[m4tthumphrey]

I cannot fathom this. What an egregious waste of (assumed) public money.

Surely someone can request to see where this went? Even the original figure of $4.1m is insane.

[alcasa]

Why? Its 4.1m AUD. Given the salary of devs and the scope of such a website, the original budget seemed pretty optimistic.

[chrisrickard]

Because the ridiculous scope creep perhaps? And spending $96M of government money on an website (still with large faults that were backed out)

This was Accenture and Deloitte - not some backyard dev shop.

[hyperpape]

I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price.

But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization" without any connection to real improvements.

A better approach would be to determine the most important weaknesses of the existing website, and incrementally improve them. But big organizations struggle with this. Government agencies are probably even worse than big corporations, but big corporations are terrible too.

[blitzar]

> Given the salary of devs

Devs are shocked to hear that their 500k salary makes the project cost more than a 50k they think it is worth.

[aunty_helen]

5 person team, 5 overheads (dealing with the government no less), 200k/yr each that’s 2m a year + 50% margin would easily get you a 4m burn rate.