. If company A is less efficient that company B and therefore charges more for essentially the same products, you can go with company B instead. Doing the same thing with a government is much more involved.
For the above reasons, it is better in many cases to have things provided by multiple, competing organizations than by a government (or, indeed, another monopoly - the same reasoning applies). There will still be inefficiency, but, since you can choose your provider, providers have an incentive to curb their inefficiencies in order to be more competitive. I think that's the long version of what you've been saying, and I agree.
However, there is one key point, and that is that it's sometimes _not_ a good thing to be able to choose your provider and have providers reduce their inefficiencies. This is the case in many social programs. Presuming the social program has any merit at all, the population can be divided into two classes: those who would currently directly benefit from the program, and those who wouldn't.
E.g. if the program provided unemployment benefits, and I were unemployed, and you weren't, then, I would directly benefit, but you wouldn't. If we were free to choose, I might want the system that provided the maximum unemployment benefits, and you might want the system that provided the minimum. But that wouldn't work, because then the money for running the program would have to come from those who don't have it, while those who do have money wouldn't be contributing it.
To make the program work, it must be mandatory for those who have money to contribute to the program that provides money to those who need it. And that means you need the government, despite its tendency towards inefficiency. It's the difference between having a system that works inefficiently with government involvement, or a system that doesn't work at all. And what makes the former system inefficient is precisely the same thing that makes it work at all: the fact that participation is mandatory.
Long story short: if you can make it work while preserving freedom of choice, do so. It will preserve liberty and be more efficient. But in some cases, the only way to make it work is to take away that freedom. The same people can cry foul over inefficiencies in government and still advocate government programs: we need some government programs, but we still want things to be as efficient as possible.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
are you including project managers in your definition of management, because I would bet if you suddenly stripped MS of project managers you would have a serious problem
Pisanos?
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
There are plenty of people out there who will end up working productively for an entire lifetime for less money than these wastes of space have made on this one failed project. If we REALLY want to fix the economy, perhaps those people should be given a chance rather than laying them off so the living monuments to the broken window fallacy can get a raise.
Governments waste money. Your local government does it. Your state government. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (/sarcasm) but I'm pretty sure the federal government does it, too.
Private industry wastes gobs of money as well. The reason you don't hear about it is that the government actually has to report on what it spent, where private industry can usually sweep it all under the table.
Have you never heard of failed projects in private industry that wasted millions of dollars? Sometimes private enterprise has a very public failure they wasted millions of dollars on that's so public they can't sweep it under the rug. The London Stock Exchangeis a good example. (Brought to you by the fine folks at Accenture, whom I personally know have completely fucked up two other large projects).
Idiotic and colossal failures of software projects are embarrassingly common. I'm sure anyone worth their salt on slashdot has heard of many such failures in private industry. I know I have.
AccountKiller
I thought only Detroit was saddled with an incompetent, incomplete digital time management system. I feel slightly better knowing that even great cities like New York are in the same boat.
The system has been running for over a year now with many identified problems, none of which have been solved because the vendor insists on a new contract to fix them. I would have thought these problems would have been covered under the original warranty on the system but perhaps this was bought wothout a warranty.
Who's to blame. Certainly the private contractors who failed to deliver the system they promised but also the procurement people in government who may be too uninformed to know what is the best system but most often seem to be simply corrupt.
The responses to your comment had me shaking with laughter...so many so quick to seize the opportunity to blame government, and unions, and political parties...each overlooking the fact that this project was created and handed to "private enterprise" by Giuliani. And for that, the public is paying the price.
The bottom line truth is the right does not object to the taxpayers' money being wasted unless they are not getting a cut. The real right is private enterprise; they'll buy whatever variety of politician it takes to give them the ability to create $720 million invoices for time-keeping systems.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
If the government had done it, it would have cost even more. I am sure the free market will punish these consultants accordingly.
all i can say is...
damn, why didn't i get this job!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I guess you don't know the half of it. They sell well to CIOs on the basis of sex-aiddict sportsmen but deliver chaos as they try to get stuff written as cheaply as possible whilst not spending money to manage their projects properly. The settlement on the project I saw was the refund of $16M or so but a big fat non-disclosure. Government projects usually don't have that luxury.
Big projects are still very difficult to run be it pyramids or large IT systems.
See my journal, I write things there
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Government doesn't have to waste money...better oversight would help.
