HN user
I'm working on https://GovWeave.com/.
It's like a BuiltWith for Government. I am tracking all UK government spend and building a picture of software and rising/falling trends of various products in the government.
I worked as a government supplier and found it hard to find out what tech/solutions are in place without inside knowledge. My idea is that by opening the data, I can help more suppliers compete and foster innovation.
I feel the same. Investments are shooting up and wages stink.
UK has very high taxation now so working full time doesn’t bring in as much as a decent portfolio.
Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.
Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.
The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.
Understood that this is a pitch for his own platform (which is fair enough), there is a mixture of a few things here which are common tech tropes.
- Enterprise buyers are risk averse and buy the wrong thing - Language X is better because the people that use it are smarter - New tech is difficult for established players
Not really a fresh take but at least it's well written.
I am building something similar in the UK. As a contractor, I have to manage tax, invoices, reconciliation, payroll, accountant emails.
I think software in the future will be general portals which roughly self manages via plugins and automation. Services like QuickBooks will eventually just be an MCP server and you can tailor the software as you wish.
Will follow!
GDS went from an internal distruptor, breaking the consultancy oligopoly to being another entry gate.
The companies who capitalised on this (Kainos/Equal Experts/ScrumConnect) are now their own oligopoly.
It's just big guys charging arms/legs for average work again.
LLM's are like accountants looking at the past.
The numbers are bad therefore it will collapse.
How about NFC? App with a QR code displayed?
Could be a force of habit for UK but that's mostly how we do tickets. Printing is usually still an option.
Maybe i booked through a shadow site. The ticket office printed out something else.
The ticket office did have impressive throughput and lines building up.
German trains are absolute chaos. Tickets are sent via PDF for trains running 3 hours late. I was in Frankfurt last year getting to Cologne and back a few times.
Coming from someone who has to commute via South Western railway into London everyday.
Sad state of affairs for Germany.
Yeap. I worked in the UK public sector and I watched the UK gov briefly back their own cloud company (Skyscape) then ditch them when they had some minor issues.
Completely captured by US tech
Europe has just been catastrophically slow in developing anything related to it's own tech infrastructure. Its doesn't back itself.
Given how poor it's responding to things like the Draghi report, I wouldn't anticipate success. Just more flailing around and working groups.
Yeap, getting this for the last 20 minutes. Everything green on their status pages.
I've started buying clothes from China. Quality and style is starting to really improve.
Makes you wonder how much we've been ripped off for years.
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The EU outsourced manufacturing without any Mag 7.
I'm sure it'll work out well for us...
Tech giants have no competition in Europe and no capital to do so. In some ways, what Trump is doing is a call to arms for the EU to kick their economies into shape. We've been stuck in 0 growth for years, the UK is in a 0 growth trap since the GFC.
While I agree we're not all implementing physics engines, there is a spectrum of complexity that is both business and technical between a todo app and a banking system.
Developer brains are still much more efficient at holding the different layers of context involved to build systems.
My view is that Ai companies saw there was a huge volume of code online and decided coding was a text generation problem and easy to replace.
I don't buy it. I also don't think it'll replace writers or artists. Just the low brow, chum bucket stuff which in programming terms is a todo app or web form.
We need very big changes to capitalism at its core.
There are warning signs flashing across all economies without any coherent solutions.
Germany is in serious trouble. The US and China are in protectionist markets. EU is starting to realise their labour and manufacturing are expensive and not unique anymore. The business model is broken.
Too much to build. UK government has shown it can build styling templates, payment and notification wrappers well. These are useful and achievable services.
Full on ERP would be a disaster.
I use notion and like using it. But it’s high contrast Jira.
Yes it’s decluttered but it’s not a very sticky product.
Have Indian relatives and can confirm that lots of the home cooked stuff is greasy too. Fried sugar jalebis anyone.
While Ireland has some cash these days, it was a poor place until joining the EU. If you wanted to do well, you emigrated. This is still the case pretty much.
The UK economy is not very dynamic and becoming less so. Low wages, high immigration, low investment.
It’s not just a mentality thing, there are legitimate reasons unfortunately
I agree with that. The thing that made them grow so quickly is now going to force them into reliance.
Encouraging consumption by creating more welfare programs, spreading corporate wealth to citizens via share schemes etc would be a way of changing this but I don't see this fitting into the Marxist production machine.
Seems like China will do as well as the US lets it. It has little domestic consumption and is reliant on exports to the US.
Maybe China will have strong consumers in the future but then it'll have to ensure it can compete with US wages which erodes its competitiveness.
House always wins.
For all the drama in US Politics, you have to admit they run extremely well economically. Quick to keep rates high, good forecasting, good trade policies, good energy policies.
Europe is like a kid copying the US homework, trying to make the equations work.
Are gold and crypto correlated? Both seem to be rising on rate cut prospects but not sure how proven the theory is.