221–230 of 688 posts
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?
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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…
In Germany we literally use fax and enter data by hand. A project that successfully moved things to an emailing Excel sheets based workflow would be absolutely revolutionary.
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That may be a low salary compared to FAAMNG, but it's quite reasonable for the rest of tech. It's a good bit more than I make with 6 years of experience in Austin, and I currently make almost twice as much as I did when I started. They don't need industry-leading researchers, they need people who can build a maintainable business systems.
That's the absolute Max though. You need to justify that. It's infinitely easier to make on 170k happen in the private sector, then as a federal employee. Unless the government wants to create like a special ops tech department which doesn't use the government pay grades, more money can be made in the private sector. I'm only mid-career or so and I'm already at around 200. But I don't, at least on paper have the qual…
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> 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.
One reason that comes to mind is that a lot of people browse on mobile devices. These days a site really ought to be responsive to mobile viewports and a lot of “basic bitch” government sites are not.
So you quickly see large numbers of leads, directors, managing directors, managing partners, and partners show up into meetings with 1 or 2 SMEs to make a show of "managing the project", whose only purpose in life is to suck the oxygen out of the room.
And I mean literally suck the oxygen out of a room. The meeting rooms are tiny--cuz real estate isn't billable!--so when you get more people than chairs in a room like that, the CO2 levels literally start to put you to sleep.
I spent a year and a half at Deloitte, building Augmented Reality projects. Every single project I worked, I was only brought in during the last 10% of the project time. The time was always not enough to do a good job. The one project that I cared about--incidentally also the only one that got any traction with any actual clients--got canned during a restructuring from working within Deloitte's "government" division to it's "industry" division. Except we always worked blended across industries and the app was targeted at industry, not gov. To this day, I really think the entire point was to just waste money, and my app getting traction edged too dangerously close to one day having to show efficacy.
I'm now the head of VR (yeah, I never actually wanted to do AR, and didn't even get hired for it, but that's where Deloitte stuck me) at a small company that does foreign language instruction for gov. A year and a half in and we've got an exciting project that has tested well with some limited number of students and is soon deploying company-wide. Barring some natural disaster, I'm extremely happy to never change jobs again.
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 (includin…
The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience.
Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code.
Then, whenever you hear another multi-million dollar catastrophe, add it to the list. The brand damage will accrue - as it should - over time.
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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”.
I can expand on the Steve Jobs reference. Apple is about creating usable technology for the masses, not the few. Apple also simplified access to legacy systems, like buying music and making it digital. Or maybe using your watch or phone to pay. IPhone is geared for ease of use for anyone to adopt, including folks who arent super tech saavy.. Apple's innovation is charging a premium to create beginners in tech adoptio…
Their market share figures would show that if that’s their aim then they are failing. IMO Apple makes premium products for a specific kind of customer and have little regard for issues like backwards compatibility. Which is absolutely fine. But probably not a model you’d want the government to follow.
This case it was a government client, and one could argue there is no singular point of authority/ responsibility that may have caught on to the troubles early on. However I have also it happen in private companies where 350-500$/hr 'consultants't do not provide anything more than code lifted from code samples or community tech forums.
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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”…
Who did they hang?