And STOP CALLING ME SHIRLEY!
I have a friend who was a teacher in California for a year. She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Is there some reason why you would not be eligible for unemployment benefits?
Governments waste money. Your local government does it. Your state government. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (/sarcasm) but I'm pretty sure the federal government does it, too.
Yes, it's a government that's footing the bill here... But it's a private company that's wasting the money. Sure, they should have been fired and replaced... But that's more of an oversight thing than a waste of money thing, right?
The fact of the matter is that wasting money isn't limited to governments. Private companies waste money all the freaking time.
My current favorite is a local supplier of EMR software and the accompanying hardware. One of the doctors we support spent about $30,000 for a server, software, and some workstations. That supplier then turned around and sent the doctor about $5,000 worth of junk for Christmas as a "thank you." Seems to me that they could have either taken $5,000 off the initial price... Or put it towards making the software better.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I guess you don't know the half of it. They sell well to CIOs on the basis of sex-aiddict sportsmen but deliver chaos as they try to get stuff written as cheaply as possible whilst not spending money to manage their projects properly.
Oh I know that quite well (Though I'm not sure what you mean by sex-addict sportmen). I've never personally experienced their work, but I've heard from several people I trust that that's how they operate. Selling to CIOs and the like is relatively common if you're trying to sell something expensive. That part I've experienced and told vendors to go packing and found solutions at 1/30 of the cost. (Sales people don't like me because I actually know what I want and can see through their sophisticated 3-card Monte). That's obviously a bit of a luxury, and I'm sure someday I'll get dictated to to buy some insanely expensive and worthless system.
The project I know most about that they fucked up was rewriting University of Minnesota financial system. Through the grapevine I heard the project was doomed early on. A friend of mine actually worked with the "finished" product, and confirmed how utterly and complete a train wreck the thing was. The response of Accenture to the train wreck was to set up a "SWAT Team" that they could point towards whenever someone complained. The "SWAT Team" consisted of reportedly smart people that would look at the code, and kind of shrug essentially saying "Well of course that huge mess of crap doesn't work, but how the hell am I supposed to fix it?"
AccountKiller
I'm sure there's a good amount of corruption and waste going on here, but that's pretty typical for government programs; and it seems like the financial incentives also support it in this case. However, just cause it's not the popular opinion, another thought...
As someone in the software industry, it's exceedingly common to have projects where the person specifying the requirements has no concept of the actual work involved, and/or there's serious feature creep, and/or there's no consideration for the costs of maintenance and modifications when the code is being designed. All of these contribute to projects which, on their face, would appear to cost much less, actually end up costing significantly more.
Most people who are not in the software industry (and some people who are) look at projects as commodities, which take a certain amount of time/money depending on the scope of work, and ignore the internal workings. That's just not the way the real world works, especially when incompetence and beuracracy are present, regardless of the skill and efforts of the people actually trying to produce a good product.
You do know what party controls New York, right?
Well, Michael Bloomberg is still mayor, so I think it depends on the day of the week.
they are late on a time keeping system
the government will get health care right!!!
Its is almost impossible to fire a teacher due to teachers unions. Hence, in the original post, the teacher that was laid off still gets paid almost as much as before. There are many many stories of teachers who are still being paid to do nothing because nobody wants them. Many of them have been caught having sex with their students, molestation, etc etc. Despite being convicted and in jail, they still draw paychecks because they can't be fired.
For the parties, its just pointing out that its the democratic party that has the history of claiming a great injustice in the land and sponsoring a new government program to correct it, while also promising how inexpensive it will be and how great of a job they will do, just as the parent was talking about.
When you start ranting that "the problem in this market is all the evil monopolies" you might want to stop for breath. A single system for filing claims would be a huge improvement in the way the business of healthcare operates. Huge. And totally within the legitimate provenance of government to enforce, much like the uniform commercial code standardizes a bunch of other stuff about contracts and customer-business relationships at the logistical level.
How about we just fix the problems?
Problem: too many complex paperwork systems for filing claims consumes a huge amount of healthcare dollars.
Solution: have the government create a standardized system (not prices, just medical terms and filing process).
Problem: too many people have no access to health insurance, and so access heallth care in very inefficient ways.
Solution: give those people government health insurance.
