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

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

#441

Post by GordonS » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:26 AM UTC

rlonn wrote: post #432

StavrosK wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the analogy. Why would I give the requirements for making a website to someone who doesn't make websites? The government should do whatever anyone who wants a website does, hire someone to make a website. What's the issue?

I think this is what usually happens and what causes many public projects to fail: the customer has no competent staff that can a) write requirements or b) evaluate tenders. They're often incompetent enough to even hire someone competent to do those things. The government should maybe have a dedicated unit that assists other units with procurement of IT solutions. Where the staff gets very well compensated when a pro…

I imagine you are correct that this happens frequently.

However, if a large outsourcer like Deloitte gets the gig, they should have the right experience and knowledge to work with the customer to determine what they really need/want, and to steer them through the whole process. They should also ensure they use best practices, such as tests. If a company fails here.

I think there is blame to go round on both sides.

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

#442

Post by mkl95 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

Deloitte is well known among devs in my country for the poor working conditions of their employees (including unpaid overtime and low pay) and the overpriced contracts they sign with public bodies. They do things like charging €2M to build a broken CRUD app written by devs fresh out of uni. They then follow up with a "maintenance contract" that consists of not doing much to fix it at all, and replacing the people who are not fresh out of uni anymore with cheaper devs.

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

#443

Post by raverbashing » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:33 AM UTC

Raidion wrote: post #128

walrus01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could hire 73 engineers each paid 300k for a year, and have 22 million left over for hosting/operations/overhead costs... Absolutely ridiculous.

You get those 73 engineers in a room, then what? What do they write? You get 15 engineers, 3 DBAs, 5 sys admins + their managers. While that's spinning up, you get a bunch of business analyists to write the requirements. A first version gets written, it doesn't do what people want and the data it works from is really crappy, so you have to write a bunch of custom edge logic to deal with the crappy data. Repeat severa…

Ideally the requirements gathering wouldn't be a pile of tick boxes.

Get them to sit next to the users (especially UI/UX) and see how the process happen. Ask questions. See how data entry people work.

(Ideally. In the real world it will be a very thorny and boring process)

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

#444

Post by fakedang » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

crimsoneer wrote: post #427

fakedang wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GDS is a shadow of its former self now though

Tbh the UK is a shadow of its former self now, as are all things in it.

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

#445

Post by StrauXX » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

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.

In Austria (at least in the province I am living in) the provincial government does have its own software development departmant. I am currently working with them (for free :)) on a software project of theirs for a class.

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

#446

Post by tw20212021 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:37 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #400

zaroth wrote: post #115

> 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.

Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.

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

#447

Post by estaseuropano » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:49 AM UTC

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…

Or to mention they have to price in the tender development and the cost of all the failed tenders that they made for similar projects.

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

#448

Post by brtkdotse » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:52 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #433

brtkdotse wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.

Couldn’t find an English version, but I’m sure you can run it through a translate and get the gist of it

https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...

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

#449

Post by fallingknife » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #440

echelon wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.

A quick google search didn't give me much but I found this https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-...

> He rose to the rank of major despite not having completed mandatory training, and was even temporarily promoted to be able to serve at the military alliance headquarters, the newspaper said.

Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.

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

#450

Post by philjohn » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 11:03 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #400

zaroth wrote: post #115

> 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.

This is endemic in tender processes the world over.

I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.