Following the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is very entertaining. Basically every day they cancel DEI contracts for grifters and kick out huge swatches of Deep State bureaucrats. Looking beyond just the government, however, I had the impression that the impact of his work will be much more far reaching and may even reshape the tech industry. It is easy to look at USAID spending billions of US taxpayers’ money on radical leftist causes such as spreading sodomy and trannyism across the world. However, there is also a right-wing approach to grifting, namely by providing actual work, yet executing it really slowly and shoddily, with far too many intermediaries and people involved. To be more precise: The IT industry is a gigantic grift. Of course, Musk himself proved this by firing 80% of the people at Twitter, with no impact on performance.

As I work in tech myself, I have seen aspects of the IT grift as well, at various levels. Most relevant is the issue of “external suppliers”, i.e. contracting companies that provide labor. These are often at best medium-skilled engineers who get brought in for the duration of a project. The team sizes can be staggering, with some companies effectively outsourcing their entire engineering work to such outside companies. A well-known IT services company is Accenture, which has over 770,000 employees, a lot of them in India. There are also huge Indian companies, often abbreviated as “WITCH” (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL), and even these are just a subset of the big IT services companies in India. There is no end of IT services companies with 10,000+ employees. These companies often get hired by pretty clueless managers and you can almost guarantee that the work they produce will be below standard, take much longer than expected, and needs to be endlessly fixed (for a fee!), which is of course part of the business model.

I have seen managers attempting to shore up their position in a company by getting outside contractors involved. Suddenly the Indian manager gives a project to an Indian IT services company and needs to be the middle man because only he can effectively communicate with these people, or so he says. The quality and quantity of the work can be an enormous problem. What is worse, you may have in-house managers who are so clueless that they do not even grasp that they are being taken advantage of. I have seen a manager getting cajoled into taking on an external project team. The IT company had a moderately attractive contact person who gradually convinced him that he also needs software testers, a project manager and also an “agile coach”. This guy was so clueless that his defense was that he “was told that he needed these people”. The context was that I had received an assignment from someone higher up to assess the health of the engineering organization because costs were spiraling out of control. The extent of the problem was much worse than I could have imagined.

Obviously, I do not want to make the claim that only Indians are to blame. I also had really poor experiences with Brazilians. This included a non-technical manager believing absolutely anything his team told him as he had no frame of reference. Someone claimed that updating an DNS record, as part of a migration project, was a six-months project. This claim was laughable. The actual update takes a few minutes, and propagation takes theoretically up to three days. Yet, he did not follow up and the guy who told him that effectively did not do any work for months. I also discovered that multiple engineers had not written any code in months. They could not show anything else they had been doing. The situation was so bad that we sacked the entire team and if I had not peeked behind the curtain, this grift would have gone on for much longer.

The government is probably the ideal customer for IT services as tenured government employees are often unmotivated and, according to stereotypes, pretty lazy. I would not be surprised if you could tell them anything, such as claiming that a simple website needs a staff of 100 people. Of course, if you are speaking of government, you need to think bigger, much much bigger. Reportedly, the United States has spent $5 billion on the effing ObamaCare websites. You could probably have done this with five million dollars quite comfortably. The healthcare.gov project is another billion-dollar disaster. The excuse is that these are really complicated systems that need to process a lot of transactions. Well, all of this is known technology. We know how to build high-load websites. Many small startups with 50 people operate systems that handle much more traffic than the biggest websites run by the US government. To put it in very clear terms: A smaller but much more able team could probably have implemented any of the US government systems at 1 to 5% of the actual cost.

A big problem in tech is that mediocre engineers produce mediocre work at an excruciatingly slow pace. Then it costs more money to run their software, it scales worse and it will require constant maintenance work, yet the quality of the product only gets worse. A team of 100 shitty coders, and this is no exaggeration, will not be able to produce what one brilliant engineer can do. If they could then India would be at the leading edge of progress in this industry. People like Elon Musk know this. All it takes for him to cause serious problems for the entrenched IT services industry is taking a closer look, just like his team has done with the leftist money spigot USAID. Let him do to US IT systems what he has done to Twitter and USAID, and you probably end up with a very small fraction of engineers that are needed to build and maintain them. At Twitter he cut 80% of the workforce and there, the assumption can be made that the quality of the employees was a lot higher than at your typical IT sweatshop. Thus, I would not at all be surprised if you could comfortably cut 95% of personnel in IT in the US, while improving the quality of services. As a consequence, you can probably kick out the entire H-1B IT workforce, which is an enormous fraction of the total H1-B workforce that is in the millions. Incidentally, many of the IT H-1B’s work for low-quality IT body shops so there is enormous room for optimization.