Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 688 posts

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

#181

Post by throwaway3699 »

Raidion wrote: post #128
walrus01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could hire 73 engineers each paid 300k for a year, and have 22 million left over for hosting/operations/overhead costs... Absolutely ridiculous.

You get those 73 engineers in a room, then what? What do they write? You get 15 engineers, 3 DBAs, 5 sys admins + their managers. While that's spinning up, you get a bunch of business analyists to write the requirements. A first version gets written, it doesn't do what people want and the data it works from is really crappy, so you have to write a bunch of custom edge logic to deal with the crappy data. Repeat severa…

Requirements gathering is part of the job. Maybe more of a PM role but still something we all should be able to tackle.

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

#182

Post by bretpiatt »

amscanne wrote: post #140
bbeesley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users. That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough…

> No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent. Why isn’t this just the site? I love Spartan, ugly, functional sites. That’s what the government should build, always . They should have style guidelines that are basically “no style”. You’re not competing with anyone, there’s no need to look good. Function, function, function.

Part of function is layout. It isn't any more difficult to grab Bootstrap or some other out of the box framework that'll give a good consistent look than it is to go "no style".

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

#183

Post by oivey »

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 you see, something something, core business government isn’t tech, something something, private contractors are more efficient.

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

#184

Post by corytheboyd »

smabie wrote: post #147
corytheboyd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean with $22M on the line I’m willing to at least investigate a means of doing so.

I actually think Cory the boyd could probably figure it out.

Lol thank you for your blind faith :p

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

#185

Post by bretpiatt »

freeone3000 wrote: post #155
bbeesley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users. That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough…

It's a governmental website. It must be usable by everyone . Less than two percent is not zero percent -- it's over a million people.

2% of traffic doesn't mean that 2% of users only have access to IE6. It may limit which computing device they can use but not supporting IE6 isn't blocking millions from your site, it is blocking them from using your site on all of their devices.

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

#186

Post by MangoCoffee »

this happened to smaller/mid size company as well.

a long time ago i work for a mid size company with a small division that sell specialized software build with Delphi.

its a desktop app. when i got hired by the company, they outsourced it to Capgemini. after 3 years, they still can't get the app convert to .Net. (that's the goal) by the time i got out the company. they changed to another more local company instead of big outsource firm like Capgemini. they still haven't got it all work out and the new company they hired throw away all the code done by Capgemini. the whole project was estimate to be 2 million by Capgemini.

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

#187

Post by tootie »

jnathsf wrote: post #169

Deloitte is using salesforce for the underlying technology of the system. So almost all of this work is configuration and maybe some customization. We worked with another state that almost selected Deloitte but they bombed the no cost bake off and ultimately chose another vendor which completed 80% of the work during the bake off. This approach lowers risk dramatically and you’re able to set an aggressive and a more…

They probably got sold on it being "off the shelf" and just a matter of customization and not coding. But the minute they run into edge cases (of which there are likely hundreds given the nature of the product) they just end up stuck.

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

#188

Post by josephg »

ndiscussion wrote: post #105
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US federal government employs over 4 million people. The employees at the CDC probably never heard of the problems with the obamacare website, let alone had the chance to learn any lessons from the people involved. > They're supposed to be the best we have. They won a vote after all. These mistakes aren't made by the politicians you elected. They're made by civic servants. Civic servants are employed from the poo…

Well thanks for calling me out as to not knowing who the hell is responsible. I agree with your approach... we need experts, who will NOT bid to one company, who will NOT accept one-sided terms. These are fat government contracts we're talking about... the company should have to take 100% responsibility to deliver a working website at cost. If companies mismanage and fail, they should go out of business, and another…

> Well thanks for calling me out as to not knowing who the hell is responsible.

To be fair, you were also partially right. Government departments usually have elected representatives who are officially in charge, so there's someone the public can blame when things like this happen. At least thats true here in Australia and in the UK - I'm not totally sure if it works the same way in the US.

That said, the politicians usually don't get too involved in on-the-ground details like this. They have other things to worry about (like the next election). And the civil servants will usually understand the issues on the ground much better, because they spend their whole career dealing with them. (Unlike politicians who come and go.)

Blaming the politicians involved is like blaming the CEO when bugs happen in software. (Or in this case, when bugs from many years ago are discovered.) Technically yeah, they're ultimately responsible. But the actual mistake was the fault of the people on the ground.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

mewse wrote: post #37
throwawayboise wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't we speak figuratively anymore? Why is Deloitte getting all the blame here? Why is the government not responsible for this fiasco? They know very well what Deloitte is and what their track record is.

> Why can't we speak figuratively anymore? Because it’s less than a month since people stormed the US capital, literally erecting a guillotine and literally calling for politicians they disliked to be hanged. How is this hard for you to understand? If you want to speak figuratively, then maybe don’t do it using exactly the same speech that other people are demonstrably using and acting upon literally. EDIT: “gallows”…

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by headmelted »

j45 wrote: post #152
mdorazio wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (includin…

Sounds like a lot of $6-700/hr management consultants that don't know much about tech but are happy to channel their inner Steve Jobs to try and architect something. The 22 year olds might not be able to do it (I beg to differ), but can management consultants/accountants who barely took typing in school who have Excel as the height of their digital literacy be expected to have all the answers? By the time this gets t…

So very much this when it comes to how easily money can be wasted on these kinds of deals.

Can’t agree at all with the ageism though, which is wholly uncalled for.

Post reply on HN