alt Hacker News> the ability to fix a bug in-house
Yes, but bureaucracies make this impossible. If you have worked at a bank before, you'll know how difficult it is to make a change to some in-house piece of software. And that's a bank, not a gov't institution. Think how much more friction there will be in the latter.
Replies
The culture can only change when it actually becomes possible to make any changes to the systems.
If all the software one institution uses comes in the form of proprietary binaries, there is simply no need to even think about making policies about fixing those systems in-house.
At a certain size (and government departments are absolutely large enough) it makes sense to manage software deployment centrally, from an internal package repository/cache.
Once that’s in place, the process for populating that repository can easily adopt locally modified versions of upstream software: defaults changed, bugs removed, features added, etc.
No one in a big business/government blinks at changing group policies for internal deployment. Changing the code is really very little different once the ability to do so is internalized.
I wonder if it is in fact easier in a German region than a bank though. A bank has massive compliance complications, where the state insists on rules being met, so their are teams of people trying to make sure no rules being broken, and therefore anti-change. Germany is a Federal system, and the region has law making powers, a bit like a US state. Therefore it can set the rules to make sure migration to a new system happens. If big fixes are not allowed, they have themselves to blame. At a bank it is the state causing the friction.
EU bureaucracy is where optimism goes to die
It's funny, I was doing some budgeting stuff, and I ran into some corruption of payee-data in my bank's export files.
Good: I already wrote a script to fix the exact same issue.
Bad: It was in a pile of old stuff from 10+ years ago.
Good: It worked anyway.
Bad: The bank still has the same bug.