Deloitte's habits of stealing tens of millions of dollars to deliver broken technology to the government are so deeply ingrained they couldn't even stop themselves from taking this critical assignment. People are going to die because of this, there's no way around that.
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
#412> 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…
Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.
It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich.
edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#413I will install wordpress for them for $43M
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#414Earlier 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…
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…
There is often the expertise in house, but over years the internal teams get terribly under-funded and the poor service that results is then used to justify spending vastly more amounts on external suppliers.
This always comes down to piss-poor and craven senior management decisions.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#415> 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…
Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.
There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person.
Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#416Earlier 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.
Careful with your line of reasoning. 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.
Doing something for 20 years does not necessarily make someone better at it than someone who’s done it for 5 years. Arguably doing something for that long could even make you worse.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.
It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich. edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we don't have a monopoly on such practices, only couldn't remember if I ever read about Western procedures and misconducts with these contests. Dunno even what they're properly called—it's a ‘tender’ here.
However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#418> 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…
Somebody had written this with exact purpose to give this contract to Deloitte. I would be very surprised if there wasn't bribery involved.
Geez, I thought the whole idea is that 'government is the problem. We need to let the private sector handle all these things.'
Making the CDC look bad appears to have been part of that program last year. Shame the price has been so high.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#419Earlier 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.
Obfuscating the code and deliberately adding technical debt is not "the bare minimum", but it is shipping a planned obsolete product.
Re: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs
#420> 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…
For your next laptop, car, etc. try doing what you think the government ought to do here. Write down the requirements, give them to a neutral third party who doesn’t doesn’t use computers/drive, and ask them to figure out the cheapest thing that meets the requirements. Commit yourself to buying only that. See how it goes for you.