As someone who is not a lawyer but works with them, your article is well-written and I can tell you've thought about it a lot, but, it's not even close to accurately describing the internal workings of the legal world. I could probably write a whole article just responding to yours, but a few things:
1. Lawyers LOVE plea deals. And settlements, for non-criminal cases. 98% of federal criminal cases end in plea deals and if my memory's right, it's in the 90s for state criminal cases as well. Lawyers love it when they don't have to go to trial and can clear off their calendar for the day. No one who's actually in the legal field views settling a case as anything sketchy or "less than" than going to trial. If anything, I'd say that more lawyers violate ethical standards by convincing their client to forego their trial and take a plea deal that's not in their best interest.
2. People from outside the legal field view their cases as slogging along at a snail's speed, but for the people in the legal field, they're going at a breakneck pace. You speculate that a couple of weeks is "plenty of time" to review all the evidence in a case and make a decision. That's laughable. You might not even know what evidence there is within a few weeks. You have to meet with your client, find out their story, file an appearance as their attorney, get any pleadings that were already filed in the case, determine what evidence the prosecutor has on them, figure out what points of law and fact can be argued, subpoena places to get records which will take at least two weeks, figure out potential witnesses, find those witnesses, convince them to talk with you, meet with those witnesses and find out what their story would be if they were to testify, prepare questions that you would ask them if you go to trial, subpoena them, try to reach a plea deal with opposing, review their offers with your client, prepare a counter-offer, and then hope to hear back. Decide what evidence you want to use as exhibits. Disclose your witnesses and exhibits to opposing. Look over opposing's disclosures with your client and see if anything makes him change his mind about that initial settlement offer, ....I sure hope you only have one case to work on!
As it is, in federal cases, defendants have a right to a trial with 70 days of being charged. Most of them waive that right. Why? Because they want their attorney to have more time to gather evidence to support their position. If you were to have a trial within a few weeks, the only thing you would get is a lot more appeals as evidence continued to be discovered after the trial date.
3. You seem to be under the impression that lawyers are the ones that are writing the laws and that they write them to be as complicated as possible for their own benefit. Actually, when laypeople write the laws they end up being a lot more convoluted and cause more issues down the road because 1) there will be contradictions, and 2) they don't define terms. Take a law that says, "no one can drive with marijuana in their system". Seems simple, but what does that actually mean? That you can't be under the influence? Or that you can't have any chemical components from marijuana in your system, even though they could be around for weeks after you smoked it? Sloppy writing like that makes the judicial system have to go back and determine what the intent of the law was a lot more than writing seems overly-detailed but is precise.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. The typical criminal case is not that complicated. Even the average felony case is something like a burglary or a $4k employee theft. An attorney can review all the evidence in a matter of hours, sometimes less.
The biggest time sink is dealing with the client’s feelings. They can spend hours telling you they don’t want to go to prison.
>>>Infrastructure has become nearly impossible to build, in large parts because of endless legal review.<<<
Environmental impact studies are one of those things where a ton of great ideas come together to form a horrific end result.
Yes, you should understand where rainwater runoff will go after you build something. It's not fair for your 20 acres of parking lots to dump rainwater into a low-income neighborhood.
Yes, you should make sure there are no endangered animals on site or whether you risk damaging the ecosystem of an endangered animal.
Yes, you should understand how the water-table works under the site and ensure that site operations would not potentially leach hazardous chemicals into the water flow.
Yes, you should have a way to ensure that the raw materials for construction are not being sourced from slave labor in 3rd world countries.
Yes, we should make sure that the roads around the site are rated for the weight of the equipment that must traverse them during construction.
Yes, we should make sure that the site will not present any immediate dangers or hazards to children or small animals.
And then someone goes to build 3 concrete steps in a park and it costs $80,000 to get approvals.
So you say, "wow, we should be able to exclude some of the steps above based on the scope of the proposed construction". But now all you have done is keep all of the steps above, but now created hundreds of different regulatory approval processes, and figuring out which approval process to pursue just becomes another step in an already extremely convoluted process.
I imagine the rest of the legal processes outlined are similar in concept; when you go to simplify it, every detail suddenly appears to make sense.
“It should make sense to treat lawyers like we do plumbers - not with disrespect, but just as normal people whose job it is to do standard maintenance on slightly unpleasant infrastructure and get paid a reasonable moderate amount for it.”
I don’t agree with everything in the post, but I DO think that if we could wave a magic wand and make people think of lawyers (of which I am one) this way that would be a big step toward improving things.
