NYC Drops $722M On CityTime Attendance System 306
theodp writes "New York City is reportedly paying 230 consultants an average annual salary of $400K for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission that the computerized timekeeping and payroll system — dubbed CityTime — is 'a disaster.' Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600K annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000. The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500K a year. Some of the consultants have been working at these rates for as long as a decade."
Can You Say ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Vacation? I'd say oversight is off retired on this one. That's a lot of money to be putting into a system and not having delivered it. I'd love to have the role of these consultants- that's a LOT of cash to be getting per year to have delivered nothing on with only apparently minimal expectations of having something to show for yourself in the future.
Corruption (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it just me or do Americans seem to have some kind of blind spot when it comes to government corruption? In any other country, this would've immediately been called for what it is, plain old corruption, and would be a scandal. It is obvious what is happening here.
Re:Corruption (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent. Anything done by a government will not work. So government can't hire employees to work on software projects. Instead, it hires private enterprise to do it. Private enterprise is efficient and effective, and the result is savings.
This way of thinking has brought us multi-billion-dollar FAA upgrades that didn't work, new IRS d-bases that failed utterly, and created a whole industry of government contractors whose sole function in life is to transfer tax money from your pocket to theirs. The sad fact is that five programmers at Lawrence Livermore Labs could have gotten this done in a year for $500k. The outsourcing model doesn't work for us. Tragically, it *does* work for the people to whom the money flows, and so they lobby for it, and we get government contractors instead of government employees doing these projects.
Re:Corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent.
I know you meant this sarcastically, but in fact, this example demonstrates their incompetence. How often do you see boondoggles like this when two private sector companies write contracts with each other? Maybe it's because when a private sector buyer writes a contract, the contract guarantees delivery of the product. With the government, everything is "renegotiable".
And let's get real. It's not like there isn't any backroom dealing going on here.
The outsourcing model doesn't work for us.
And the antiquated payroll system is evidence that the government can get it done itself?
Re:Corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
this is a CLASSIC example of why government is incompetent and corrupt, it has nothing to do with wether the job is being done by government employee's or a contractor. a government bureaucrat is the manager of this project, if this project is 7 years late the axe falls squarely on him, not the contractors he's allowed to milk the public purse. the government has bungled this by allowing it to continue, if this was a project being run at any private enterprise it'd have been shit canned years ago.
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This isn't government corruption. It's private enterprise. The idea is that government is fundamentally incompetent.
But in this case, they are.
The government hired these contractors who can't get shit done. The government has "renegotiated" the delivery date every single time the project has been late. I mean, seriously, what aren't you getting about this?
Are the contractors to blame? Yes, of course. They shouldn't have taken work they couldn't complete on-time and on-budget. But the government is the one *
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Yea, you're seeing it wrong, and seeing it right at the same time. Many of us do hate corruption and have a problem with things like this. However, there are also people who accepted the irresponsible and immoral "greed is good" philosophy. Greed now so rules their lives that they see evidence of greed in society as validation of their philosophy rather than recognizing that what is going on is actually costing them money and harming their own society.
Greed has so blinded them that they become like dogs
Re:Corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
It is obvious what is happening here.
To me it is obvious what has happened here. Some years ago some one probably thought it would be a good idea to implement an automated timekeeping system, without doing a proper cost/benefit analysis, thinking they could just quickly drop some slightly customized system in place and never have to touch it again.
Government agencies usually have many complicated and unusual timekeeping rules that sometimes even change. Often this is the result of various laws they have to deal with that private companies would not have to deal with. They almost certainly underestimated the amount of customization needed for a time keeping program like this, especially if this is based on an existing system that was never designed to deal with their kinds of rules.
Don't blame on corruption what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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How much oversight did the consultants have into the system? At this point, would it be possible to rescind payments for non-delivery, or give the consultants 6 months on complete on their dime or be blacklisted from all NYC / NY State contracts again?
Deadlines (Score:2, Funny)
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Yeah, I can not deliver that for a mere $200k/year, within, say 15 years? Anyone care to overbid me? That is how a contract like this works, isn't it?
Cheaper if everybody steals an hour a day (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it?
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I've been in IT one war or another since the TRS-80 model 1.
Regarding our fate as IT 'professionals' we had a saying then that still holds true, "Never have so many been paid so much to do so little".
