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Turns out all that happened was the rich benefitted and the poor suffered. Who'da thought?
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It's similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn't even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don't understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at "double spended". As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren't actually "doing" anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn't I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don't have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don't believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering "talent". They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don't understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.