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

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

#171

Post by alasdair_ » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #80

lmilcin wrote: post #17

I have worked with Deloitte on two projects (on clients' side, I would never willingly work for Deloitte). Generally expect them to do absolute minimum necessary to meet the contract. The code was obfuscated to ensure support contract. The people employed to write it were not interested in the quality in the slightest but were interested a lot in specifics of the contract.

They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?

> They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?

And this is how we get the 737 Max.

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

#172

Post by pickpuck » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:09 AM UTC

These are mostly front-end issues.

Software is often judged based on these UI/UX nuances, but the complexity of building a competent front-end system remains an undervalued part of the process.

The front-end team is usually (1) brought in too late in the game to provide effective feedback and (2) not given enough time to build.

When there's not front-end representation at early design reviews or at initial discussions on how APIs should work, then it's easy to forget things like form error handling.

Designs don't account for all possible states, services/APIs are in flux, until the very end.

Everything else is late, and then all of it has to get slapped together with duct tape and shipped in a few weeks. Performance and browser support be damned.

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

#173

Post by option » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:10 AM UTC

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 just smells corruption. Plain and simple, alas happens not only in “3rd world countries”

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

#174

Post by justinzollars » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

> abandoned due to bugs

That can be translated into a new corrupt administration is replacing the old corrupt administration and will spend an additional 44 million on a new website built by their own politically connected friends.

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

#175

Post by jijji » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

NearAP wrote: post #53

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…

alot of these issues can be solved by pushing code to UAT or QA environments and having a bug tracker that allows everyone to submit their bugs. It seems like either none of this happened, or it was rolled out too quickly.

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

#176

Post by ashtonkem » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #136

nojito wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data flows into legacy systems like VAERS

Have you seen the vaccination setups? It's just car queues! I'm sure nothing there "flows" without a whole lot of manual data entry. So now what, you are reporting this adverse event to VAMS who reports it to VAERS? There is no flow, it's all just duplicate effort from architecture astronauts.

Vaccinating a whole country is a hell of a lot more complicated than just car queues.

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

#177

Post by Romanulus » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:11 AM UTC

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?

Deloitte held a big govt. contract back when I worked there back in the day... long story short, they had a strong track record of providing the worst service, a terrible product, and was ultimately made a very bad reputation for themselves as time went on (through the local media, etc).

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

#178

Post by antipaul » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #55

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 jus…

But then that tech department would become government itself, and would that be better?

Maybe, maybe not.

Though rare, there _are_ private success stories, such as healthcare.gov 2.0 [1] and Palantir, though the latter gets in hot water for some tangential reasons. But maybe figure out how these happened, and scale that.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...

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

#179

Post by Ericson2314 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

I would check out https://pedestrianobservations.com/ for information on other but analogous cost disease.

Basically, no, it's not just a meme. American managerial culture (or even Anglosphere at large, as alleged there) really does suck. And no amount of crafty mechanism design gets around the fact that least exploitable system seems to be one where the civil service isn't maimed and the work is done in-house.

Basically government should fund some free software for various general purposes (or just do a decent UBI), and then any "consulting" should basically be public sector and free software sector exchanging best practices.

The higher end academic consulting (ARPA) is legit[1] and should still exist, but it shouldn't be defense specific, and like drug bounties basically should exist to smooth over the "research...development...product" gap --- development is severely sort-changed current since outside of DARPA and ARPA-E so much research that doesn't contribute to someone's rent-seeking agenda just lies wasted.

[1]: I suppose should say I once was an intern at https://galois.com/

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

#180

Post by amluto » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

antipaul wrote: post #165

amluto wrote: post #148

I find myself wondering why much technology is needed. If I were running a mass vaccination campaign, I would approach it like this: First, I would create extremely fine grained but easy to check eligibility tiers. Going by date of birth would be the most basic solution. At any given time, vaccinations are open to people born on or before a given date. [0] Then, I would set up real mass vaccination sites. None of thi…

The small problem with your kind of approach is that it would make the army of administrators and contractors like “Deloitte.” quite redundant, and then they’d actually have to do non-Bullshit Jobs!

Nah, they can just do nothing at all or bid on other unrelated contracts.

Sometimes people get so caught up with new technology that they forgot about old technology, and technology predates computers. Believe it or not, it wasn’t that long ago that you could go to stores, buy things, eat at restaurants, and even fill up your fuel tank without directly interacting with any form of computer. Heck, it hasn’t been that long since you could fly on Southwest Airlines with little reusable plastic boarding passes that the agents would hang out in exchange for a paper ticket. These systems were imperfect, but they worked and were extremely reliable.