I sometimes joke that we should go back to a system where all of our laws fit on a stele in the middle of town. Jokes aside, it would probably be better in some important ways, lol.
Yeah. Eliezer had a story where each law has to have a legislator that takes responsibility for it by reciting the whole thing (and when that legislator is replaced they have to find a new one to take it over), which also feels like a good variant to stop them being too long.
I agree that many lawyers love doing plea deals in practice, but they end up doing them because trials become longer and more cumbersome. The dynamic is that people add complications to trials until they hit the limit of complexity they can reasonably handle, then use plea deals in many cases because there's no realistic option to avoid them (this also causes issues with charging some things as felonies, because then people don't want a plea deal and there's not enough court slots to do trials for all of these).
But this is still not a system that tries upfront to be efficient. It's one that's designed to be maximally accurate and avoid shortcuts, and then makes them as a compromise with reality when it has to. It's not designed upfront to enable easy or more plea deals, or to allow shorter trials for cases where plea deals tend to be avoided.
Re lawyers not slogging - I agree that lawyers work incredibly hard. I think they end up taking forever because the system is implemented to measure effort rather than results (or when it does measure results, it often gives no or negative weight to speed).
For the third point - lawyers don't write the original laws, but they do build up the system for processing it and advise the people who wrote them. I agree that in terms of assigning blame much of it should go to non-lawyer politicians who have even less interest in writing things that work well. The length of trials and processing is mostly procedural. It's not that there's specific guys going "hohoho I'll make this longer to annoy people". It's that the priorities are careful work and dotting all the is, and going "maybe we should just skim this" makes you come off as a bad lawyer.
The business world is similarly burdened by rules, some of which are used as “moats.” A moat is what you’d imagine it being, a series of obstacles that protect existing market players from newcomers.
There is also a universal response to risk in that when a disaster (no matter how improbable and unlikely to repeat) happens, the immediate response is almost always to make a rule or check to prevent it from happening. Even as all these burdensome checks and rules accumulate, no one is assigned to clearing out old rules or assessing the risk of being so risk averse. The rules just amass over time, which could be why newcomers with less accumulated internal rules are still able to rise despite said moats.
Yeah. An advantage the business world has is that incumbents tend to be replaced by newcomers over time. But that's a bigger problem when it comes to replacing the legal system
As someone who’s about to become a lawyer, I really liked the first half of this piece. I agree that most lawyers don’t value efficiency enough (social efficiency that is - lawyers value efficiency when it comes to their own time and money plenty). I also agree that status-seeking hurts the legal community in a lot of ways.
Part of the solution is probably to increase the supply of lawyers by lowering barriers to entry, and for the government to employ more lawyers/judges so that things get done more quickly. I’m also hopeful that AI will shake things up in a positive direction.
You started to lose me on some of the other arguments re criminal law. I’m not sure I see criminal convictions losing enough stigma to justify a higher false positive rate in my lifetime. And without that loss in stigma, plea bargaining a case that could otherwise be won might still frequently be a bad thing to do (I think there’s been statistical work showing that this is probably responsible for mass incarceration?).
So one specific point about the stigma: if people often resist plea bargains that would move them from misdemeanor to felony on stigma grounds, it seems like we could get some mileage for improving plea bargaining by playing around with that boundary (either moving it or blurring it in some way, for example)
Justice can only be individual and specific and plea bargains, like all legal fictions, are incompatible with justice, which requires a specific accounting of individual facts. They're abhorrent to justice both in theory and much more than that in practice.
Typically, legal doctrines were created by necessity but, like fruit of the poison tree, applied with little understanding of or care for their actual purpose. If they were applied as intended when created we'd have a massively more just system. Fruit of the poison tree doctrine is a minimum that isn't even reached.
The problem with judicial systems is that they don't have the basics right and the legislatures don't even try to have the basics right, they just write more laws constantly which constantly makes things more complex and therefore inherently worse.
For instance, judges are only chosen from the already integrated and compliant. Juries are literally never of one's peers, and that's not necessary for justice anyway. Ignorance of the law is no excuse despite that there's an army of judges and lawyers arguing about what it means every day as it shifts beneath their feet. Immunity after the fact is impunity before the fact. Etc. https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/no-isms
But more than all of that, most judicial systems don't even have the ethical priorities straight, much less the jurisprudential ones.
