SF Schools finally scrap their disastrous, $40M payroll system that failed to actually pay people

[Del Tachi]

SFIST: A two-year-long San Francisco Unified School District payroll fiasco is still not resolved, so the district has decided to cut ties with the calamity of its payroll system called EMPower, and start over with a whole new vendor.


San Francisco USD gave a $9.5M no-bid contract to an HR firm to run its payroll system.  When it didn't work and teachers weren't getting paid, they threw another $30M at it to see if things would get better.  They didn't.  Now they'll be starting back over at square one with a new vendor.   

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

Can't believe I fully agree with a Del Tachi post. Unusually based and state-pilled position of you.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Sure some basic math could have determined that this was a bad idea, but MATH IS RACIST!

[Reactionary Libertarian]

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

Much of SF’s problems stem from the fact that they’ve outsourced core government functions to progressive NGOs that exist to perpetuate the problems, not solve them.

[Del Tachi]

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

Can't believe I fully agree with a Del Tachi post. Unusually based and state-pilled position of you.

Horseshoe theory is real.

[NYDem]

What the hell is wrong with the San Francisco City School District?

In the time I've been on Atlas, I can remember:

• Attempting to rename nearly every school in the district, because Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, George Washington, and nearly everyone else who has ever lived was racist
• Walking back the renaming crusade after massive backlash + numerous grammatical errors and blatant lies/mischaracterizations are found in their "research" into the schools' namesakes
• Removing algebra from 8th grade because math is racist
• Woke Kindergarten
• Outsourcing their payroll system for tens of millions of dollars, to a company that doesn't and can't do payroll
• Former school board member threatens political violence as response to landslide referendum majority returning algebra to schools
• Many others I am forgetting

[Antonio the Sixth]

What the hell is wrong with the San Francisco City School District?

In the time I've been on Atlas, I can remember:

• Attempting to rename nearly every school in the district, because Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, George Washington, and nearly everyone else who has ever lived was racist
• Walking back the renaming crusade after massive backlash + numerous grammatical errors and blatant lies/mischaracterizations are found in their "research" into the schools' namesakes
• Removing algebra from 8th grade because math is racist
• Woke Kindergarten
• Outsourcing their payroll system for tens of millions of dollars, to a company that doesn't and can't do payroll
• Former school board member threatens political violence as response to landslide referendum majority returning algebra to schools
• Many others I am forgetting

Honestly these people are the closest we've seen to a Democratic version of QAnon. They need to be shunned and ostracized from the party.

[jojoju1998]

What the hell is wrong with the San Francisco City School District?

In the time I've been on Atlas, I can remember:

• Attempting to rename nearly every school in the district, because Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, George Washington, and nearly everyone else who has ever lived was racist
• Walking back the renaming crusade after massive backlash + numerous grammatical errors and blatant lies/mischaracterizations are found in their "research" into the schools' namesakes
• Removing algebra from 8th grade because math is racist
• Woke Kindergarten
• Outsourcing their payroll system for tens of millions of dollars, to a company that doesn't and can't do payroll
• Former school board member threatens political violence as response to landslide referendum majority returning algebra to schools
• Many others I am forgetting

Ideological extremism.

[The Arizonan]

What the hell is wrong with the San Francisco City School District?

In the time I've been on Atlas, I can remember:

• Attempting to rename nearly every school in the district, because Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, George Washington, and nearly everyone else who has ever lived was racist
• Walking back the renaming crusade after massive backlash + numerous grammatical errors and blatant lies/mischaracterizations are found in their "research" into the schools' namesakes
• Removing algebra from 8th grade because math is racist
• Woke Kindergarten
• Outsourcing their payroll system for tens of millions of dollars, to a company that doesn't and can't do payroll
• Former school board member threatens political violence as response to landslide referendum majority returning algebra to schools
• Many others I am forgetting

Thank you for item number one on this list. Renaming schools is definitely ridiculous and is Orwellian crap that needs to stop.

[Electric Circus]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

[dead0man]

and everybody has a nephew that just, coincidentally, started an IT business and he can totally take care of our organization's web presence/network security/database management/cloud storage/whatever needs.  Sure, they'll charge us more than standard rates and will almost certainly do a poor job (at best and after a lot of "come on man, you've got to do better than this, it's been 4 months"s).

[Del Tachi]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

What the hell is wrong with the San Francisco City School District?

In the time I've been on Atlas, I can remember:

• Attempting to rename nearly every school in the district, because Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, George Washington, and nearly everyone else who has ever lived was racist
• Walking back the renaming crusade after massive backlash + numerous grammatical errors and blatant lies/mischaracterizations are found in their "research" into the schools' namesakes
• Removing algebra from 8th grade because math is racist
• Woke Kindergarten
• Outsourcing their payroll system for tens of millions of dollars, to a company that doesn't and can't do payroll
• Former school board member threatens political violence as response to landslide referendum majority returning algebra to schools
• Many others I am forgetting

Honestly these people are the closest we've seen to a Democratic version of QAnon. They need to be shunned and ostracized from the party.

