> That's... not how it works.

If often is.

Organizations with preexisting staff and knowledge frequently implement things instead of outsourcing.

> Experience and existing infrastructure and solutions actually matter, and can make something significantly cheaper than building from scratch.

Coming up with a secure fare payment and tracking system isn't some cutting edge concept. Work would still be outsourced where necessary, like ordering or manufacturing the hardware.

> You're not a baker, so you don't have any of the skills, ingredients, or tools needed to bake this loaf.

That's where the analogy fails. Municipal governments would have people with the skills, acquiring ingredients and tools could be outsourced as needed, but 'baking a loaf of bread' could still be mostly an internal project.

but the point is why does the municiple gov't have someone with baking skills on staff, when they don't bake bread at all normally?

Because they have bake muffins, pizzas, cakes, pancakes, pasta and pies regularly.

Turns out when you have experience in the general area of baking bread, learning to bake bread isn't that hard.

Your assumptions about the flexibility and transferability of a municipal employee's skillset are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Not at all. Assuming a city has a mix of people with database, web and security experience is perfectly reasonable. You can definitely find someone capable enough to run manage the project, and as I said what needs to can still be outsourced.

Are these proficient people not already doing something with their time?

If yes, do you hire someone else to replace the work they were doing?

If no, sounds like a lot of slippage.

Have you never worked at a large company?

People don't always have their billable hours fully booked.

Why would a city that has never built a contactless ticket gate system have experience building a contactless ticket gate system?

It's not that hard is the basic answer. They have plenty of people with IT experience capable of managing the project to develop and in house implementation. Even outsourcing what they need to will be cheaper than going with what a company like Cubic offers, where the price is significantly marked up over the actual cost of developing.

It's a better use of tax payer money with the bonus that the city is not dependent on a third party for-profit entity.

Difficulty has almost nothing to do with it. It's about volume. Baking a loaf of bread is not particularly difficult either. But unless you plan to bake many loaves of bread, it is almost certainly neither cheaper nor faster to do so yourself, even if you have experience baking bread. Bakeries also have profit margins, and that changes nothing. All companies make a profit. That doesn't mean they are fleecing you.

Do you make your own clothes? Certainly it must be cheaper to do it yourself rather than buy a shirt from a company, right? Because they have their profits to worry about. Does every city have its own manhole cover factory? Why not? Certainly it must be cheaper to build your own manhole cover factory (forging manhole covers is not a hard problem, after all) rather than pay a company to do it. After all, the manhole cover company is burdened by profit motive, and the city is not.

Repeat ad nauseam.

> it is almost certainly neither cheaper nor faster to do so yourself, even if you have experience baking bread.

You are severely underestimating how much a company will mark up the cost to make a profit.

> Do you make your own clothes? Certainly it must be cheaper to do it yourself rather than buy a shirt from a company, right?

Poor analogy. The fare system being talked about is a big investment that doesn't need to be replaced every year. A closer equivalent would be building your own computer, and yes many people do. The parts they manufacturer they still buy or have made.

> Repeat ad nauseam.

Except your analogy doesn't apply across the board and you know this. If we extrapolate from your reasoning a city shouldn't do anything themselves.

> If we extrapolate from your reasoning a city shouldn't do anything themselves.

exactly correct. A city should be a bureaucratic, administrative organization that collects taxes, and funds projects. These projects should be done by professional project doers - such as construction companies, or IT companies, or bakers. There ought to be many project doers, all competing for the city's funding. The city's job is to find the lowest cost, highest value project doer to give them the project.

The people of the city chooses what projects to fund, and the city takes care of the administrative work of allocating the tax dollars. Nowhere in this loop should a city be keeping employees on hand in the expectation of projects that need doing.

One year my city put the sidewalk snow-clearing out on contract to a private company, but then the sidewalks didn't get cleared between Christmas and New Year, because the company was on holiday during that period.

Someone wrote an editorial that would not pass HN's comment policy, basically to the effect of "who would ever have guessed that it might snow in between Christmas and New Year?" and sidewalk-clearing went back to being a public task.

In my experience public workers are more likely to have public holidays off than private workers.

> exactly correct.

No it isn't. What nonsense. Cities have been doing things themselves all around the world for decades because it generally makes more sense.

> Nowhere in this loop should a city be keeping employees on hand in the expectation of projects that need doing.

They already do that, look at just IT for example, they maintain websites, databases, etc. They don't outsource everything, that's ridiculous.