It's important to add the context that whenever our government tries to do something by themselves it ends up late and severely over budget.
So you have to weigh the risks of outsourcing to the risk of the whole thing becoming very late and very expensive. The risks around outsourcing are something further down the line, the risks of everything becoming expensive and late are something that will give the responsible politician a headache now.
I work (and always has) in the private sector and we can be even better at ending up over budget and be even later at delivery. I don’t believe for a moment that the government has a monopoly on underachieving!
The problem isn’t public or private, it’s incentives.
If the private company is granted a defacto monopoly, it doesn’t matter that they’re a “private” company, they will have the same incentive and accountability problem.
What we know for certain though: Government taking over something is definitionally a monopoly and 99.99% of government employees are not subject to the accountability mechanism of elections.
Historically, the largest boondoggles of waste have always come from government, given they can legally hold a gun to your head and take 50% of everyones money to fund their “projects.” Private companies can’t take your money by force, unless being given those contracts by government. So again, the the incentive issue fundamentally arises from an entity being entitled to gather assets using violence rather than voluntary exchange.
Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).
What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.
Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).
Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.
Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.
> ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.
Who says that? The British National Grid says the opposite. Or is it specifically the Dutch network that would not handle the changing requirements? If so what makes it special?
Outsourced stuff is late and expensive too, just not directly the responsibility of the minister or secretary of state because of the magic piece of paper in between.
IT is hardly something we need to do occasionally, so build up a department that can do it (not just write up huge reports about what it should do and outsource, like Logius) and invest in the people that will work there (retaining them as much as possible). Give a big middle finger to consultants, and listen to the tech experts. Build boring stuff that works instead of a new app every month.
It's not impossible in theory, and cheaper in the long run. It's impossible because asshats who would actually benefit from left and centre politics keep voting right-wing parties in to power.
I agree that the government should do IT in house, ideally, because it's a core business for them. The reality is that it is very hard to attract and retain good IT staff on a government salary. The people who need to manage all that in a cost-effective way are especially hard to find.
So we end up with expensive consultants doing the work. Consultants have the wrong incentive. They don't want to stay in one place to long because it looks bad on their resume and overruns mean more money for them.
So really, I can see why a seasoned politician chooses the safest option for him. By the time an overrun occurs he will have moved on to the next job. I don't think left or right-wing politics has much to do with this dynamic. How will a left-wing politician magically get capable IT staff that higher paying industry can't even get enough of?
By attempting to? There is a huge and I would argue growing number of talented people who are dismayed by what the tech industry has become and would actively want to work on values aligned projects
The US-made Ultra UV light source is important, but there is quite a bit more than that to a $380 million lithography machine. (Otherwise someone would have created a competitor by now.)
I run a low 7 figures SaaS as well. This is the blurb I answer with when asked about SOC2 (yes, yes, AI generated):
"While we follow industry best practices that align closely with the requirements of SOC2 and similar frameworks, we have chosen not to pursue formal certification at this time. Maintaining multiple certifications and undergoing recurring audits across the various regions in which we operate would significantly increase our operational costs and, consequently, the price of our service."
Text based accounting is a great use case for LLMs. I was pleasantly surprised how well Codex works with ledger CLI, especially in combination with git.
I wonder if this is going to give text based accounting a boost. Reviewing clearly worded git commits is so much more reassuring then letting an LLM drive your accounting package and hoping it doesn't mess up somewhere.
> ... something you know well and is easy to read ...
For this reason I tell my LLMs to use Ruby whenever possible. In one rare case where the performance of my script was critical, I told Claude to convert the working ruby script to Rust. It got it right in a single shot.
Getting Time Machine to work reliably over a network is painful, even the old Apple-made Airport with built in TM stopped working twice a year.
However, I have multiple Macs where I simply have a USB-C laptop SSD attached for Time Machine and they have worked without issue for years. These laptop SSDs come in huge sizes nowadays, and you don't need an especially performant one, so they can be pretty cheap.
Reading that BBC article, how the attacker got caught while shouting at an OpenAI building, it would seem likely that this attacker is confused or deranged. Not specifically someone with deliberate evil intent.
So the headline seems to be more "high profile person attacked by lunatic" than "OpenAI CEO attacked for being evil".
So you have to weigh the risks of outsourcing to the risk of the whole thing becoming very late and very expensive. The risks around outsourcing are something further down the line, the risks of everything becoming expensive and late are something that will give the responsible politician a headache now.
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