I would dearly love a government that was trying to fix the actual problems, instead of using the actual problems as an excuse to grow the power of government over our daily lives. No where in fixing the actual problems is it necessary for the IRS to know the details of what my health insurance plan covers! No where in fixing the actual problems does the government get to say "providing health care for all has become too expensive, so let's outlaw the following unhealthy behaviors." If you think the latter is far-fetched, you haven't been paying attention, here or abroad.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Anyone who gets 2/3rds of their previous salary in unemployment benefits wasn't making much money. There's a fairly low maximum payment you can get from unemployment.
You are trolling but you are not aware of it because you got a blind spot. Remember those banks that collapsed and took the whole economy with them? Private industry and filled with excessive salaries and people who get golden parachutes when they are "let go".
Had the free market been allowed to work as it should, none of those golden parachutes would have been paid out.
Instead we propped them up and allowed them - no encouraged them to rob us blind. Dumbasses.
Yeah, the economy would have collapsed, and it would have sucked. But you know what? The fundamentals of economics don't change because someone fucked up. Where one company fails by making foolish decisions, another succeeds by making great decisions. What you end up with when the economy collapses is a country full of companies that made the correct decisions, because those are the only ones that would survive. Even in the midst of the banking crisis there were a number of banks who stood out as being rock solid for not making the foolish decisions other banks made. How did we reward them for doing the right thing? Why, we gave their failing competition free money to make sure they could still compete in spite of their foolish decisions! What fools are we?
Things would have sucked for a year or two, and things would definitely be very different today, but it wouldn't have taken very long for us to be better off than we were before. So instead of things sucking a lot for a short while, things are going to suck a little bit less for a very long time. Great choice.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
This is an SAIC project. SAIC is a large company and most likely has significant amounts of "overhead" to support. Thus, you get very high billing rates, but that has no real relationship to the actual salaries these guys are making.
From the article:
"The actual amounts individual SAIC employees took home are most likely lower than their stated rates, since computer firms typically take a cut of each consultant's charges. Nonetheless, these are breathtaking numbers."
Which would be better put:
"So I don't know what these guys are REALLY making in their paychecks, but I bet that headline and these mugshots are really going to sell this story!"
That's not really THAT outlandish for an ERP system, but it most certainly is for a PM. Normally your $250 and up guys are the ones with specialized abilities in certain fields that require a mix of technical and functional understanding. When I was a recruiter, I once placed a consultant on a treasury project for a large agricultural company at a pay rate of $350 an hour, and his bill rate was over $500 an hour.
And that was AFTER the whole IT boom. I know an SAP Human Resources consultant whose bill rate was over $1300 an hour during that period.
So the government is bad because it pays its workers living wages, and capitalism is good because it keeps down the wages of the people who do the work and hand it all over to the rich? I suppose that's the opinion you would hold if you received your news from a publication run by a billionaire sociopath.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A few months ago, wasn't he going on about an economic rescue something or other?
In my opinion (although I am Canadian, but my opinion applies equally to my homeland as well), civil budgets should be one of the primary figures available to all on data.gov. That way, careless spending could be fairly easily monitored (potentially automatically).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes yes, teachers' unions are a den of thieves and sex offenders. Christ, what an asshole.
That or give them a guaranteed end date with penalties for going over. Either one works great.
The biggest thing though, is knowing what you want/need ahead of time. More than likely the reason the project is still going on today is not because the contractors have been milking it (even though I'm sure they have been).
This project has scope creep written all over it, and the best written contracts with the most honest and efficient company in the world will not be able to finish a project where the scope is perpetually changing. It is impossible by definition.
It sounds like they contracted out all the project management, which means they probably did not empower those PM's with the ability to cancel all or part of the project. They then likely allowed multiple departments to make "suggestions" which the PMs were forced to accommodate. The cycle is vicious, and it takes a strong, honest, and empowered project manager to prevent it.
When the NYC government requests a change, and the consultant says "We can do that, but it will cost another $100 million", and the government signs the contract adjustment, you cannot blame the consultant. Period.