Good day.
Re:Cheaper if everybody steals an hour a day (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but you're forgetting something: in America, we are so terribly concerned that some poor person somewhere may be getting something they don't deserve that we're willing to put nearly a billion dollars in the pockets of rich people to ensure that the poor people stay in line.
It's just good conservative fiscal policy.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because private industry pays sensible salar (Score:2)
You are trolling but you are not aware of it because you got a blind spot. Remember those banks that collapsed and took the whole economy with them? Private industry and filled with excessive salaries and people who get golden parachutes when they are "let go".
About the only way to fix this is to cut management down. But what manager is going to say, "we don't need all these managers". I seen these kind of projects, they are pretty common. And it is always a case of management going out of control. You cou
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Of course this is disgraceful, but it's by no means limited to government - there's plenty of waste in private industry, we just don't hear about it as much. I have a friend who recently worked as a consultant for one of the big health insurers in California. She talked about a multi-hundred-million-dollar development project on a new IT system that they scrapped before implementing. You'd think someone could have pulled the plug before the project got into 9 figures.
Of course, from a cost standpoint, he
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..there's plenty of waste in private industry, we just don't hear about it as much.
One word. Dilbert.
Its funny cus its true!
This is a *private* sector project (Score:5, Insightful)
I read TFA and saw that a private company called "Science Applications International Corp." was running the project.
So, why is that people are blaming the government when it is the private sector that is wasting all this money? Sure, it's tax-payers' money but aren't we constantly told by various private sector financed think tanks that this public work is best outsourced to the private sector? Well, this is what happens, folks.
And if you think the private sector is any better, you're living in a fantasy land. It's just that they are less liable to scrutiny. When corruption happens in private organizations, it gets brushed under the carpet. Why? Because it looks not only bad for the culprit (obviously) but also the guy who employed him - no matter that he had nothing to do with the scam. Everybody stay silent and nobody gets hurt, right?
I've seen this soooo many times in the private sector - outsourced procurement agencies that charge $1000 for a $500 desktop, outsourced projects that were awarded to a consultancy that was (by shocking coincidence) run by the brother of the guy on the committee overseeing the outsourcing etc etc. In all these cases, it's hard to prove that actual fraud took place (eg, "well, we really did think this was the best offer when you consider all the factors").
And nobody in a private organization is ever, ever going to be prosecuted for these scams. Why would they? Who wants to pursue such cases? The shareholders don't care about such small corruption even if they got to hear of it. The media are not interested (a private company can spend its money as it sees fit). And an employee is only going to ruin his career.
Re:This is a *private* sector project (Score:5, Insightful)
Without getting into the whole private/government bullshit debate, in this case it's because the government keeps paying them the money. If they discovered that the company they hired is useless the first year, they should've dropped them (or the whole project) and found somebody else, and not kept pouring money down the drain. But they kept doing just that, so that's their problem right there.
Re:This is a *private* sector project (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a good point - but have you ever tried to take a project away from a vendor some way into the development life cycle?
Outsourced IT consultancies are essentially organized labor. They have collective bargaining powers that can totally fsck you up if you look as if you may start causing them problems.
Basically, you're the victim of a kind of intellectual lock-in. How motivated do you think the outgoing vendor is when transferring all its knowledge to you if they know their contract is not being renewed? They'll give the minimum amount of co-operation they're contractually obliged to. I know. I've been there :-(
The best way of managing an IT project is to keep it all (or at least mostly) in-house. But this flies in the face of all those economic fundamentalists that were bleating outsourcing dogma in the early 2000s. The situation is slowly changing, but not fast enough.
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Those guys are masters of working the government outsourcing gravy train. At least those 500k a year developers who've failed to produce anything aren't members of a union, so it must be efficient, right?
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I have a friend who was a teacher in California for a year. She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
If you tried it you'd be quitting, not laid off. Try to understand the difference.
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The article mentions that in most states with deficits, if pay were more reasonable, it would easily close the d
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You're absolutely right. Corporate welfare is evil. We should stop it. Which party, and which candidates, advocate stopping it? Do you for them, or for their opponents?
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do you vote for them, I meant to say. Sigh.
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She was laid off and promptly given 2/3rds her previous salary in unemployment benefits. Pretty good for keeping the same employer and just not working anymore. If I tried that it would result in a 100% pay cut.