As sentiments go, Dick the Butcher has you beat by 500 years. Most people form their impressions of the legal system from watching LA Law or Boston Legal
(I hate when I somehow post a comment before I’m finished!). …At any rate, our legal system, like the rest of our institutions, tends always to entropy. I don’t know a single lawyer of my generation who does not believe that the profession has degenerated and been diminished during their tenure. I was primarily an hourly rate lawyer trying lawsuits for 40 years and am an expert at dealing with sticker shock. It’s funny you illustrate your point by reference to Plumbers, since I used to recommend that option to prospective clients appalled and offended by my realistic assessment of the probable cost of their options. I despise a LOT more lawyers than you do, but you should spend more time talking to some. Some of your points have merit, but, like most problems, the solution to this one is not nearly as simple as you think.
I don't think the solution is simple at all. The point I'm trying to make is that it's death by a thousand cuts of entropy made by a bias when making legitimate tradeoffs, not a single big obvious red button you could push to solve things.
Basically they have a racket going. It is near impossible to get a PE license. It is full of arbitrary criteria most of which only applies to new members not ones already in. To even sit for the rest for example you have to prove that your kids have health insurance. What exactly does that have to do with engineering? You need a masters degree unless you already have a PE. Alright if something isn't safe it has nothing to do with it being old. Plus you need referrals to get in, which is why every PE is almost always certain demographics and not others. The whole idea makes no sense. Physics is physics everywhere. You don't need a local, you need the best person you can hire.
Additionally they have a total anti-team work attitude. I talk you listen is engraved on their mental landscape. Read any email from a PE and it just radiates "I am a PE I know everything and you know nothing". The result is no new ideas, no corrections, no upgrades. I have a folder on my work desktop literally called "for idiots" it has obsolete designs for the PEs I deal with.
Plus there is a total lack of integrity. I have the emails of me telling some PE "hey the part you are calling for is no longer manufactured, here is a replacement. I will have to buy this on eBay if you don't make this change" and been told to do it. New machines for the US government with used parts.
They make huge mistakes, they do not listen to anyone, they delay projects to rank up huge consulting fees, they refuse to do site visits, they weight in on topics they do not know about, and in everything act like an incompetent man in a situation they can not control.
I don't drink the water in many places in Canada and US because I know the man who planned out the sewage there. I drink the water in Mexico but not in Southern California.
Let me summarize it by an andoectal. I am on one project now that should have taken 9 months, it started in 2018 and nothing is moving. The original spec demanded that I clone a computer system from 1982, it was scanned from a typewrited document. The PE wanted all clicking relays. This is for a town within a few hours drive of Silicon Valley. What this fucker is doing is fraud and I have been dragged into his crimes.
So yeah maybe before we blame the lawyers we blame the people actually running things into the ground
Why are the hiring standards for the PEs so bad? Is it the general terrible government hiring pipeline or are there special politicized issues with it?
Governments rarely hire on PEs they contract companies that have them. There are exceptions of course.
To a degree it makes sense. Say you were a mayor of a town and want some new pumping station built. Wouldn't you hire some consultant company that to build it vs order your local maintenance department to just wing it? Ok so you have done this a few times now and you are tried of broken promises from contractors so now you hire on a consultant to keep tabs on the contractors. The consultant drags the project out because they get paid monthly.
Basically you are hiring a security guard to guard your security guards to guard your workers instead of just getting better workers.
I guess this is the thing Alon Levy always talks about where you fundamentally can't outsource core government functions and when governments try they get bad services. You need to have people on the inside who know what they're doing and what they need
I don't know about that. Technology fiefdoms have their own issues. The general rule I trick to stick with when I do project management is if it is not off the shelf build it, if you can't build it have an embedded contractor build it. None of this send it out and four years later some box of parts arrive
About an hour after I wrote this a new job came in that the spec was scanned from typewriter written document. The date was in the 70s. I might post part of it later.
This is what we are dealing with 2025 and I am being asked to replicate a system from about 5 decades ago.
As someone who is not a lawyer but works with them, your article is well-written and I can tell you've thought about it a lot, but, it's not even close to accurately describing the internal workings of the legal world. I could probably write a whole article just responding to yours, but a few things:
1. Lawyers LOVE plea deals. And settlements, for non-criminal cases. 98% of federal criminal cases end in plea deals and if my memory's right, it's in the 90s for state criminal cases as well. Lawyers love it when they don't have to go to trial and can clear off their calendar for the day. No one who's actually in the legal field views settling a case as anything sketchy or "less than" than going to trial. If anything, I'd say that more lawyers violate ethical standards by convincing their client to forego their trial and take a plea deal that's not in their best interest.