To put it another way, there is no way the government can pay out $700 million on a contract without the government approving the cost.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
People work to make money. They need money to put food on the table and to pay debts. That is their primary concern for working, not for completing a project. The project is just secondary to them. Therefore, it either gets done or it doesn't. Seeing as how the people of NYC have been healing since 2001, it isn't a surprise that they haven't put more time and effort into the work that they do, since they need the money to stay sane in order to work at all.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
Except it's NOT the same revenue stream (and it's only "non-trivial because unemployment benefits are capped at a relatively small amount, so your friend was making shit to begin with). Contrary to popular belief "the government" isn't a single entity with one single revenue stream. Unemployment for instance is partially funded through federal tax dollars. But don't believe just me, look it up yourself (After reading through it, it is NOT simple)
In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Because of being partly funded through a federal payroll tax, California is saving more than that. Also, states are allowed to borrow money from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits. If you wanted to actually analyze the savings you'd have to know whether the California unemployment tax goes into a general fund, or whether it goes to pay unemployment benefits. But hey, just simplify it down and make the bare minimum calculation and assume everything supports your argument. Also just ignore the fact about how school funding ACTUALLY happens. I'm sure you're right that just assuming all revenue is just thrown into a general fund like your bank account and there's no allocation of funds to different branches of government. (Have you seriously never paid any attention at all to how government works?)
and the unemployment lobby
What the fuck are you on, brother? The "unemployment lobby"? There's an "unemployment lobby"? Created by whom? The super-rich unemployed? What's the name of this "unemployment lobby" Do they have offices? You're just making shit up at this point and putting "lobby" in front of things you don't like because people don't like lobbyist (oh, except for the causes they personally support).
AccountKiller
Reminds me of the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation project (1995-2000). It too was a big fail resulting in the ban of XP practice at Chrysler for a while, although they did deliver a system.
But this example is even worse (public funds, longer, more waste of money) and much more flagrantly (fraudulently?) ridiculous.
Hence, in the original post, the teacher that was laid off still gets paid almost as much as before.
Uhh... haven't you ever heard of unemployment insurance. (Hint, this is a benefit everyone but the self-employed gets and has nothing to do with teachers unions). The only reason the person in question received 2/3 of their original salary is because the original salary was shit to begin with (unemployment benefits are generally capped to a relatively small amount).
The ignorance of some people just astounds me. Your entire argument is based on nothing of substance. You are a prime example of willful ignorance.
AccountKiller
Quick, someone find those magical MIT students who proved the mythical man month wrong!
1. Client calls for tenders on a vaguely-defined project.
2. Outsourcing companies put in bids that are _very_ keenly priced. It's not unusual for the initial big to be a break-even, or even a loss-maker for the outsourcing company.
3. Client chooses lowest bidder - even if other bidders are clearly better-qualified to do the job.
4. Contract is signed, including a clause where any variance to the original spec is to be billed at $X per hour (typically several times the rate for the original work).
5. Every frakking thing in the contract is then gone over with a fine tooth comb, and if any part of the necessary work wasn't explicitly specified, it becomes a variance. Meetings are called with the client to discusss these variances. At every meeting there will be 2 or 3 client representatives, and 6 or 8 contractor representatives, these meetings are billed to the client at $X per person per hour. The longer it takes to agree on the revised specs, the more the contractor makes.
6. Actual work then commences. Inevitably, more ambiguities or outright bugs in the original spec are discovered. This leads to more very profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
7. When the project is half way finished, there's a change in management at the client, and the new manager feels the urge to "make his mark" by having an organizational re-structure. Everyone gets new job titles, new business cards, new reporting lines. This requires changes to the software, which requires more meetings....
The above describes an outsourcing project I worked on where the client was a large private business, where the client is government, you have a whole 'nother layer of bureaucracy adding far more opportunity for highly profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The one thing I have not been able to find out here is whether the high salaries are an actual salary, or the billed costs of a consulting firm. If these are billed costs, divide by three (or more) to find out what the programmers were actually paid. And then consider that this is New York - where a parking space costs more than an apartment in most other cities.
The rest of the comments seem pretty accurate.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
Comment removed based on user account deletion
no he is correct about unions, they essentially protect the useless and incompertent purly because they paid their union dues. ironically unions often claim to be all about safety when they knowingly fight to keep unsafe workers in a job, and believe me most work place accidents are caused by co workers without 2 brain cells to rub together.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, here's the general difference:
People work for the government for 2 reasons: control and security. When a government agency doesn't spend its entire budget, the budget for the next year is probably going to be cut. A governmental manager would be pretty upset to see their budget cut because it's going to be harder for them to get things done in their little fiefdom, not to mention harm their expense account. A government, for that reason, will spend every dime it has, even if there's no good reason to do so.
