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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

#191

Post by WanderPanda »

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…

> Edit: Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Sounds plausible but I sadly only observe the opposite of management consulting “drying up”

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

#192

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #162
tidepod12 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's certainly no secret that the US government suffered from incredible incompetence when it came to managing the pandemic. With that said, the start of the pandemic was ~1 year ago. Even if it started right then, 12 months for a country-wide, government-run IT project is a rush job.

What government managed it right? Anyone in Europe?

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by tootie »

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?

Aside from all the other answers, it would cost you millions to hire and onboard 146 qualified engineers. A place like Deloitte can drop them on your doorstep with a week's notice. They also have all the product design, strategy, and organization layers required to stand up the equivalent of mid-size enterprise from scratch really quickly and then tear it all back down a year later. I've worked in this business for smaller agencies and we could absolutely work miracles for stodgy organizations. My biggest account probably took in $20M all told and I'd say we earned every penny and launched a really successful product really quickly. Failures can happen too and they're usually a lot more complicated than just incompetent developers. It's just as likely the client is unable to articulate need accurately and corners get cut.

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

#194

Post by S_A_P »

In my field (ETRM) I’ve worked with Deloitte on a couple of occasions. I have seen this sort of nonsense on more than one occasion.

A specific example that comes to mind was a project a few years back where Deloitte stuck 4 junior consultants along with 5 senior consultants and spent a couple million dollars for 12 months and were unable to produce even one business scenario in the system of choice. They did however produce reams of documents showing how it should work. The software vendor was called back onsite and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. A team of 3 of us ended up doing full implementation in 5 months. That included about 20 scenarios from front to back office along with foreign business.

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

#195

Post by wjdp »

bbeesley wrote: post #85
NearAP wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

The "basic bitches" version of the site should be the base, this is a gov website which will be used by the older demographic first.

This article got posted here recently: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven... even outside of a pandemic people need access to gov sites from whatever device they can get their hands on

> But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

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

#196

Post by afavour »

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…

It doesn’t sound like that at all. “channel their inner Steve Jobs” sounds like everyone is staring at the clouds and practising some blue sky thinking, while the OP you replied to is talking about managing legacy systems, old data and bringing along an existing work force into using a new system. These are all the diametric opposite of “Steve Jobs architecting”.

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

#197

Post by greggyb »

ndiscussion wrote: post #69
tidepod12 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure. Citation needed, see Oracle, many companies have grown that large on the backs of taxpayers by employing the best "Sales" techniques in the biz.

I've worked with many database technologies and many data professionals. I don't recall any instances offhand of technical critiques of Oracle. Pricing and business practices are a different story. Oracle the database is fantastic technology.

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

#198

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #171
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, we should just expect free work from all developers. Because if you want to be a good developer, you have to meet this imaginary bar made up by other developers who want to show off about how "much extra work we do."

The point is the ask for the 737 Max wasn't a "plane that doesn't work." It was for a plane that does work. That was the deliverable. It wasn't met. That is not doing the bare minimum.

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

#199

Post by et-al »

brundolf wrote: post #166
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.

Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?

There's 18F for the US government, but unfortunately they're limited by government salary caps and other policies.

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

#200

Post by offtop5 »

brundolf wrote: post #166
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.

Serious question: why doesn't the government have its own internal software development department at this point? One that's familiar with all the regulatory and bureaoucratic hurdles and the legacy systems, but doesn't have the incentive to grift. For the amount of money they spend on these contracts surely they could afford to pay competitive salaries?

For various reasons this wouldn't work, you have the various bands of government salary

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/pay/2020/01/more-top-career-e...

>But for a GS-15, step 10 in Washington, his or her salary should total roughly $185,509 in 2020. But due to the federal pay ceiling, that same GS-15, step 10 in Washington will make the limit of $170,800 this year.

And that's the absolute Max, after you go to the trouble of getting a security clearance, which you just don't need in the private sector.

Even government contracting involves so much red tape, more innovative engineers would probably just rather not do it.

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