2. People from outside the legal field view their cases as slogging along at a snail's speed, but for the people in the legal field, they're going at a breakneck pace. You speculate that a couple of weeks is "plenty of time" to review all the evidence in a case and make a decision. That's laughable. You might not even know what evidence there is within a few weeks. You have to meet with your client, find out their story, file an appearance as their attorney, get any pleadings that were already filed in the case, determine what evidence the prosecutor has on them, figure out what points of law and fact can be argued, subpoena places to get records which will take at least two weeks, figure out potential witnesses, find those witnesses, convince them to talk with you, meet with those witnesses and find out what their story would be if they were to testify, prepare questions that you would ask them if you go to trial, subpoena them, try to reach a plea deal with opposing, review their offers with your client, prepare a counter-offer, and then hope to hear back. Decide what evidence you want to use as exhibits. Disclose your witnesses and exhibits to opposing. Look over opposing's disclosures with your client and see if anything makes him change his mind about that initial settlement offer, ....I sure hope you only have one case to work on!
As it is, in federal cases, defendants have a right to a trial with 70 days of being charged. Most of them waive that right. Why? Because they want their attorney to have more time to gather evidence to support their position. If you were to have a trial within a few weeks, the only thing you would get is a lot more appeals as evidence continued to be discovered after the trial date.
3. You seem to be under the impression that lawyers are the ones that are writing the laws and that they write them to be as complicated as possible for their own benefit. Actually, when laypeople write the laws they end up being a lot more convoluted and cause more issues down the road because 1) there will be contradictions, and 2) they don't define terms. Take a law that says, "no one can drive with marijuana in their system". Seems simple, but what does that actually mean? That you can't be under the influence? Or that you can't have any chemical components from marijuana in your system, even though they could be around for weeks after you smoked it? Sloppy writing like that makes the judicial system have to go back and determine what the intent of the law was a lot more than writing seems overly-detailed but is precise.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. The typical criminal case is not that complicated. Even the average felony case is something like a burglary or a $4k employee theft. An attorney can review all the evidence in a matter of hours, sometimes less.
The biggest time sink is dealing with the client’s feelings. They can spend hours telling you they don’t want to go to prison.
>>>Infrastructure has become nearly impossible to build, in large parts because of endless legal review.<<<
Environmental impact studies are one of those things where a ton of great ideas come together to form a horrific end result.
Yes, you should understand where rainwater runoff will go after you build something. It's not fair for your 20 acres of parking lots to dump rainwater into a low-income neighborhood.
Yes, you should make sure there are no endangered animals on site or whether you risk damaging the ecosystem of an endangered animal.
Yes, you should understand how the water-table works under the site and ensure that site operations would not potentially leach hazardous chemicals into the water flow.
Yes, you should have a way to ensure that the raw materials for construction are not being sourced from slave labor in 3rd world countries.
Yes, we should make sure that the roads around the site are rated for the weight of the equipment that must traverse them during construction.
Yes, we should make sure that the site will not present any immediate dangers or hazards to children or small animals.
And then someone goes to build 3 concrete steps in a park and it costs $80,000 to get approvals.
So you say, "wow, we should be able to exclude some of the steps above based on the scope of the proposed construction". But now all you have done is keep all of the steps above, but now created hundreds of different regulatory approval processes, and figuring out which approval process to pursue just becomes another step in an already extremely convoluted process.
I imagine the rest of the legal processes outlined are similar in concept; when you go to simplify it, every detail suddenly appears to make sense.
“It should make sense to treat lawyers like we do plumbers - not with disrespect, but just as normal people whose job it is to do standard maintenance on slightly unpleasant infrastructure and get paid a reasonable moderate amount for it.”
I don’t agree with everything in the post, but I DO think that if we could wave a magic wand and make people think of lawyers (of which I am one) this way that would be a big step toward improving things.
I sometimes joke that we should go back to a system where all of our laws fit on a stele in the middle of town. Jokes aside, it would probably be better in some important ways, lol.
Yeah. Eliezer had a story where each law has to have a legislator that takes responsibility for it by reciting the whole thing (and when that legislator is replaced they have to find a new one to take it over), which also feels like a good variant to stop them being too long.
Lots to think about, sir: and I shall meet you at noon! After current writing obligations are met.
