A long time ago some teammates (prior to my joining the company) had been assigned to work on some VA related health system, turned out they were 8 levels sub contractors, i.e. sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors. Project never shipped.

It still boggles my mind how ANYONE would sign off on a setup like this. How does no one see that this will fail without a single doubt.

because no one has a view of the whole system.

What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other?

When I was a subcontractor, the most I had to do was 3 (customer and 2 consultancies), and even that was a major hassle.

>What I want to know: did they have to fill in their time reports in 8+ systems, one worse than the other?

OMG, I do not miss filling out three fucking timesheets as a salaried employee.

One via MS Access, which was believe it or not, the least painful. One on fucking paper, because why shouldn't programmers use paper for timesheets? And last, but definitely not least one via PHONE. Where you have to enter your employee number and hours via a fucking PHONE KEYPAD. Oh, and they would nag a company of 250,000 to do it early so that the accounting team of like 5 could go home on time on Friday.

One of the many reasons I don't miss that job.

This was the first thing that jumped out at me as well. I've worked on govt. contracts and when you put >1 contractor on the same project they become competitors. They will sabotage each other in the hopes of winning a larger share in the future. And beyond that they have absolutely no incentive to help each other. Their managers aren't going to pay them to make the other contractors code work better.

"best of breed" + "we want to avoid vendor lock-in" :(

Seems on par with most state-sponsored IT project here in Scandinavia.

Big consulting firms involved, billions spent, horrible products shipped.