I love the smell of a boondoggle in the morning.
I won't be tempted unless the day rates are well north of £1,000.
UK's GDS to hire 300 folk. Silver lining: They'll be evicted from Holborn
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) is to hire nearly 300 more staff, beefing up its full-time employees to 830, according to sources. As such, the body is planning to move from Aviation House in Holborn, London, where it has been based since its formation in 2011. Apparently that office is no longer big enough. Insiders …
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Friday 29th April 2016 16:29 GMT BurnT'offering
Re: what makes GDS think they can do it any better?
That's their mission statement. "We can do it better than you."
It drives their agile methodology of: badmouth the status quo; design a new web front end; issue press release; deliver broken system; test; gather requirements; then leave for higher pay.
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Friday 29th April 2016 18:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: what makes GDS think they can do it any better?
Yeah, I remember hearing people say the same thing about DirectGov peeps, too. They just come in, badmouth the existing (expensive, inefficient basketcase system costing near £100k/PA to maintain for one static website) status quo, fucking kids, they don't know how the civil service works, etc.
Ya, boo, Directgov! Get away from the job where I put in 20hrs a week flexi for £35k and effectively can't be sacked unless I literally beat someone around the head with a stapler in front of my boss!
Normally that sort of whining was coming from existing legacy teams who had put tens of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of pounds - often far, far more - into projects and had nothing to show for it.
So I have no sympathy for the incompetent fuckers, as they are everywhere and they are the rot in civil service IT. At least from what I've seen (and heard at a shop floor level), GDS are making a reasonable fist of implementing modern development strategies and for the most part, other than a few public hiccups, it's having an effect. Most of those problems, reportedly, come from people with an attitude like the above.
You can tell, because the existing staff where GDS are touching, and who often haven't delivered a successful project at all, are fucking terrified. Especially in the DWP. Because, well, that link above should explain it.
I've heard of entire projects being undermined by incumbent project staff when GDS try to get involved, out of nothing more than a petty flat out refusal to accept that their way isn't the best way, even when these bumblefucks have been sitting on twenty people for over a year and have nothing to show for it - not even an alpha.
I say it needs burning to the ground and start again, and GDS are better people than many to be holding the gas can and the box of Swan Vestas.
Anon, because you know damned well why.
Oh, source? Many years working in Govt IT, many contacts made, many breakdowns watched from people trying to fix this shit.
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Friday 29th April 2016 23:57 GMT BurnT'offering
Re: what makes GDS think they can do it any better?
A few public hiccups?
They've delivered a website. They've claimed credit for a bunch of transactional services that predate their existence and which they had no part in. They claim to have delivered many more services that are still vapourware. Their ID project is years behind schedule and over budget. They fucked up Universal Credit. They fucked up Defra so much, Defra reverted to paper.
If this was one of the big outsourcers, questions would have been asked in Parliament and contracts torn up.
They are so incompetent, they make the aircraftless carriers project look like a model of efficiency. They are the most useless, unproductive, arrogant, lying, unprofessional bunch of jumped up tossers I have ever encountered. It is a complete mystery to me how they manage to continue existing and getting people to believe their bullshit.
And yet, they still act surprised and hurt when a few sceptics don't genuflect to their superior wisdom.
There is a story of wasted taxpayers' money and breathtakingly bad management crying out to be told here but I'm not optimistic we'll ever hear it
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Tuesday 3rd May 2016 14:21 GMT Kay_terra
Re: what makes GDS think they can do it any better?
Obvious troll .... GDS walked into Universal Credit with the attitude 'How hard can it be'.
They tried to turn it into a front end development before realising just how complex it was. 3 short months later, they literally gave up and were walked offsite by patient, and slightly irritated DWP staff
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Friday 29th April 2016 18:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
"last year it won £450m to deliver savings of £3.4bn during this Parliament"
Wow!! With that kind of return, all Britain has to do is spend about 100 billion Sterling on GDS, and the national debt will get cancelled out by the resultant savings!! Then Mr. and Mrs. Average Brit can look forward to a future of having their own personal NHS physician, a free flying car and 300 days a year of sunshine courtesy of state-funded weather control!
I for one welcome our future tanned, healthy and carefree flying Limey overlords!!
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Saturday 30th April 2016 05:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "last year it won £450m to deliver savings of £3.4bn during this Parliament"
Wow!! With that kind of return....
Out of boredom, a few months back I tried to round up all of the "<insert problem here> costs the British economy X billion pounds a year and if we invested Y we could solve that problem" statements I could find. All the usual stuff - government incompetence, environmental harms, congestion & transport, energy, health, housing etc.
I gave up the exercise when a relatively brief set of problems gave a supposed avoidable cost to the UK totalling about half of GDP.
But it doesn't matter. The civil service conjure up business cases on made up numbers, ministers make sweeping decisions to waste billions on daft projects (HS2, smart meters, Hinkley Point C, etc), and the National Audit Office weep and beat their brow.
Talking of which, I hold NAO in quite high regard, but imagine what a Sisyphian task it is! Time after time after time the poor blighters of NAO dissect yet another misbegotten, wasteful, inefficient, bungled idea, pointing out the failure, the waste, the flaws, and the lessons that should be learned. But they never are. I would guess that NAO is a living hell for accountants and analysts, who see their good work ignored time and again. If the Buddhists are right, then the explanation must be that every NAO employee was a prison camp guard or torturer in a former life.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
