Re: [xml-dev] XML As Fall Guy

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@ibiblio.org> wrote:

I suspect the fundamental issue at the heart of healthcare.gov and a lot of government projects (by no means just in software development, or just in the U.S. Federal Government) is the reliance on outside vendors instead of developing qualified in-house teams and talent.

Long ago, I had the job, as an in-house team of one, of coming up with a recommendation for a corporate firewall, back when connecting a corporate intranet to the Internet was considered just barely thinkable. I did the research and implemented the firewall. My work was then discarded, and a huge team of outside consultants were brought in at enormous expense. They recommended the same firewall I did and implemented it a second time.

I never found out what that was all about. Perhaps there was a turf war going on over my head somewhere, and the point of the outside consultants was that they didn't work for any of the squabbling factions. I just don't know.

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