Software crisis - healthcare.gov is just the dead canary

[antiquie]

1. Government software is an alien.

The very elite tech companies have been a magnet for the best computer top talent for a long time. It is not this cohort that writes government software. Of course there are good engineers in every school, industry, country, and within each specialty. But there is no question that technical collaboration looks very different between engineers at a big tech company versus a contracting company writing government software. Government processes seem to always flow explicitly from written law or written policy. In other words, Government process are by definition implemented top down. But every well paid software engineer has had a lifetime of practice intimidating his bosses to let them work bottom up.