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CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

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Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#51

Post by pxeboot »

hntrader wrote: post #33
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

The Obamacare website cost $2 billion according to a Bloomberg piece in 2014. Don't ask me how that's even possible.

And don't forget the State of Oregon paid an additional $240 million for their own version of it [1].

[1] https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-...

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#52

Post by mdorazio »

didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#53

Post by NearAP »

didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

This is not a 'software engineering' thing. If you look at it from a software development POV, then the issue is more of not having 'product managers' whose job it is to - understand the requirements, write the specs, basically champion the POV of the end user (after actually identifying the correct end user). Examples

a) The article talked about the software not working on Internet Explorer (IE). Older people still use IE. Software Engs with fewer years of experience tend to optimize for FF, Chrome and latest version of IE.

b) The article talked about 'wrong' placement of buttons (probably the software is not responsive or not optimized for phones or older phones)

c) Input fields seem to be rigid (older people will make mistakes)

d) Once you're registered, you can't switch from patient to staff. This should have been designed like a 2-sided marketplace with the ability of one person to sometimes play the 2 roles

If you don't have the right spec/requirements, the output of the engineers will still be bad

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#55

Post by yalogin »

This kind of looting is common place and is built into the federal contracting situation. After this 48 million or so they will get more to ix the bugs and maintain it. The maintenance is the most lucrative aspect of the contract.

Unfortunately this corrupt behavior is deeply rooted and condoned and expected and there doesn't seem to be much motivation to come up with a solution.

Wonder why the government doesn't just staff up a tech wing themselves instead of outsourcing. There is so much to do and its much more efficient to just create an tech department that serves all branches of government.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#56

Post by hogFeast »

klyrs wrote: post #15
adultSwim wrote: post #10

Is that a lot for a website?

I made about a dozen websites in the late 90s and early aughts... most I ever made at it was 50k/y. OTOH, they worked and continued to work long past my involvement. Maybe it's a fair price for a shoddy website?

With these projects, there are Veblen effects. No-one wants the $50k/year consultant who quietly cranks out good work...they want the $300k/year consultants whose work may or may not be good but they can spin, make things easy with your boss, etc.

...stuff like this drives me mad. You see it everywhere. I worked in financial services, and (on my weaker days) it was enraging to see someone pay three or four times the price to get a product that was not only bad, it was literally worthless...life is weird.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#57

Post by tidepod12 »

stefan_ wrote: post #6
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #2

> Why was Deloitte awarded the project on a no-bid basis? The contracts claim the company was the only “responsible source”[1] to build the tool. [1]: https://www.acquisition.gov/far/6.302-1

Deloitte is a whole lot better manipulating and sweet talking the government than it is at building anything, that is for sure. Surely their track record should see them permanently disqualified?

I'm sure if you actually looked at their full track record, the vast vast majority of projects probably result in "mediocre but workable" systems, you just don't hear about them because that's a boring headline. Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#58

Post by vbordo »

didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

Agreed. You can also argue that inflated contract cost in a statement of work leads to artificial labor bloat on the project. This benefits the consulting firm while disadvantaging the client. The unnecessary labor can create collaboration friction and lead to technical decisions like adopting microservices despite not being necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of the project. This kind of complexity doesn't guarantee a higher quality product is delivered to the client. Instead, it's used to justify follow-on work, further extracting dollars from the client.

It's possible there's context we don't have that exponentially increases the complexity of their tech requirements and justifies the price here but I'm skeptical. Looks more like misaligned economic incentives commonly at play in engagements between consulting firms and the gov.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#59

Post by fatbird »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #28
didibus wrote: post #13

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

I don't think you're really paying for the development per se. Most of the effort is actually managing the customer. That is, their contracting requirements, the whole requirements process, procurement hoops, change process, optics management, cost of "sales", reporting requirements, various additional compliance requirements...

This is a large part of the truth. Crank out a booking website? Give me a couple weeks. Deal with your byzantine organization, your incoherent standards, your security department coming out of the woodwork with list of requirements, your torturous system for provisioning government services like VMs in secure data centres... and then pile on that integration with a variety of legacy systems across another slew of organizations that bring all their own baggage to the process.

I would blame government, but I'm simultaneously experiencing all these issues with a Fortune 100 company. They're almost indistinguishable in the degree to which their cumulative organizational headwind is a hurricane I'm supposed to fly into. It's simply hard past a certain scale for purely people and procedure reasons.

Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs

#60

Post by BadInformatics »

dmix wrote: post #43
dataflow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. Don't contractors do everything they can to milk government contracts as much as possible? I'm pretty sure I've even seen people provide advice on how to do this effectively right here on HN. So I can definitely understand how it happens...

The difference is they aren’t paying the engineers 300k they are paying an endless amount of administrator executives with “industry experience” aka 20yrs emailing spreadsheets between other managers at IBM. I realized this once when I started attending (Canadian) gov ‘innovation’ events and ‘startup’ funding initiatives. There was hardly anyone I’d consider an engineer that is benefiting from these systems. It’s a g…

Having helped to clean up a couple of those messes IBM left behind in various parts of the Canadian public sector, the only silver lining I see is that governments are starting to take in-house dev talent and the digital service model seriously because nothing (in the best case scenario) gets done if you rely on IBM. Hopefully this trend continues and governments grow some teeth in contract negotiations because of it.
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