The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night • Hacker News Board

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#161

Post by geoff-dot » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:28 AM UTC

What did this app do exactly? It was just a reporting app, I'm assuming that the source data collected, albeit perhaps in different formats, lived somewhere else and that there wasn't a lot of data or a lot of variations. From my understanding it seems there was an Auth0 redirect issue, but why wasn't this just a night of taking the source data and doing scripting then shipping out the reports via a secure DropBox type service? We've all be there where an ETL job fails, since it isn't critical (e.g., financial transaction), it wasn't tested every which way and we just had to some scripting.

Even if it is, say, 500TB of data, in 300 different formats usually those formats aren't drastically "different." Maybe I'm not understanding what the application was supposed to do to not understand why this wasn't solved every quickly. Or maybe given the timeline it was solved quickly once the right people got involved and figured out what needed to be done.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#162

Post by allovernow » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:28 AM UTC

jmull wrote: post #139

allovernow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but until recently it was professional to keep your politics private and, more importantly, when there are inconsistencies disproportionately favoring an otherwise less popular candidate, public support from employees and especially the CEO, in conjunction with a money trail, these personal indicators of bias become relevant for justification of suspicion.

How is this even helping Buttigieg? There doesn’t seem to be any indication this was anything but a regular screwup. Throwing around suggestions of a vague conspiracy looks unwarranted. You’re suggesting that to avoid suspicion companies providing services to political campaigns must be apolitical and to have never previously provided services to a candidate in the race or any previous opponent of a candidate in the…

No, I'm saying those in support of ostensibly neutral third parties should not be making tweets indicating strong bias for one of the parties they are charged with treating neutrally.

Is it really so difficult to keep your public persona neutral and vanilla if you're a damn CEO? Wasn't this standard practice until recently? What, because Trump vomits on Twitter 24/7 everyone else needs to as well?

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#163

Post by sky_rw » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #148

sidlls wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company was co-founded by a Google alumna.

That doesn't mean as much as you might think. Working in the depths of google and running a company are two very different things.

In my experience it actually means less. SWE who cut their teeth at google are spoiled with amazing tooling and processes to support everything they do.

My personal experience with google engineers is 20% code and 80% complaining that our issue tracking system isn't as perfect as googles was.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#164

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:30 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #152

Aperocky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why they can't just do a https website with login is beyond me. Why an App? We all know there's nothing in it but boilerplate.

Would it matter? You've still got to build it, the cost would be (roughly) the same.

The added complexity of having to build an app and all the boilerplate can significantly increase the complexity from just a simple website.

And while an app not hard, a https website with login and post capability is on the _extremely simple_ territory. As long as precinct official are trustable, I don't see any reason why they have to use an app.

I guess for the wow factor? As the entire political process is essentially becoming.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#165

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:31 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #152

Aperocky wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why they can't just do a https website with login is beyond me. Why an App? We all know there's nothing in it but boilerplate.

Would it matter? You've still got to build it, the cost would be (roughly) the same.

Many caucus workers are more senior than the average citizen. I know lots of older folks who can go to a website if you text them the address, but who can't install an app. Many apps are apps instead of PWAs for no defensible reason.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#166

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:33 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #153

Aperocky wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be an app? This is the part that confuse d me the most. Do it from an web page, use cloud, heck, it could even be cheaper. You only had 1000 precincts, all you had to deal with is 1000 calls - and if one of them went wrong, you'll let that person know through some kind of reviewing mechanism. I understand that $60K is nothing but this kind of failure is absurd.

I don't think this is a failure because an iOS app was delivered instead of a website.

You can't update an iOS app as quickly as an website, unless it just request a view, which is even worse - just open it in safari/chrome.

Looks like someone put wrong test headers in there, for what it does, the App is 26MB.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#167

Post by mncolinlee » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:33 AM UTC

war1025 wrote: post #59

nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio. That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks. That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this.…

$100/hr is remarkably low in agency mobile work. When I was doing agency work five years ago, even our Bulgarian developers were billed out at more than that. I was billed out at 3x that back then and it would be more now. It's really challenging to find skilled developers who want to perform agency work and to keep them from leaving for a competing firm.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#168

Post by megablast » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

nooron wrote: post #44

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading. This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transpare…

> I declined because it was outside of our core skillset.

Um, isn't this app allowing people to enter data, and sending that to an API? How could that be out of anyone's core skillset? Almost every single app must do that.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#169

Post by Aperocky » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:35 AM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #159

Aperocky wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a company of its size, it certainly got a good amount of C-titled people. CEO, COO, CTO... Here's the thing I don't understand about them, I thought startups were averse to this? Am I wrong about startups or am I wrong about them being a startup?

Titles are a form of compensation. When you are a cash-strapped startup, especially in a domain that's not particularly lucrative, you pay people with titles. If this incident hadn't happened, these folks could have proudly claimed that they were the CTO/COO/CPO etc of Shadow Inc on their LinkedIns and whatever article BuzzFeed/Forbes wrote about them.

With the exception of CTO, none of them seem to be engineers.

If I'm on the hiring end, this is not something that will help. Instead, if someone's going to sell me the importance of their title at their 6 people startup, it's going to negatively affect their chances.

Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night

#170

Post by hcknwscommenter » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:38 AM UTC

allovernow wrote: post #155

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I'm not necessarily trying to suggest anything" Aren't you though? I mean, your post is essentially "CLINTON" "ALLEGED" "SEVERE" "LEAK" . Lot's of words meant to imply some grand conspiracy. The reality is almost certainly that the developer (who has an unfortunate name) probably just didn't have enough time/budget to put out a decent product. Not everything is an actual conspiracy.

Is it really difficult to believe that a group of people in charge of something may be biased? Calling it a "conspiracy" theory is just dismissive slander at this point. People have conspired successfully to achieve far greater and more malicious goals.

That would be an awful lot of work for such a tiny gain. And it doesn't scale. AT ALL. What moron would go to the trouble? Iowa picks corn, not presidents.