Yeah, and there's not chance that you'd be able to get unemployment benefits, right? Or is it just that you object to the idea of unemployment benefits.
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``And yet many of the same people who will cry foul over this will be first in line telling the government it is morally obligated to provide X social program or prop up Y industry "for the good of the country." Surely that isn't a colossal waste, won't go to lining the pockets of consultants, won't get dragged down by graft, won't go over budget estimations, et cetera.''
I think you're conflating two issues there. Allow me to explain.
Your whole post is full of examples of government inefficiency. They are g
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No competition. No alternative sources for their services.
Private companies increase business by selling more goods or services, so they have incentive to provide better value.
Government bureaucracies increase their business by creating more bureaucracy. They have no incentive to provide better value. Doing that could even be detrimental to them.
Like you said, it's how people operate in general, so without the pressure to be profitable, government will always be more i
Re:Not a waste (Score:4, Insightful)
I blame the paradigm of "government". No competition. No alternative sources for their services.
Yeah, those countries that have two competing governments are just a blast to live in.
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Teacher unions are evil. End of story.
Huh? What has that got to do with what the original poster said?
You do know what party controls New York, right?
Double huh? How did party politics get involved here? It looks like you are some political Eliza-bot that looks for keywords and spews out canned clichés. Actually, that would explain a lot about mainstream political debate.
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You do know what party controls New York, right?
Well, Michael Bloomberg is still mayor, so I think it depends on the day of the week.
Cool.. (Score:3, Funny)
Where do i sign up?
Re:Cool.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, imagining being one of those consultants, I would make sure this project would never finish! Obviously the longer it takes the more you make off of it. This is a recipe for disaster - and internal sabotage.
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Right, as long as there are no penalties for overruns and scope creep, there is really no incentive to complete a job on time and within budget. ( this applies to both sides of a contract as there is plenty of blame to spread around )
Not only do you make "more money off it" due to the length of the project, but you don't have to worry about finding your next gig.
Re:Cool.. (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm guessing New York.
CityTime Forever (Score:5, Funny)
Coming Soon
We need more of these articles (Score:2, Insightful)
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This has nothing to do with "smaller" government and everything to do with exactly what you expect to be doing when you enter the working world as one of the "masses". "Business Management" people that don't have any relevant or useful skills at all that enter the workforce.
Yes, I too expect to get a $500k per year contracting gig working but not working on a huge government project. Yes, it's all about the expectations, not who is actually squandering the money and how.
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Hm... If only you could get more than the SF or Tech Geek crowd riled up in a manner where we could get people to be that interested in fixing things by way of elections to do it. Right now, we've got the government we so richly deserve right at the moment because of the disinterest, etc.
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People need to take charge of elections and actively support smaller and more responsive government.
If only we had candidates that ran on a smaller and more responsive government without being sold out to special interest groups. Democrats are sold out to the copyright lobbies, and Republicans are sold out to the Christian fundamentalists. Independents rarely stand a chance.
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The nature of our DOE, NASA, and DOD budgets allow for this type of uncontrolled spending.
I think it's more of the fact that the people working at these organizations don't play hardball with contractors and make them finish on time and in budget. We need accountability measures that make these firms liable for budget overruns and late deliveries, especially ones that are so egregious.
Cringely says: (Score:2)
Problem = Managers (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of thing happens in many, many businesses. The difference is that many businesses aren't required to report those figures and even then they are under far less scrutiny. I assure you this is about par course for American business in general both public and private.
There are better ways to do things, but until we vastly change the corporate culture that everyone is used to operating under we aren't going to see more efficiencies. The reality is that it's not the "government" wasting money here because this is what everyone that goes into these projects expects to be doing. And this is generally something that scales with said project; so cheaper projects get cheaper prices on management but it is still disproportionately higher than those that are doing the actual work.
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If you can milk over $500,000/year from a business (government is a form of business) over the course of a decade without anyone crying foul about it, would you not do it? The same could be said about $100,000/year. You end up with a stable job doing practically nothing and getting
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This sort of thing happens in many, many businesses. The difference is that many businesses aren't required to report those figures and even then they are under far less scrutiny. I assure you this is about par course for American business in general both public and private.
