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.
That's my money. Not a company's. To anyone who disagrees, how is this statement wrong?
It’s 0.00275% of the income tax paid annually ($44M/$1.6T)and an even smaller amount of the total tax. Assuming you’re an average taxpayer, it cost you about thirty one cents ($44M/143M people). If you’re a median taxpayer it’s even less. This is a giant fuck up, but way out of perspective. Even with all the other fuckups, the wasted portion of your taxes surely isn’t enough for heads to roll.
An organization dumb and bloated enough to pay $44M for a website (even one that works) is probably wasting more than half of its budget.
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…
This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set. 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 a…
There was just an article on here last week about how software development is a learning process and programs are just artifacts of that process. Big, old, messy, and highly regulated domains will obviously be hard to learn.
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.
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.
Plain old HTML is responsive. It stops being responsive when you start trying to make it look good.
I’m not convinced that’s true. Case in point: tabular data. I don’t think presenting something in a table is an attempt to make it look good, I think it’s the most logical and recognisable way of presenting certain kinds of information. But tables don’t scale well on a mobile viewport without extra work.
Does anyone know if this was yet another React website disaster? This is exactly the kind of website that should be built with reliable technologies. You don't need fancy animations or whatever junk the SPA style sites have. Just old style server side frameworks, minimal Javascript, standards supported HTML and CSS. The article mentioned Internet Explorer as an issue? Cross browser support is no issue if you stick to…
No kidding --- the fact that they mentioned it only worked in Chrome is a sad commentary of the state of the Internet and what Google's effective monopoly has lead to.
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?
Divide that number by 3-5, for starters. Charge out rates are multiples of salaries.