251–260 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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Humanity can make an mRNA vaccine in 6 months. That's literally (almost) instructing your cells to make a particular protein.
But one of the largest consulting company in the world cannot develop a freaking website.
> Deloitte is the only contractor that can meet the project requirements, because configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform. Therefore, no other contractor has rights or access to leverage the system to carry out O&M activities, such as the administration of the system, change and defect management and end user support. As the only contractor with the GovConnect…
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?
Organisations are like people. Their culture is like someone's personality. Dealing with easygoing people is much smoother than paranoid delusional people with OCD. In the same way, dealing with government agencies is difficult because their corporate culture -- their personality -- is not what most people would categorise as normal.
These deals aren't normal deals. They're the equivalent of specialist treatment for someone with mental problems.
Take for example an organisation like SpaceX: They simply do things. If some manager goes to Elon with a rational but inherently risky proposal, he'll weigh the risk and then more than likely give the goahead. Other companies have a lower risk appetite, but they will take occasional risks. Sometimes huge ones.
Large federal government organisations are the diametric opposite of this kind of agile, low-overhead, no-bullshit private company. Their appetite for risk is precisely zero. That's difficult for people to wrap their head around. It's like a superconductor. It's not just a "really good conductor". It's not a "little better than copper". No, it's something fundamentally different. This kind of zero tolerance squeezes out entire lines of thought, just like a superconductor expels a magnetic field.
Notice how in this article the blame is on Deloitte and the "problem" is that there was a failure. This isn't a fault, this is the system working precisely as designed. Nobody will get fired for picking Deloitte, their purpose all along was to take the blame for the low-low price of a mere $44M so that a government employee making $100K won't have to have a couple of uncomfortable meetings.
The problem isn't that there was a failure, that happens all the time with software projects. The problem is that risk in government agencies is managed by people with essentially infinite source of free money that they can draw down on in order to protect themselves.
If a magic genie gave you a million dollars every week to spend on your own safety with no strings attached, wouldn't you? Would you say "no"? Really?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You could also apply this weaselly BS to Boeing. Their "ask", if there was one, was to make a plane that customers would buy and that would pass FAA review. Not "a plane that works".
No one's contract just says "make an X that works", even though that's what everyone wants. Because an X that works is hard to define. Fundamentally the system depends on honor and trust. Which is why we despise losers that just try to get paid and fuck the customer.
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.
Considering that this came out of nowhere, I was impressed how quickly and easily I got a vaccine. Big thanks to the Army who ran the vaccination site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
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?