Another "but business does it too" remark. There's a lot more difference than merely who business has to report to. Business isn't required by government to report these figures, but they are required by their Board of Directors to report whatever data the Board of Directors wants. Now maybe the BoD is too busy yacht racing or whatever to do their job. That is a problem of the owners of the business. Ultimately, the owners are the ones who lose out when a business gets out of control like this. That's how a
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Looks like most of them don't even know they are the "board of directors".
And they keep voting for the same two "management teams" who take turns to screw the shareholders, so why should the management teams change their ways? It's working really well for them.
Similarly, why should the consultants change either? They're being rewarded tremendously for their behaviour.
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Oh, it's government wasting the money. The problem lies within the inability to pull the plug when it's clear it's not coming together. Within that culture, there's an environment that encourages this sort of thinking you ascribe to the businesses. Why should they do any different. They can half-ass their way through things and maybe deliver a lurching horror, maybe deliver nothing- and still keep getting paid for it for the longest time.
In the end, the business won, the government people got to pour
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The problem is very clearly the people involved in the project, and I don't necessarily mean the government employees either (though they are partially to blame), but I b
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the people actually doing the grunt work on the project are likely making 10% of the stated figures
Based on my experiences, the PMs and a few other administrative and lead folks are the only ones in NYC itself. The grunts are off in Hong Kong, Bangalore, Mumbai, or Kiev
How hard can it be (Score:4, Interesting)
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
230 highly paid people and it has been underdevelopment for over a decade?
1 person should of been able to get it done in a decade.
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well lets see
1 tax and labor laws: what time gets paid for how much and how do you handle "off hours" work and various grades of over time/hazard pay/rush|time critical work
2 multisite/multi "cost center" issues
3 temporary/contract work
4 "Family matters"
5 International Concerns some bits of NYC are considered "foreign ground" so the laws of that Nation need to be dealt with
6 type and format for the ~8,000 different forms all of this will need
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even at that I'm wondering if 2 or 3 very competent coder and a handful of competent lawyers/accountants could get that done in a fraction of the time.
Projects get tied up in cruft but by that point the guys in charge are afraid to just turn around and say "the code is crap, we made mistakes early on and we're never going to get this done. the only way is to start again and do it right." because that's admitting failure.
Re:How hard can it be (Score:5, Insightful)
Or buy one of the many solutions already available....for about the cost of 1 developer for 1 year.
Re:How hard can it be (Score:5, Insightful)
How hard can it be to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system.
Answer: difficult, but definitely doable in a reasonable time frame.
However, you've obviously never worked on a big bureaucracy-driven project before, because you've asked the wrong question.
Here's the correct question:
How hard is it to program a computerized timekeeping and payroll system when the fundamental requirements change on a monthly basis, individual design changes are made weekly, all because there are fifteen project managers who believe they own the project, since the primary project manager who actually does own the project spends all of his time in asinine meetings with his bosses and doesn't know what the hell is going on?
Answer: virtually impossible.
All that situation needs are a bunch of blind fools in upper management to keep approving the extensions and cost overruns and you have the NYC CityTime project.
It happens all the time in any sufficiently large bureaucracy, and the NYC government is definitely a sufficiently large bureaucracy. Note that this is not a private/public problem, it's a bureaucracy problem. The exact same thing happens to projects in large corporations (I work in a top 100 corporation and see this kind of thing happen all the time, though they are usually much quicker to pull the plug on a project than NYC is in this case).
Two for the half the price of one (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, I've got 15+ years of experience with computers and some big name corporations (e.g. Time Inc & Oracle) in my resume. I'd be willing to do the job of two of the consultants for half as much.
The real question here is *who* is responsible for the project and is employing these people (who clearly seem to have no interest in getting the job done)? For example, if two or three individuals can rewrite a relatively robust DBMS (Oracle) in less than 2 years (circa 1983-84, the Oracle Version 3-->4 rewrite) having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
Consulting (Score:2, Insightful)
the scam of city government continues (Score:3, Insightful)
the sad thing is that the taxpayers put up with it. and many even defend it.
Saving Money (Score:3, Funny)
They are saving money, because any off-the-shelf time-tracking software would cost much more than $722 million. Oh, wait ...
Lack of Competition... (Score:2)
Makes for wasteful governments. I am sure IBM or EDS could have quoted a system to take care of employee based on existing code and systems they had refined over decades.