So to address these in order
I agree that many lawyers love doing plea deals in practice, but they end up doing them because trials become longer and more cumbersome. The dynamic is that people add complications to trials until they hit the limit of complexity they can reasonably handle, then use plea deals in many cases because there's no realistic option to avoid them (this also causes issues with charging some things as felonies, because then people don't want a plea deal and there's not enough court slots to do trials for all of these).
But this is still not a system that tries upfront to be efficient. It's one that's designed to be maximally accurate and avoid shortcuts, and then makes them as a compromise with reality when it has to. It's not designed upfront to enable easy or more plea deals, or to allow shorter trials for cases where plea deals tend to be avoided.
Re lawyers not slogging - I agree that lawyers work incredibly hard. I think they end up taking forever because the system is implemented to measure effort rather than results (or when it does measure results, it often gives no or negative weight to speed).
For the third point - lawyers don't write the original laws, but they do build up the system for processing it and advise the people who wrote them. I agree that in terms of assigning blame much of it should go to non-lawyer politicians who have even less interest in writing things that work well. The length of trials and processing is mostly procedural. It's not that there's specific guys going "hohoho I'll make this longer to annoy people". It's that the priorities are careful work and dotting all the is, and going "maybe we should just skim this" makes you come off as a bad lawyer.
Very bad and wrong piece based on pure bullshit.
Found the idiot bot in the room. “Muh AI”
The business world is similarly burdened by rules, some of which are used as “moats.” A moat is what you’d imagine it being, a series of obstacles that protect existing market players from newcomers.
There is also a universal response to risk in that when a disaster (no matter how improbable and unlikely to repeat) happens, the immediate response is almost always to make a rule or check to prevent it from happening. Even as all these burdensome checks and rules accumulate, no one is assigned to clearing out old rules or assessing the risk of being so risk averse. The rules just amass over time, which could be why newcomers with less accumulated internal rules are still able to rise despite said moats.
Yeah. An advantage the business world has is that incumbents tend to be replaced by newcomers over time. But that's a bigger problem when it comes to replacing the legal system
Lawyers are gammas. Whoever tells the better story wins.
My god they’ve broken containment!
Are we talking about gammas in regular conversation now?
The old joke…
99% of lawyers give the other 1% a bad name…
As someone who’s about to become a lawyer, I really liked the first half of this piece. I agree that most lawyers don’t value efficiency enough (social efficiency that is - lawyers value efficiency when it comes to their own time and money plenty). I also agree that status-seeking hurts the legal community in a lot of ways.
Part of the solution is probably to increase the supply of lawyers by lowering barriers to entry, and for the government to employ more lawyers/judges so that things get done more quickly. I’m also hopeful that AI will shake things up in a positive direction.
You started to lose me on some of the other arguments re criminal law. I’m not sure I see criminal convictions losing enough stigma to justify a higher false positive rate in my lifetime. And without that loss in stigma, plea bargaining a case that could otherwise be won might still frequently be a bad thing to do (I think there’s been statistical work showing that this is probably responsible for mass incarceration?).
So one specific point about the stigma: if people often resist plea bargains that would move them from misdemeanor to felony on stigma grounds, it seems like we could get some mileage for improving plea bargaining by playing around with that boundary (either moving it or blurring it in some way, for example)
Yeah that sounds right to me, but I’m not familiar enough with how plea bargaining works to how common that is
Justice can only be individual and specific and plea bargains, like all legal fictions, are incompatible with justice, which requires a specific accounting of individual facts. They're abhorrent to justice both in theory and much more than that in practice.
Typically, legal doctrines were created by necessity but, like fruit of the poison tree, applied with little understanding of or care for their actual purpose. If they were applied as intended when created we'd have a massively more just system. Fruit of the poison tree doctrine is a minimum that isn't even reached.
The problem with judicial systems is that they don't have the basics right and the legislatures don't even try to have the basics right, they just write more laws constantly which constantly makes things more complex and therefore inherently worse.
For instance, judges are only chosen from the already integrated and compliant. Juries are literally never of one's peers, and that's not necessary for justice anyway. Ignorance of the law is no excuse despite that there's an army of judges and lawyers arguing about what it means every day as it shifts beneath their feet. Immunity after the fact is impunity before the fact. Etc. https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/no-isms
But more than all of that, most judicial systems don't even have the ethical priorities straight, much less the jurisprudential ones.
