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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

#351

Post by awestroke »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #198
alasdair_ wrote: post #171

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.

Free work from developers? Deloitte got 44 million. Do you think they would get no salary for the extra hours spent on making it not suck?

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

#352

Post by onion2k »

fakedang wrote: post #285
eigenvector wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government's side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do? "Because we don't have the expertise to do software development." The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if gove…

Exactly. The UK in-housed their entire website IT team, and it's one of the best set of government websites I've seen worldwide, UX-wise and performance-wise.

There are a lot of Accenture consultants working in the Digital Service.

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

#353

Post by baby »

offtop5 wrote: post #200
brundolf wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tro…

That's actually much more than I imagined o_O and a government job is usually pretty stable as well.

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

#354

Post by eCa »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #80
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.

They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?

I have only worked directly with an external consultancy company once, and the problem (the way I see it) is that the incentives are mis-aligned.

A good internal developer will notice that requirements are missing, or could be improved, and has the incentive to bring it up with the project manager and get it fixed.

That incentive does not necessarily exist for a consultancy developer, because as you say that means their employer loses money.

My conclusion: Use consultans for very well defined and testable problems that don’t require too much business-specific domain knowledge.

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

#355

Post by Joeri »

nataz wrote: post #226
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…

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…

What they need to do is flip the script. Instead of only looking at the input side of these systems and how to plug into older systems not designed for it, look at the output side of everything that’s built and make sure it is api first so future projects can integrate much easier.

At the city of antwerp we flipped over in 2015 from a typical assortment of poorly integrated consultant-built monoliths to a microservices api-first approach. It became a hard requirement that all functionality provided by new systems had to be offered by a documented api, and most of the newly built systems dogfood their own api’s from the ui. In 5 years this caused a fundamental shift, where it gave us the ability to set up a covid contact tracing app for schools in weeks, because it was mostly the piecing together of well documented and battle tested api’s.

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

#356

Post by skybrian »

tidepod12 wrote: post #46
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?

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing busine…

This might be true for your average project, but the pandemic is not average; it’s very high-profile. Put out the word that the government needs help and you would have Googlers taking a leave of absence, like they did to fix the Obamacare website.

There are lots of great people who would rather be doing something meaningful than whatever they’re currently doing and governments need to do better at tapping into this.

It’s a different problem, but for a more recent example, look at how fast vaccinateca.com got going.

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

#357

Post by matthewdgreen »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #344
eaton wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never in a million years argue that Deloitte did an awesome job on a large government contract, but it's mind-boggling to watch the regular ritual of HN posters blithely insist that anything more over $20K and a pile of pizzas for government infrastructure is a scam.

Not only do I think thats a strawman (I don't see that base level argument given that often on hn), but even if it wasn't, the truth is there is a lot, and I mean a fuckton , of money waste at the government level on IT projects. Trying to act like just because they aren't all a scam doesn't mean there isn't a systemic problem of waste that still needs to be addressed, and there are plenty of examples in even recent…

The story of Healthcare.gov is pretty much the poster for this. They didn’t need to bring in a bunch of clever people to figure out requirements, that was already done and the site just didn’t work. To fix it they had to bring in a team of tech experts, who largely just did tech things —- competently and at a lower cost than the contractors who did the first iteration. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

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

#358

Post by 3327 »

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?

Deloitte should be investigated for defrauding tax payers

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

#359

Post by vncecartersknee »

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?

I used to have a few friends who worked at deloitte as analysts I'd often catch up with them for lunch or after work drinks and I can guarantee you this was most likely made by a bunch of coked out 22 year olds working until 3am every night for a couple of months

It reminded me of a university style group project, constantly astonished that they’d turn over a few 10's of thousands of lines of python code that (usually) some government department was paying millions for. Not to smear my friends who worked there who must have to work incredibly hard given the conditions and the stress they were under, I always suspected their code must have been absolutely riddled with bugs, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like for the next poor grads who had to work on it after them.

And it was always some project where I was amazed there wasn't already some mature software out there that accomplished what they were doing anyway.

But anyway they seemed to have fun so whatever

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

#360

Post by didibus »

mdorazio wrote: post #52
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?

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…

> Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.

I get your point, but also yes it is. The issue is superficial, it's like when I try to Zoom with my mom, it'll take 10 times longer as I need to explain and bring her along every single step of the way. This is the same for these type of contracts. A lot of the slowdowns come from people just not letting development take its course as it should.

Just look at the article, the states ended up choosing to use a bunch of SaaS startup not even designed for this use case in its place, like eventbrite.

And look at the issues:

> “It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome. The ‘Next’ button is all the way down and to the right, so if you’re on a cell phone, you literally can’t see it,” says Rowe.

That's not a project management issue, that's a full on development issue, it doesn't even work on mobile in 2021 !!

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