That is why they should do the least and let private businesses compete for tasks.
It is sad that politicians and some in the public think government is THE answer.
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SAIC vs. contractor rates (Score:2)
The rates quoted are the rates SAIC is charging. They are NOT the rates the contractors are paid. The article is very misleading on this point and I'm surprised that this hasn't been picked up on here.
If SAIC charges their client $600k per year for a consultant, SAIC is probably paying that employee, say, $140k. It's extremely disingenuous to state that these contractors themselve
Inaccurate story (Score:2, Interesting)
The story is inaccurate. The City is not employing these persons and is not paying these persons a salary or any other type of compensation.
The City has hired a company to perform the work and this other company is paying these persons some type of compensation. These persons will never see anything close to the stated "salaries".
The rates being charged are not out of line with rates being charged elsewhere.
Chasing Changing Specs? (Score:2)
It sounds like someone might be constantly changing the specifications. I'm sure like all things political in New York (see rebilding WTC), the contract likely requires EVERYONE who touches the payroll to have a say in how it works. That, along with different trade unions and their contracts' idiosyncrasies, work/shift/OT rules, and I could see how it can become a mess.
I'm paid hourly, and my company uses SAP for HR management. The idea is that all I should have to do is put my hours and on-call time in and
self-referential fun (Score:2)
A project to prevent the city from overpaying people for doing nothing is being overpaid to do nothing.
Stupid way to contract: by the hour (Score:2)
If you want something done by a contractor on a budget, get a fixed bid. That will give them incentives to move Heaven an Earth to keep the margins fat and timelines short.
Of course the contract should include a series of binding quality criteria, else "fat margins" will equate to non-performing "product".
I've been on both sides of the fence, and that's the best way for both contractor and contractee to have a fruitful relationship.
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That or give them a guaranteed end date with penalties for going over. Either one works great.
The biggest thing though, is knowing what you want/need ahead of time. More than likely the reason the project is still going on today is not because the contractors have been milking it (even though I'm sure they have been).
This project has scope creep written all over it, and the best written contracts with the most honest and efficient company in the world will not be able to finish a project where the scope i
SAIC (Score:2)
Really sad (Score:2)
There are plenty of people out there who will end up working productively for an entire lifetime for less money than these wastes of space have made on this one failed project. If we REALLY want to fix the economy, perhaps those people should be given a chance rather than laying them off so the living monuments to the broken window fallacy can get a raise.
The natural outcome of the 'outsourcing' business (Score:5, Informative)
1. Client calls for tenders on a vaguely-defined project.
2. Outsourcing companies put in bids that are _very_ keenly priced. It's not unusual for the initial big to be a break-even, or even a loss-maker for the outsourcing company.
3. Client chooses lowest bidder - even if other bidders are clearly better-qualified to do the job.
4. Contract is signed, including a clause where any variance to the original spec is to be billed at $X per hour (typically several times the rate for the original work).
5. Every frakking thing in the contract is then gone over with a fine tooth comb, and if any part of the necessary work wasn't explicitly specified, it becomes a variance. Meetings are called with the client to discusss these variances. At every meeting there will be 2 or 3 client representatives, and 6 or 8 contractor representatives, these meetings are billed to the client at $X per person per hour. The longer it takes to agree on the revised specs, the more the contractor makes.
6. Actual work then commences. Inevitably, more ambiguities or outright bugs in the original spec are discovered. This leads to more very profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
7. When the project is half way finished, there's a change in management at the client, and the new manager feels the urge to "make his mark" by having an organizational re-structure. Everyone gets new job titles, new business cards, new reporting lines. This requires changes to the software, which requires more meetings....
The above describes an outsourcing project I worked on where the client was a large private business, where the client is government, you have a whole 'nother layer of bureaucracy adding far more opportunity for highly profitable (for the contractor) meetings.
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Attendance systems are in place in private business too, so what is the difference?
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Pubic service is voluntary. It happens by directly applying for a position, appointment, or being elected.
Last i heard no one was forced into working for the government ( well, forced taxation and convicted prisoners not withstanding :) )
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You may have parsed that wrong. He says voluntary servitude in a private business is not his concern. Voluntary servitude in a public office, OTOH, is his concern since it is a public affair. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, just clearing up the difference. I assume involuntary servitude in either situation would concern him.