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/the-mandate-of-libertarian-fascist/
As sentiments go, Dick the Butcher has you beat by 500 years. Most people form their impressions of the legal system from watching LA Law or Boston Legal
(I hate when I somehow post a comment before I’m finished!). …At any rate, our legal system, like the rest of our institutions, tends always to entropy. I don’t know a single lawyer of my generation who does not believe that the profession has degenerated and been diminished during their tenure. I was primarily an hourly rate lawyer trying lawsuits for 40 years and am an expert at dealing with sticker shock. It’s funny you illustrate your point by reference to Plumbers, since I used to recommend that option to prospective clients appalled and offended by my realistic assessment of the probable cost of their options. I despise a LOT more lawyers than you do, but you should spend more time talking to some. Some of your points have merit, but, like most problems, the solution to this one is not nearly as simple as you think.
I don't think the solution is simple at all. The point I'm trying to make is that it's death by a thousand cuts of entropy made by a bias when making legitimate tradeoffs, not a single big obvious red button you could push to solve things.
Well, let’s consider why, exactly, “things take so long.” Want your case over in a week? Easy answer - trial by combat.
Combat shouldn't take a week! Even a five round MMA title match is over in half an hour
I am in infrastructure and there is plenty of problems without pointing to only the lawyers.
If you want someone to blame, blame the PEs. We need to start firing ones that can't produce and slow everything down.
Oh yeah, definitely didn't mean to imply the legal structure is the only problem (but please tell me more about the issues with the PEs?)
Basically they have a racket going. It is near impossible to get a PE license. It is full of arbitrary criteria most of which only applies to new members not ones already in. To even sit for the rest for example you have to prove that your kids have health insurance. What exactly does that have to do with engineering? You need a masters degree unless you already have a PE. Alright if something isn't safe it has nothing to do with it being old. Plus you need referrals to get in, which is why every PE is almost always certain demographics and not others. The whole idea makes no sense. Physics is physics everywhere. You don't need a local, you need the best person you can hire.
Additionally they have a total anti-team work attitude. I talk you listen is engraved on their mental landscape. Read any email from a PE and it just radiates "I am a PE I know everything and you know nothing". The result is no new ideas, no corrections, no upgrades. I have a folder on my work desktop literally called "for idiots" it has obsolete designs for the PEs I deal with.
Plus there is a total lack of integrity. I have the emails of me telling some PE "hey the part you are calling for is no longer manufactured, here is a replacement. I will have to buy this on eBay if you don't make this change" and been told to do it. New machines for the US government with used parts.
They make huge mistakes, they do not listen to anyone, they delay projects to rank up huge consulting fees, they refuse to do site visits, they weight in on topics they do not know about, and in everything act like an incompetent man in a situation they can not control.
I don't drink the water in many places in Canada and US because I know the man who planned out the sewage there. I drink the water in Mexico but not in Southern California.
Let me summarize it by an andoectal. I am on one project now that should have taken 9 months, it started in 2018 and nothing is moving. The original spec demanded that I clone a computer system from 1982, it was scanned from a typewrited document. The PE wanted all clicking relays. This is for a town within a few hours drive of Silicon Valley. What this fucker is doing is fraud and I have been dragged into his crimes.
So yeah maybe before we blame the lawyers we blame the people actually running things into the ground
Why are the hiring standards for the PEs so bad? Is it the general terrible government hiring pipeline or are there special politicized issues with it?
Governments rarely hire on PEs they contract companies that have them. There are exceptions of course.
To a degree it makes sense. Say you were a mayor of a town and want some new pumping station built. Wouldn't you hire some consultant company that to build it vs order your local maintenance department to just wing it? Ok so you have done this a few times now and you are tried of broken promises from contractors so now you hire on a consultant to keep tabs on the contractors. The consultant drags the project out because they get paid monthly.
Basically you are hiring a security guard to guard your security guards to guard your workers instead of just getting better workers.
I guess this is the thing Alon Levy always talks about where you fundamentally can't outsource core government functions and when governments try they get bad services. You need to have people on the inside who know what they're doing and what they need
I don't know about that. Technology fiefdoms have their own issues. The general rule I trick to stick with when I do project management is if it is not off the shelf build it, if you can't build it have an embedded contractor build it. None of this send it out and four years later some box of parts arrive
About an hour after I wrote this a new job came in that the spec was scanned from typewriter written document. The date was in the 70s. I might post part of it later.
This is what we are dealing with 2025 and I am being asked to replicate a system from about 5 decades ago.