They kind of were. Sadly that doesn't seem to have gone far enough.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

Just LOL.

I've heard plenty of stories from Best Buy corporate about junk like this. I worked for them briefly and my experience with that makes me believe it.

For example one guy saying that his friend was hired by Best Buy as a contractor to work on a payroll processing system and after about two months of work on that their team found out there was two other teams at Best Buy all working on the exact same system and none of them were aware of the others until then.

[Del Tachi]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

Just LOL.

I've heard plenty of stories from Best Buy corporate about junk like this. I worked for them briefly and my experience with that makes me believe it.

For example one guy saying that his friend was hired by Best Buy as a contractor to work on a payroll processing system and after about two months of work on that their team found out there was two other teams at Best Buy all working on the exact same system and none of them were aware of the others until then.

Did they pay him $30M?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

Just LOL.

I've heard plenty of stories from Best Buy corporate about junk like this. I worked for them briefly and my experience with that makes me believe it.

For example one guy saying that his friend was hired by Best Buy as a contractor to work on a payroll processing system and after about two months of work on that their team found out there was two other teams at Best Buy all working on the exact same system and none of them were aware of the others until then.

Did they pay him $30M?

Probably not, but consider the total costs of three teams working for two months when only one team was needed. Probably not $30M but these sort of errors definitely can and do happen with private companies.

[Del Tachi]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

Just LOL.

I've heard plenty of stories from Best Buy corporate about junk like this. I worked for them briefly and my experience with that makes me believe it.

For example one guy saying that his friend was hired by Best Buy as a contractor to work on a payroll processing system and after about two months of work on that their team found out there was two other teams at Best Buy all working on the exact same system and none of them were aware of the others until then.

Did they pay him $30M?

Probably not, but consider the total costs of three teams working for two months when only one team was needed. Probably not $30M but these sort of errors definitely can and do happen with private companies.

Ok.  So you're admitting you're comparing two very different things.  In your example, Best Buy contracted a single guy (i.e., surely a quite minimal cost for a huge company like them) and then promptly laid him off when they realized they didn't need him.  In my example, SFUSD let a $9.5M no-bid contract for a payroll system and then let it balloon to >$40M over several years without ever having a working system.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Extremely common problem, especially in the public and non-profit sectors. So much money wasted on failed IT implementations.

On the other hand, you also have organizations that waste massive amounts of money because they're struggling to maintain obsolete legacy systems, so it's a Scylla and Charybdis situation.

I'm not sure which is worse. Both situations tend to interfere with an organization's mission. Both situations expose an organization to a lot of unnecessary risk.

And both situations have a tendency to degenerate into something resembling bailing water out of a slowly sinking lifeboat. Upper management doesn't see through the complexity, so they don't hold leaders to account for their bad decisions until something catastrophic happens. (And sometimes not even then!)

Something like this would never happen at a for-profit company because they are actually in the position of going bankrupt.  What's the worst that will happen to SFUSD if they spend another $30M on bad software?

Government is the best customer, it's easy to throw good money after bad when it's not yours.

Just LOL.

I've heard plenty of stories from Best Buy corporate about junk like this. I worked for them briefly and my experience with that makes me believe it.

For example one guy saying that his friend was hired by Best Buy as a contractor to work on a payroll processing system and after about two months of work on that their team found out there was two other teams at Best Buy all working on the exact same system and none of them were aware of the others until then.

Did they pay him $30M?

Probably not, but consider the total costs of three teams working for two months when only one team was needed. Probably not $30M but these sort of errors definitely can and do happen with private companies.

Ok.  So you're admitting you're comparing two very different things.  In your example, Best Buy contracted a single guy (i.e., surely a quite minimal cost for a huge company like them) and then promptly laid him off when they realized they didn't need him.  In my example, SFUSD let a $9.5M no-bid contract for a payroll system and then let it balloon to >$40M over several years without ever having a working system.

He was part of a team, and there was three teams total. So it was more than a single guy.

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

Agreed with everything except this line, technocracy is rule of experts, and the conduct here shows this group (and SF's government in general) is run by people who might be as far from experts as possible.

[Del Tachi]

Such a marquee story of how government outsourcing of what should be core business services (i.e., f[inks]ing payroll!) increase costs for taxpayers while simultaneously diminishing democratic accountability and transparency.  This is technocracy at work!

Agreed with everything except this line, technocracy is rule of experts, and the conduct here shows this group (and SF's government in general) is run by people who might be as far from experts as possible.

Technocracy is the allocation of political power on the basis of technical ability or expertise.  Yes, a strong administrative state is indicative of technocracy but so is government outsourcing key functions to specialized technical firms.  Both outcomes obscure the democratic link between government and citizens.