Re:Slaves (Score:4, Insightful)
What is the purpose of an attendance system? To make sure someone is getting to work on time and not leaving before quitting time?
Sometimes people say that government employees should have greater scrutiny due to their being paid by the taxpayers, but I'm uncomfortable turning them into slaves.
I'd bet that if they didn't keep track of anyone's time that many people (maybe even you) would be complaining that people are showing up for work late, leaving early and generally 'working the system'. And they'd be right.
Governments (including NYC) are beholden to their citizens - and this includes making sure that people are showing up for their government jobs. They may not do a very good job at it (serving their c8itizens and/or doing their government jobs) but they damn well better try.
Re:Slaves (Score:4, Insightful)
I work at a sizable county government in California, and while our timekeeping systems aren't nearly as fancy as to require millions of dollars of investment, they do have to provide an accounting of what people work on. A good portion of the staff are able to have one- or two-line timesheets, as the work they do comes out of one bucket. Others, like me, may have anywhere from 10 to 30 lines a week as we work on different projects or tickets and have to bill the time appropriately.
However, neither of the two systems (one for employees, one for contractors) tracks when people actually arrive and depart. There are mechanisms to enter that data, but it's done by the staff member, not by the badge-reading system. From a technical perspective, I could show up at 10, take a two-hour lunch, then leave at 2, and say that I arrived at 7am, worked my normal shift with a one-hour lunch, and went home at 5. It's only my work ethic (and to a much smaller extent the fact that I would get caught quickly by my boss) that keeps me from doing it.
Re:Slaves (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's to track the hours they worked so they can be properly paid- the other part is just data that the system provides so that managers can know they're cheating on the system.
Since it's effectively little more than a fancy punch clock, I'd think that it'd not be THAT difficult to do. I'm amazed that they're pouring that much cash into a bottomless pit on this- and then doing more of it instead of pulling the plug and starting over.
Screw egg on face moments here- you're pouring $722 MILLION dollars into what is an overglorified punch clock system. If it's not working by now, it's not going to EVER work right and that's some serious good money after bad that could be put elsewhere.
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In 1995, I built a Time and Attendance system using Informix and Powerbuilder 5. I was the sole developer and didn't know Powerbuilder when I started. In less than 6 months, it was up and running in 16 divisions.
Sure, a city is more complicated, but this isn't rocket science.
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Then again perhaps the NYC has put in lots of complicated (and potentially conflicting) requirements. My guess is you were the one deciding on most of the requirements with only a few coming from others.
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I wish I was getting $600K.
I don't care what the requirements are, a consultant working on a T&A system (Yeah baaaby!) is waay overpaid at $600k per year.
But, I guess more power to them. If they can convince some city idiot to pay them that much, good for them.
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Maybe I'm misreading you, but what I see you saying is, if you find a way to steal, steal with impunity for as long as you can.
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Ha!...it's not stealing if they give it to you.
Re:Slaves (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmmm.... So you think that perpetrating fraud on the general public by not delivering a product, or in the case of those in charge of the product, not requiring a time limit for a working product, isn't stealing?
No matter what your excuse this is corruption, plain and simple. If the project is impossible to complete because of conflicting requirements, for the developers to not state that it's impossible to deliver a working product and quit, but just continue to accept money for a decade is fraud. They know they aren't going to deliver but keep on taking money as if they are. It's plain old theft from the general public and a blatant example of the problems created where both consultants and project management are ethically-challenged, to put it politically correct term. In real life it's just called theft through a collusion of a bunch of crooks.
Re:Slaves (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't fraud on the part of the consultants if the project is poorly managed. They charge what they charge, and if there is nobody saying "This is what the project covers, anything else needs to be a separate project with its own approvals and a separate budget." then it is 100% the fault of the program manager, who works for the government.
