A former Googler got called in by the Obama administration to try and put healthcare.gov back on its rails after the disastrous launch, and the things he learned about it were fascinating. He talks about some of them here
It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.
One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.
https://youtu.be/0albm_hhQzM
It's not only the pay rate attracting employees who prefer stability to income... It's an entire decisionmaking ecosystem centered around minimizing blame coupled badly with compartmentalization. The end result is employees are heavily incentivized to do things that minimize risk not for the entire project but for their individual department. couple that to the percentage of the work that is done by third-party vendors under strict contracts written before the full scope of the project is understood, and it's a bad recipe.
One of the first problems the embedded team identified with the whole design of healthcare.gov was that every team had responsibility for its individual component, but nobody was empowered to have responsibility for integration. It was possible for every subcontractor to satisfy every bullet point of their contract and the result to not actually be a functioning healthcare exchange website.