The problem is that the contracting companies don't give a fuck.

this is true but it is actually worse than that. There is actually motivation to hire less-than-competant people and to hire more people than you need to complete the task. It is financially beneficial to employee a bunch of dead weight in a lot of cases since they get paid for each employee. As long as you don't go so slow you lose the contract, the more losers you can shove into a contract the more money you will make.

I worked on a contract where I was writing code that automated away what most of our people did, or at least drastically reduced the amount of staff required......nobody was let go despite not having enough work for people and we couldn't advertise TOO hard how effective our automation system was because that scared the government folks even though my software drove the error rate down and allowed us to bulk-process an amount of data that would have taken years into a couple months.

After I did all that work to make the process better - and there was still plenty of room for improvement - and we showed them how we could do an insane amount of work now, even saving one government dude's ass who promised the military a certain amount of work would be finished that was absurd but we did it thanks to automation, we lost the rebid of the contract and it went to one of their big-contractor buddies who had no idea how to run the bulk processing I was running and had to go back to a MUCH more manual process (they did somehow convince the government to FORCE us to hand over the tools I built despite the fact it wasn't a development contract and it was built entirely in house for our own purposes...but in all their infinite wisdom they hired away all of our low level employees and refused to hire a single person who knew how to operate the tools properly let alone somebody who understood the codebase that had probably tens of thousands of lines of code...which was pretty much just me, of course I had no desire to work for them anyways unless they were going to pay me stupid amounts of money). I always laugh now, I went to the interview with the new company just for shits and giggles and they looked at me like I was an idiot when I explained what I did for the company. They acted like I was insane for thinking that having in-house development of tools was essential to this contract and to improving the process, they didn't offer me a job....but then they convinced the government that all the tools I built were now theirs and they would sue if we didn't hand them over.....so I was an idiot for building them....but they were going to sue us if they couldn't have them. Just let that sink in for a second, a small company built a tool that allowed YEARS worth of work to be done in months (probably could be even quicker if we wanted).....so they instead give the contract to a different company that only hires the low-level people from my company and can't even figure out how to properly use the tools and it has now been years and they have NEVER been able to bulk process data like we were doing. Where is the logic in this?! I was pretty furious that we were forced to hand over the tools I worked on. Thankfully the main tool had a very elaborate configuration setup that was regularly tweaked. I restored it to "default" settings (which would NOT operate even close to optimally) and handed it to them to figure out........ It wasn't THAT tricky but they didn't hire a single person who understood our algorithms and the logic behind them so there was no way they would ever be able to do as much as we could.

This is why I hate those big contracting companies SAIC/Northrop/Lockheed/Mantech/etc/etc.....they just put warm bodies in chairs and instead of actually doing good work (at least in the sector of government I was working in) they just make backroom deals with people in the contracting offices, make shady deals with small companies to bid contracts that are for small business only, use front companies to get monopolies by winning two contracts that one company isn't supposed to be allowed to have, sabotage effective work, it is a complete shit show. Then contracts get disputed and work stoppages happen....it is so stupid. Getting the actual work done seems to be the least of their worries half the time.