In the US, congressmen make $170K a year, the president makes around $400K a year. Junior developers at large tech companies can make $170K easily in year one or two. Senior developers at tech companies make $400K+. Is the government going to pay tech workers enough to compete?

It could.

Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.

Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.

The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.

The companies bidding for the work would also be private industry. Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?

Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.

Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

> Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.

> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?

It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.

> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.

It’s not just the hardware, it’s building out the competencies in house. Companies like Netflix, Disney , Intuit (TurboTax) explicitly decided that it wasn’t “cheaper”.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?

Let’s say the government wanted to “leverage” open source, do you think they could make a better version of ChromeOS than Google?

You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?

The original poster said:

i’d support any legislation that booted google, fb, ms, adobe, salesforce, and a whole host of other surveillance tech companies from any and all levels of government. it’s literally as important as the separation of church and state. in fact, i’d love to see a constitutional amendment explicitly separating corporate interests from governmental ones, in all facets of civic life (e.g., campaign finance).

They don’t want any private company involved in government IT. That means the government has to build everything out themselves without using contractors.

> Companies like Netflix, Disney , Intuit (TurboTax) explicitly decided that it wasn’t “cheaper”.

Doesn't Netflix only run their metadata servers in the cloud? I'm not sure what those other two do.

> Google, Apple, Microsoft, SalesForce, Oracle, are not good at creating software?

Did I imply that?

Though we could debate Oracle...

> You also just think throwing money at a problem can automatically create software that is better than private corporations?

I never said better. But "good enough", in avoidance of horrible privacy violations, is a choice I'd approve of.

And open source software usually does quite well when given moderate funding.

> They don’t want any private company involved in government IT.

My interpretation is that if you get rid of the surveillance you solve the main problem, as far as outsourcing goes. If that's wrong then some of what I suggested isn't compatible.

Netflix is AWS’s largest customer. They run everything on AWS except the CDNs that cache their video that is usually collocated at ISPs.

I’m not trying to “appeal to authority”. But since we are taking specifically about AWS, I should disclaim that I work at AWS in the consulting department. That’s where my perspective about large scale migrations come from. I’m not necessarily saying everyone “should move to the cloud”. I’m more referring to how deeply ingrained the commercial sector has always been involved with government.