Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m so furious I’m willing to say she was a “woman” hire.
Look at the linkedin for the company. Almost all women in fact.
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The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
321–330 of 399 posts
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper ballots with scanned results in the booth. No scan means redo your vote. That way you have a track record + instant results. Folks can take home the stub to ensure non-repudiation etc.. They can look up the serial number on the stub they take home to see for sure it was recorded. FYI we should also have basic ID requirements for voting. The arguments against it are kind of ridiculous, and federal or state ID sh…
At this point, I hate politics so much, I think every nation needs a 'caretaker' Pres/PM from the bureaucracy - someone who can clean out the cobwebs, get rid of a bunch of old laws, clean up the tax code, take on the public unions (I mean reform not destroy, I mean teachers probably need higher salaries) and basically do a big, operational house cleaning that has nothing to do with politics. You realize that every s…
Yes, I agree, 'everything' is politicized, but some much more than others.
'Simplifying' the tax code could be ideological, but it's only overtly political given the interest groups of those who profit from complicated taxes.
But by that virtue - every little policy of every government agency implies 'politics' and so we'll get nowhere.
There's quite a lot of things that Americans widely support, even on some of the heavy 'litmus' issues, it's surprising how much Americans have in common.
So yes, you're right, everything would be pulled apart by Fox and MSNBC, but there's a lot that would be less divisive.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#323I 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.…
That's actually a lot of money in an Indian context. Although outsourcing to another country might raise other kind of political problems.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fresh bootcamp graduate can be a good developer, but I would argue that someone fresh off of bootcamp is way less prepared than a CS grad to directly start working in a small team with mostly non technical people. A CS grad is usually way more knowledgeable when it comes to software architecture, handling data, optimization etc. Bootcamps usually focus on specific stacks and tools, which can be great. But that mean…
My experience has been the same with fresh grads from everywhere. There's a non negligible amount of work to get them up to speed with business communication and task definition. Basically schools give you assignments or projects that are well defined and have clearly defined goals/results and cover solved problems. While that's true in the generic sense of business problems it's not how we work, we have to be able t…
I never consider education when it comes to software engineering skills, I have interviewed almost 100 candidates in the last year. For the roles I'm hiring into, I need engineers who have made the leap to distributed systems, client-server isn't nearly enough, I need to hear them confess that the domain is fraught with hard problems.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There would be endless queues if those Bulgarian devs would get even a fraction of that rate. They were lucky if they were getting more than $10-15/h. I also doubt there would be huge shortage of US devs willing to do the work if they were to get $120-150/h. The other problem is modus operandi of a standard software agency- it just suck your sole out for those extra lines of code.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#326I 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.…
> That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this. Especially since I assume it wasn't just a single person doing the coding.
One screenshot showed an SQL error.
I think if you're doing an one man job, under pressure, making an app that has limited scalability, the last thing you should be doing is not using some kind of ORM or something similar (especially at a login page)
So it looks like they made it unnecessarily hard on themselves.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#327This is ridiculous. Paper. Use a Paper as the true vote. Cross check after that.
I have read so many comments on here up-selling the ability of technology but no one in this thread has the answer. It's apparent.
Do the paper vote - as it was always done. Let our technology analyze it afterwords. Why are we all trying to put our technology in front of this simple device. of paper.
You all know this rule = "make a single application do one thing well."
Again, this is ridiculous from a Credibility sense. Paper + networks, Paper + mobile, forget the paper, Mobile only, Mobile + scale. Where are we at? No where and much less. Just take a paper vote and tally it. Is that so hard?
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#328$50000 for a mission critical, scalable app? They got exactly what they paid for. I would have written an app that doesn't work for only $25000
Alternatively, they could have paid IBM a billion dollars and still gotten an app that didn't work. At least they saved some money?
Well, at least if they paid a billion dollars they could have had an expectation that the app would work, and they could sue IBM if it didn't. Indeed at that $$$$$ they would have been ripped off though!!
At $50k they certainly weren't going to get what they wanted delivered, and they have no-one to blame but themselves.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
I mean that's the kind of money you spend funding two interns for a few months. Is it a surprise that this app looks like it was designed by a few interns on a tight schedule?
70K is the median programmer income in the US. (Based on a very thorough let's look at the first thing Google regurgitates!)
It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months. Plus Shadow Inc's overhead + profit.
It's absolutely bonkers how shitty the industry is. A kid can throw together an app in a few days, but somehow 60K USD is not enough.
That said I work in "consulting", I know how fast time, money, billable hours can be burned through, when there's no real drive, motivation, vision and delegation of responsibilities and control.
Re: The Shadow Inc. app that failed in Iowa last night
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how strong political beliefs correlate with technical ability, but from my anecdotal evidence, the people I work with are highly competent and not very political. While highly political people I know don't seem to work in tech.
for what it's worth, usually people think they are not very political, but that thought itself is quite political.
Even if many people think that they "aren't very political" and are incorrect, there are some people that aren't very political and this is justified. For example, if you are a 5 year old and you believe you are not very political, you are probably correct. If you have been living in the woods for the last 30 years, don't know anything about modern politics, and believe that you are not very political, it would be weird for us to say "the thought you are not political is itself quite political" rather than "that sounds like a justified true belief."
So assuming it's possible in principle to be "not very political," the real question is how disengaged, uninformed, or lacking in understanding do you have to be for your statement to be true in itself, rather than a "quite political" statement. For myself, I think if someone is disengaged enough that they don't care who will become the next president, and there are no local political issues they will argue with someone about, they are "not very political."