It's called scope creep, and it can raise costs astronomically. For example, I know of a project right now that is in the $10 million range that started out as a simple $300,000 parts change. It start as "Such and such needs to be upgraded, so we'll do X and it will be done." Then someone comes along with the bright idea "Well, if you're going to do X, you might as well just do Y instead." Y doubles the cost of the project, but we want it, right? Ok, fine. Then someone comes along and says "Well, if you are going to go ahead and do Y, it only makes sense to do M at the same time." M, of course, doubles the cost of the project. Well, the project is becoming complicated, so we need to hire an engineering firm (which is actually just one guy, but he's really good) to design the system. He charges $150 an hour for his time. He has spent a month designing the system, is essentially finished, when someone in another division gets wind of the project and goes to management with "Well, if they are doing M now, it's a perfect opportunity to do J at the same time and kill two birds with one stone!" This is apparently only a minor cost, but it does mean the engineer has to re-design the system.
We are now into the several million dollar range, and guess what? We just discovered that by starting work on J we have compliance issues, which means we need a team of third-party analysts to come in and determine if the final system will be in compliance with state and local regulations. Now things are getting complicated, you have to bring in a work planner (who charges $50 an hour) on top of everyone else just to keep things running smoothly. And guess what? If that $150 engineer is held up because of someone else's problem he's still charging his time.
Before long you've spent $10 million on a $300,000 project and have absolutely nothing to show for it. Oh yeah and that engineer has made over $300,000 in the year this project has gone on (remember he originally finished it in a month, but it changed).
I guarantee this is almost the exact same scenario for this time system debacle. Don't blame the consultants, it's rarely truly their fault beyond the final delivery of a shoddy product. They'll only be doing exactly what you tell them to. If what you tell them changes from week to week, expect the project to never end and expect a huge bill. They were just smart enough to charge a high enough rate that they could ride the chaos generated by poor project management and pad their bank accounts with other people's incompetence.
They aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, or even unethical. The whole thing is almost certainly not entirely their fault, if at all.
Remember this with regards to project management: Quality assurance is the responsibility of the vendor (the consultants), quality control is the responsibility of the customer (NYC). If the consultants really were scamming the government, the PM should have been refusing payment years ago. More likely, the PM is incompetent and kept changing the scope or allowing others to change the scope, preventing the consultants from actually finishing the job. It's much more common than it should be, and no matter the situation the buck stops with the project manager, not the consultant.
What's truly amazing is that the upper management kept approving the massive budget for this obviously failing project.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, your project has now gone on for 10 years with no end in sight? There's also a major difference between spending $10 million on a project, and 3/4 of $1 billion on a failed project.
Are you sure you really want to defend that kind of behavior as just the "normal cost of development" for nothing more than a time management system? Just how can those costs ever be recovered? That no one is standing up in that project and looking out for the public good, as it's public money being wasted, spells nothing
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but you can't blame them for catching it...unless they misrepresented things or otherwise acted unethically.
I'm saying NYC pretty much deserves what it gets.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know...is it?
If we are talking a bunch of corrupt city officials stringing this project along so their buddies make a killing and then kickback some of the funds to the city official, that's one thing. They all should go to jail.
But if we are talking just incompetent city officials continuing to pay people way too much for way too long, then no, it's not unethical. Again, assuming that the consultants are not padding the numbers, stalling, etc.
SOP in NYC (Score:2)
Since it's effectively little more than a fancy punch clock, I'd think that it'd not be THAT difficult to do. I'm amazed that they're pouring that much cash into a bottomless pit on this- and then doing more of it instead of pulling the plug and starting over.
It's NYC, the City of Graft. This is a city where "working the system" is SOP, where "in the old days" there where many Pisanos that had a "city job" they never went to. It still goes on today. This project is simply following the NYC way of doing things.
you're not from here, are you? (Score:2)
Re:Slaves | it works both ways yah know (Score:3, Insightful)
being able to prove that you were in fact clocked in and working from 8:55 to 16:05 on monday (and the other 4 days of the week within about 2 minutes) does real wonders for GETTING PAID FOR THOSE TIMES. or for the cases where you actually left on thursday at 20:00 because something went BANG and you had to handle it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd mod you up but I prefer to chime in. I have a punch clock at $WORK, and since the setup is well done it's surprisingly painless, even agreeable. I'm supposed to work an average of 7h48m per day, sign in in a 90-minute window, sign out in a three-hour window, work at least five and at most ten hours a day, with automatic carries of +- 3 h/week or 4h/4weeks. With regular working hours you only notice when you forget to punch or when you're absent without warning. Then you get an automatic mail.
Now, with t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This was at a private for-profit nursing home.