alt Hacker NewsIndeed. I work with governments all over the United States from federal, to states to counties, and even to larger cities. This is a consistent pattern I see as well. We have senior IT people who don't even know basics about firewall configuration. In one place, I waited 2 weeks for the IT person to figure out how to even get into the firewall configuration. Then they proceeded to completely screw it up in obvious ways, and then once we got the firewall completely configured, we could not get the app to work. It took another 2 weeks, and burned 40 hours of engineer time on our side, before somebody on their end realized that they had modified the wrong firewall!
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.
Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
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I don't believe there is an easy fix though. The government will prioritize retention because it promotes institutional stability while at the same time offering low pay (and not just low pay but often a complete lack of flexibility regarding pay) because the electorate demands it.
Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience.
It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.
Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.