Companies, on the other hand, are there to make a profit. It's a negative for a company to spend all it has. And while you can point out a few companies here and there which have gone into the red, the majority of them do not survive doing so for long, and they certainly don't do it purposefully.
Pretty much the only governments which can possibly operate in the black are governments ruled by dictators or monarchs, because they have no need to answer to the people.
Unions strike a balance between greedy corporations, and greedy individuals. Sometimes one or the other gets out of whack, but to choose one side or the other ignores the need for balance.
AccountKiller
Just imagine if the rest of the city budget was transparent, there is tons of waste, but its hidden in budgets. I'm amazed this came to light.
Try to find out how much is lost lawsuits, overtime, overruns, etc. its a fiasco, yet we will never know. Seattle has been hiding lawsuits from police deaths for awhile. I wonder how much New York pays for wrongful damages? Its outrageous that people say we need more taxes, when they cant even provide an accounting for the money is going in our budgets...
One of the reasons people want audits and accountability, our banks cant even do it, what makes you think a city can?
they are nothing more then a business themselfs, and their business is to interfer with everyone elses business. i know a guy that had a union greivences filed against him for carrying his own own bags to his room when visiting a site.
I can't say too much but i've had run in's with unions and some of them are run by ugly ugly people who you defintely don't want to have in your life.
Move out of New York City.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I was making a simple observation, not writing a thesis.
Which doesn't stand up to examination. Your observation was that California was foolish in laying off your friend for purely economic reasons since they only saved 1/3 the money. Obviously that isn't true for the reasons I stated. Even a simple observation should be able to stand up to what amounts to 2 minutes of research about how unemployment works.
But those complications don't change the overall irony of going from being an employee of the taxpayers in exchange for services rendered, to being an "employee" of the taxpayers for doing nothing at all.
I guess I don't see the irony. Being paid to do nothing is how unemployment works, and the benefit to society is we don't have people living on the streets. The other major benefit is all the cash the government gives out as unemployment goes right back into the economy. In a time of economic stress that's very important, otherwise the economy would collapse even further.
Since it's largely a payroll tax that you have to work a certain amount of time to even qualify for, it's more like an entitlement like Social Security than anything else. I really don't see how a public party being on unemployment is any more ironic than a private party. Each have paid into the system, so what's the problem? It's shit pay if that makes you feel any better. Frankly you just sound jealous of your friend because you work in a state that doesn't offer any kind of decent unemployment benefits.
Guess what? That's a lobby.
I guess you're right, there's an "unemployment lobby". What bothers be about your comment is that it reduces the real needs of people down to what amounts to politicking along the lines of "the tobacco lobby" or "the big oil lobby". People use the word "lobby" as a bludgeon to associate a certain political point with a negative connotation. It's like someone talking about how child labor laws are simply something pushed by "the child labor lobby", dismissing the real world problems that existed before child labor laws as merely "special interests". Maybe that's not what you're trying to say, but it sure sounds like it.
In fact, my entire original comment was a series of observations about government, indicting not the government for its wastefulness, but poking fun at people who get up-in-arms about that waste in one area but are quick to backpedal when their pet cause is on trial.
Or jettison subtlety, I suppose. Which is a real shame because beating people over the head makes me feel misanthropic.
I didn't get any of that whatsoever. Subtlety is largely conveyed through tone and reputation. That's lost entirely in text postings by anonymous people.
AccountKiller
no, they merely add an extra player to the game - the greedy union.
Do you really have no idea what labor was like in this country before unions were able to organize? The meatpacking industry was a prime example. Dangerous working conditions, low pay, etc Upton Sinclair wrote a popular book about it called The Jungle 104 years ago in 1906. Unions were able to organize in the 30s, and turned meat packing into a decent job. That all started to fail in the 70s when for various reasons the unions fell in meat packing. These days meatpacking is back to being a shit job done by illegal immigrants that's among the most dangerous in the nation. So it's gone full circle.
I also know some fairly idiotic counter-examples of the greed and power-hungry aspect of unions. That's why I stress the need for balance between the two.
AccountKiller
give me a break.
600K a YEAR?
Private industry already solved the claim problem by requiring that claims submitted to them be in one of a couple of different electronic or paper formats. Of course, the burden of producing said formats is greater than the vats majority of healthcare providers is able to shoulder, so a host of middlemen was created to take forms from the providers and submit them to the insurance carriers in their desired formats. Of course, this increased the cost of doing business, so the cost of healthcare went up.
