MeowCat messaging system
Is this thing on?
Hello everyone - I'm Rational Anarchist, or RA for short.
I feel a bit bad in a way, as you see I now work for them - kind of, anyway. I'm not paid out of taxpayer's money, but the work I do is for the government...
It's still quite recent, but although I feel somewhat unclean, I figure it should make for some interested blog posts/observations.
For example, I used to work for a fairly large private sector company. When they wanted something done, they found people with the relevant skills and had them do it. If there were no people with the relevant skills, they'd look at costs and benefits of hiring someone versus outsourcing the work.
Here, not so much. Outsourcing seems to be the first option - we have a number of different projects underway, and each is being run by a different external company. All of which are probably charging rather a lot for their services.
There do seem to be some sanity checks in place, but I fear they are inadequate (example: shortly after I joined I was asked how long it would take me to build and check a particular tool - my answer was apparently broadly in line with the quote that they were given. That said, I'd not be at all surprised if the external company responsible later turned around and said "oh yeah, there were some problems so it took twice as long - that'll be twice as much money please...")
Anyway, that's a little about what I might write about here, and just to finish off, a little picture of a cat:
