261–270 of 688 posts
Very little technical knowledge overall. It was a disaster.
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.
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…
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…
This is the single most important and insightful sentence that a lot of HN-ers are going to read today, and they don't even know it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't mean to support any ageism and would be happy to withdraw my age reference. What that may leave is decision makers who don't always have a high enough level of digital or technical literacy. Folks who are not competent in technology decisions and implementations being in positions of decision making and spending is the point I was trying to make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> and use Excel as the height of their digital literacy 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There is a difference between "ageism", and "being honest about how hard some problems are to solve".
There are a lot of unbelievably brilliant 22-year-olds.
None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.
- Many fed agencies have little tech savvy or ability to evaluate solutions
- Feds can have complex, mandated processes for software procurement, development and deployment that must be followed. This drives up the cost and limits the companies that choose to bid.
- There’s not much of a “get sh*t done” attitude. There’s little consequence for the individuals that managed a failure on both sides. Usually “oh well, another day at the office!” is the norm for many federal agencies/contractors.
- buzzword chasing tech ignorant administrators that consulting firms readily take advantage of - “yes! But does it have machine learning!?”
- there’s many fiefs at these agencies that must be navigated: “Oh! Wow - you spent 6 months building and it’s time to deploy? The security team really hates CYZ tech and we’ll have to escalate this to the director”
- so many g-d stakeholder to please and woo: from managers to administrators to political appointees and congresspeople. The relationship cost can be staggering.
These stereotypes aren’t always the case - some govt groups can actually execute really well. But many of these points dominate sadly.
To make a sweeping generalization which doesn't give enough credit to some amazing groups, the Federal government does not have people who are capable of managing complex IT projects. The government has outsourced so much work that it no longer has personnel who are capable of knowing what is going on. Federal workers are competent in managing contracts, but not actual work. So when you arrive at a new and complex project (like widely distributing a vaccine for an unforeseen global pandemic), they don't know what to do. How do you write that in a contract and enforce it?
That doesn't even begin to get in to the requirements around what it takes to launch a production IT system while meeting government cyber security requirements/processes. A lot of comments here are lamenting how easy this is. Let me set it straight: you cannot launch a random Django/Rails MVP in the government. They don’t operate that way, for reasons good and bad. The fact that Deloitte had something in production in under a year, no matter how buggy, is a minor miracle.
At some point, someone should compile a bullet point list of all these consulting train wrecks on a simple website, like www.consultingfails.com. Then, whenever you hear another multi-million dollar catastrophe, add it to the list. The brand damage will accrue - as it should - over time.
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…
It's completely believable that Deloitte might have built a handful of boondoggles like that and dressed it up as a "Salesforce" project.