"What really fucks things up in the city is this arcane policy stuff where everyone's building their own fiefdom and doing it for themselves instead of trying to get the best results..."

Just like Amazon and Microsoft! No worries, they'll be just fine!

Lead a dev team, even a small one, devoted to police applications would be the coolest job in the world.

I guess this guy was more management than dev.

No surprise here. The silos within City government are entrenched and unlikely to respond positively to a change maker.

They were stupid to hire him and think he'd stay, and he was stupid to take the job without knowing what he'd have to deal with. Stupidity abounds.

"The source said consolidating the IT units looks like a worthwhile "efficiency" on paper, but isn't working out in practice because different units in different departments have specialized knowledge."

Consolidation is one of those things that sounds great in theory, but is often disastrous in practice. As the post suggests, IT knowledge isn't generic.

If you get a new administration that thinks they know more the people who do the actual work, they tend to make a mess of things. There will likely be a lot of other problems resulting from the IT consolidation, but we won't hear about most of them. The public doesn't hear about inner workings of government unless you've got a high profile person involved, or things get so bad they can't be ignored.

All the tech ideas and experience in the world don't matter, which is why this was a stupid hire for SPD, and Russell did himself no favors by airing his vision.

Top level gigs for public agencies like this are first and foremost manager jobs, and secondly strategic policy gigs. At the end of the day he doesn't need to know a CD-Rom from a Coffee Holder, he needs to understand how many and labor flow through in the public sector. Given he was only there 5 months, it seems like he never even bothered to learn.

* how money and labor flow...