Despite the insurance carriers forcing healthcare providers to submit in a standardized format, when the insurance carriers send back their explanation of benefits forms, they all have their own unique format, so healthcare providers have to have someone manually plugging this information into the patient accounting system.
There already exists a standard electronic remittance form for insurance companies to send back to providers, but many insurance companies have not implemented this, and the vast majority of providers do not have the IT staff to handle receiving this format. If doctors are forced to receive this format, then a host of middlemen companies will need to be created to integrate with the healthcare providers, which will drive up the cost of healthcare.
I work for one such company that will likely benefit from ObamaCare, but I still feel that the government is swimming in waters that don't concern them, and that they know nothing about. This bill will be great for insurance companies, bad for healthcare providers, bad for the rich, will destroy the middle class, and will be bad for the poor.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Perhaps in New York this is true, but in the three states I have lived and worked in, private sector paid much more than government jobs. While government workers tended to have better benefits, the overall package was still somewhat lower.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If you think about it, it's all the more reason why that person probably needs the unemployment. In most places, it's not easy to save much money for a rainy day when you're making $30k.
It's kind of like when people complain about some statistic like "The 10% of people who make the most money pay 50% of the taxes in this country." If true, that leaves 2 mathematical possibilities: either we're placing heavy taxes on the richest people in this country, or the richest 10% are making *way* more money than the rest of us. It's most likely the latter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unemployment benefits are nominal pretty much everywhere. Maybe they're exceptionally generous in California, but I find it just as likely that your teacher friend was making so little money that even nominal unemployment benefits were 2/3 of her salary.
But I personally appreciate the irony of someone who is working for the government continuing to collect a non-trivial portion of their salary from the same revenue stream.
What's ironic about that? Do you also find it ironic that government workers can get social security when they retire or become disabled? If you just mean that it's kind of a funny thing to think about, I might agree. Like it's kind of funny that people who work for the government pay income tax. It makes sense once you understand what's going on, but it seems strange at first blush.
In the case I mentioned, California is saving 1/3 of a teacher's salary by eliminating one whole teacher.
Well for one thing, the money comes from different places. IIRC employers pay into a special unemployment insurance fund in their payroll tax. Second, while they were only saving 1/3 the teacher's salary for some time they eventually saved 3/3 of your friend's salary as soon as she gets a job. If she doesn't get a job, the unemployment eventually runs out.
But all I have observed to this point is that, whatever the reason, governments waste a lot of money, and anyone who is surprised by the article hasn't been paying attention.
Private companies also waste lots of money too, as do private individuals. In fact, the people wasting the money in this case are private consultants that the government is paying to do a job. So what exactly is your point here?
Let me put it another way: The city is going to need a computerized payroll system. (or what's your alternative there, not paying city employees? Not having a government at all?) What this article suggests, if anything, is that paying private contractors doesn't work. Maybe the lesson to learn from all this is that they city should hire a salaried IT/MIS staff to handle this stuff instead of looking to the private sector?
I doubt that the city would have been able to find a company willing to give them a fixed bid. Just the discovery process would cost probably $20 million. I doubt that any company would front that kind of money unless the contract was already a shoe-in, or the city agreed to pay for discovery.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Being paid to do nothing is how unemployment works
Actually, when unemployed ones' job is to seek work. This is because seeking work is "useful" to the economy (even though one is not working).
Government economic policy wants enough people actively seeking jobs, such that the wages for those jobs is not increasing (or increase is limited, say to a couple of %). The theory is that keeping wages from increasing is one factor that keeps inflation under control.
Happy moony
Don't know, they're your taxes as much as mine, so if you and enough other like-minded people want to pay these guys more than the rest of us are getting, that's fine, I'll go along. Personally I don't see much benefit in paying them so much extra, especially in cases like this. But maybe that's just me.
Qxe4
Uh.. what part of this, exactly, said "free market" to you?
Private industry turning down money, especially half a million dollars a year per person kind of money, would be .. dumb. Suppliers of anything will happily take more money for delivery. They'll even take money, every time, for longer periods as long as the delivery quantity is the same.
A free market would involve a buyer that decides this is absurd and cuts off the paycheck. Governments that spend money they "earned" by saying "you give us money or you go to jail" tend to be less concerned (not that they're not concerned at all, just less) about reigning in spending.
