Comment by mhuffman

I once submitted an RFP response for what was literally a CRUD app for a government agency. Medium-ish (to me) traffic. Needed to be rock-solid. Needed to be developed to spec, hosted, and supported (including tech support) for 5 years. I bid a little over $2million (I personally would have made about $500k of that). After a bit, the RFP was withdrawn and given to a sole-source provider for $100million, with the excuse that it was so complicated (HN would laugh at this if you saw the spec) that only one company could do it. So, that company gets it. Outsources everything to contractors in Pakistan. Site is constantly glitchy. And this next part is not a lie (and was def. not part of the spec) -- it only worked during business hours (m-f, 8am-5pm)! However the users of the site had to do work every day due to legal deadline requirements. They just had to set on the data until the next workday morning. I suspect that the provider spent about $1million or less for the entire contract and just kept the rest. So that is how govt. contracts can go.