#GovFraud #GovernmentContracts #WashingtonDC #TechContracts #GovTechFraud 😡
Have you ever experienced a government environment as fraudulent as what I recently went through? Let me tell you about my shocking experience with a government manager in Washington DC and the wastage of taxpayer money.
The State of Affairs:
After four years under the management of a government employee, all the technical staff either quit or were fired due to unbearable working conditions. The system was in a state of disarray, with outdated technology and patched-up products causing chaos and making it impossible to accomplish anything beyond putting out fires.
My Role:
As a software developer brought in to create a .net web api/blazor app from scratch, I was shocked by the lack of structure and requirements. The manager had control issues and wouldn’t let me see the old access app or even talk to the client. As a result, the entire project was disorganized and directionless from the start.
The Outcome:
Upon completion of the app, I offered to stay and put it on the production server, but the management decided to hand it over to a junior developer who was not capable of finishing the project. This led to the waste of over 100k+ taxpayer dollars as the project ultimately failed.
The Frustration:
As a taxpayer and someone who genuinely wanted to make a positive impact through my work, I am deeply saddened by the lack of care and accountability within the government system. The managers only have each other’s backs and are willing to sweep incompetence under the rug, ignoring the wastage of funds and the failure to provide valuable services to the public.
Conclusion:
My experience with this fraudulent government environment has left me feeling demoralized and defeated. It’s disheartening to see the lack of concern and responsibility among those who are supposed to serve the public and uphold ethical standards.
If you’ve been through a similar situation and share my sentiments, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. Let’s shed light on the reality of government fraud and incompetence, and raise awareness about the misuse of taxpayer money in the name of public service. #GovernmentIncompetence #TaxpayerWastage #PublicServiceFailures #GovAccountability #CodeForChange
I mean if you care too much about moral dilemmas, then you’ll never be happy, show up, do your job, go home and do genuine projects for yourself
Speaking from personal experience, working for the Feds or state governments is very likely to turn you into an advocate for small government. Big corporations also often have CYA management bureaucracies so don’t expect them to be better. You either have to learn to live with the nonsense or stay as far away from it as possible (what I do).
The best places I’ve found to work to avoid this situation are mid-sized corporations with a flatter organizational structure and hands-on, but not micromanaging, executives.
A lot of work throughout the private sector doesn’t get used or doesn’t generate more money than put into it. It’s not just the government. People try stuff a lot of it doesn’t work. Some stuff works incredibly well.
It is not unique to the government. Having worked in both gov and private it is the same shit in both. Non technical managers playing political games.
Government work just be like that.
Source: I was in the Navy for the last decade. It’s all fraud, waste and abuse all the way down.
” just wasted another 100k+ ”
I have done probably 20 government projects over the last 29 years – I can not think of one where something very similar to this didn’t waste a few hundred thousand to tens of millions of dollars. I have a large circle of friends with similar years of experience – and I hear the exact same story from them. Many of these projects have also affected the services provided by the government.
I have seen private industry do similar waste – but it generally gets caught earlier and doesn’t carry on for years and years as the government’s one do.
Unfortunately that is just how the governments of this world work. It gets frustrating and is a massive waste of taxpayer money.
If you point it out too loudly – you then find that government contracts start drying up.
It’s the norm now that everyone is undermanned and underpaid. Just sharpen your skills up and hop onto the next shitty project for higher pay.
It’s never going to get better. Code has ballooned in a lot of codebases. I left a position because the senior dev had no idea what a pull request was…
THE LEAD/SENIOR DEVELOPER OF 10+ YEARS.
Yeah… DC or not. It’s garbage all the way country wide. Some people care but get shut down by politics.
Regardless it pays the bills so I’d take it with a grain of salt.
This isn’t fraud. This is a project starting, getting built, and not being used. Fraud is wrongly or criminal deception that results in financial gain (misappropriation, bribery, corruption). The only one that gained here is you, and don’t attribute to malice what is better explained by incompetence.
Welcome to the industry. It’s a feature, not a bug, that projects are thought of, assumptions made, staffed up, built, then a decision is made on them. Programming language like .NET and Java are ideal for this type of development: huge language ecosystems, good documentation, and liquid talent pool.
The other way to think about this, is that you failed to deliver a project that met the demands of the problem. Yea, so there aren’t requirements, you would need to get stakeholders together to figure them out. It’s one thing to admit you failed, but an entirely other to accuse your co-workers of committing a crime to explain your lack of impact. Yeesh.
I’m not 100% sure what’s going on here, but from what I understand, it doesn’t sound like there was anything fraudulent as they were not intentionally deceiving the public (unless you want to add more details), and it’s not unusual for government agencies to use outdated technology.
Accountability for spending and budgets is a big issue with government work. The amount of waste is staggering.
I worked at a fortune 500 company for 4 years. If the dozens of projects I worked on, maybe 2 made it to production. I think that once a bureaucracy gets large enough, efficiency just disappears. Priorities changed every 3 months for projects that take six months.
I’ve worked four government contracts, they’ve all been bad, but the one I’m on now is particularly bad. No one gives a shit about the software, and this thing is being fielded next year regardless. I unfortunately have given up and have new job lined up. I’ll be putting in my two weeks in December because I won’t be the one they hang when nothing works. It is truly fraud and I understand exactly what you’re going through.
Now you know why they say the government is incompetent and inefficient. If anything they are trying to bleed out as much resources as possible. Some of these projects simply exist as cash grabbing schemes, which it sounds like what you were apart of. You essentially were just given busy work. At the end of the day, you aren’t dealing with tech ppl, these are pol with accounting degrees and political science. They aren’t going to understand what you need a cloud environment, or the latest install of a programming language, containers… these places aren’t driven by profit and that significantly changes the work environment.