Government is pretty inherently incapable of doing anything right. The response time to changing conditions is atrocious. Feel good compromises that deliver less for more are fairly common. But hey, it makes you feel good. When the assumptions required for a free market cannot be met, an inefficient government service may be better. Then again, if government is just going to hemorrhage money, it may not.
How is that not waste on a far larger scale?
The difference here, of course, is that those are private funds. If they want to waste that money, it's their business -- because the money is not provided by you and me in the form of mandatory taxes.
No business executive deserves to earn millions of dollars.
Um, they don't? Why not? Can you substantiate this opinion in any way? That money belongs to the company and its shareholders, to dispense as they see fit. This means if those parties think that someone deserves a bonus, guess what -- that person deserves a bonus. Don't like it? Buy stock enough to get you on the Board of one of those companies, and then make your opinion known. Arrange mass boycotts of their products, such that it hurts their bottom line. Organize a negative publicity campaign. There are many ways you can effect change.
Alternatively you can just keep complaining about how nobody "deserves" that kind of money without substantiating your claims with any kind of logic. That's probably the easiest route as it requires nothing but a couple of minutes of your time: no personal involvement, no research, no commitment. Fortunately for the rest of us (including the Big Evil Corps), it's also the most ineffectual option available to you.
If it's just software, you can pay me $500k/yr salary and I'll personally complete the entire project all by myself in a single year (* provided you do not change the spec during that time).
Just send me the spec and a one-month advance (which will more than cover all my expenses for an entire year), and I'll have an "80%" prototype ready at the end of the first month.
Well babysitting and gardening are quite low paid.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's even an organization that pushes the agenda of companies that supply temporary accommodation and lodging.
It's a hotel lobby.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Congratulations, you are slightly coherent.
The previous post pretty accurately describes at least 3 of the major projects I worked in the last 7 years. That's half the big projects I have worked on.
USDA with 100,000 employees (US Dept of Agriculture) rolled out a new Time and Attendance system last year. On the dropdown box of time categories in the first pic, there were 20 painfully precise categories such as WorkType:Sunday:2nd shift (and 3rd and non-sunday...). The slider on the side looked really small so I estimated there were at least 400 different categories of type of pay spread over all the Agencies and Programs that make up USDA.
Delivering a product is a requirement, but how long do you think it takes to find out there are even 400 different categories of pay? I'll bet the guys who bought the first pass didn't know.
The basic rule of bureaucracy is that if you have a billion dollar program and wish to track where each million dollars goes, you will need a thousand line report. OTOH, if you want to track where each thousand dollars goes, you end up with a million different lines which requires a staff and overhead and yadda yadda yadda.
First, from the article (p. 2):
SAIC, by the way, is the company the FBI threw off the job a few years ago after charging the agency $170 million for a virtual file system that never worked.
So, this one company worked on two of the most legendary government-related failed IT projects of all time. For the corporate apologists, it's hard not to smell this really bad odor coming from the company in question.
Several former CityTime workers have told The News city officials have ignored their complaints about questionable consultant timesheets, defective software and possible conflicts of interest between key CityTime managers and subcontractors... In January, Liu rejected an extension of Spherion's contract and began the first-ever audit of the entire project. Liu has since labeled CityTime a "money pit." He urged Bloomberg to suspend payments until the audit is finished.
So we have documented allegations of conflicts-of-interest at the company. Moreover for the "can't believe taxpayers allow this" crowd (NYC political info here): Anger at Mayor Bloomberg is high. His first two terms, he had an allied city controller (audits, etc.) For the first time in November '09 we elected a non-allied city controller (over Bloomberg's opposition), and he is just now getting to serious audits of the project, recommending suspension of payments, etc. So this whole article wouldn't have come to light if not for the will of the electorate last fall.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
How much money was the new system supposed to save, by catching time-card fraud, etc.?
SAIC, you might recall, was the group in charge of Virtual Case File for the FBI, one of the biggest failures in government IT in this country in over a decade. Their reputation as colossal fuckups precedes them and is at the point where it's a wonder that anyone still does business with them...
I have a friend who was a teacher in California for a year. She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
I'm confused, are you talking about temporary unemployment benefits that is available to everyone for a limited time, so that you can pay your mortgage when you're laid off without notice?
Or is your friend getting a permanent salary at 2/3 of her old salary?
There's a big big difference in the two.