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

Post by test6554 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 7:59 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #166

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.

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?

Post by peter_retief » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

Post by bloqs » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

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…

Post by gunsch » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:23 AM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #373

gunsch wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are government contractors who are doing this kind of work! There's a group of younger companies that grew up around the Healthcare.gov rescue and work in conjunction with USDS, trying to build cultures of better software development practices in government. Check out the companies in the Digital Services Coalition ( https://digitalservicescoalition.org/ ) and you'll see a lot of companies doing the kind of wor…

But why does it have to go through a contractor system at all? Why can't they keep developers on staff, who among other things can retain institutional knowledge?

Post by mpfundstein » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #246

nataz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But most of the rest of it in these huge contracts could just not be done. The myth is that all of the rest is necessary when only a tiny fraction really is. I have worked in tiny very early stage startups and old dinosaur companies. What comes across loud and clear is that early stage companies could use a bit more organization and dinosaurs could cut huge portions of what they “do” and then both would be in a simil…