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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."
Isn't it?
Coming Soon
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Or buy one of the many solutions already available....for about the cost of 1 developer for 1 year.
THL phish sticks
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.
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."
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent. Anything done by a government will not work. So government can't hire employees to work on software projects. Instead, it hires private enterprise to do it. Private enterprise is efficient and effective, and the result is savings.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs. The sad fact is that five programmers at Lawrence Livermore Labs could have gotten this done in a year for $500k. The outsourcing model doesn't work for us. Tragically, it *does* work for the people to whom the money flows, and so they lobby for it, and we get government contractors instead of government employees doing these projects.
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)