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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

#501

Post by laurent92 »

getlawgdon wrote: post #461
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…

Still not a $44mm problem.

I’d say getting the contract signed is already 1/3 of the total.

You need to be big enough to apply (requires investment), apply to many government contracts, you need to understand the legal terms, price them, understand the regulations, price them in, then price the software development itself and price any other provider (hardware happens very quickly), and if you guess wrong, like on 1/3rd of the projects, you’re in debt... and you have 100% chance of getting the contract if you price it wrong.

Getting the contract done is another 1/3 of the contract, and the lawyers to deal with disputes and prove that you’ve done the contract, is another 1/3.

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

#502

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

The classic “Must have caught ten pound trout in Colorado river during August 1984” method.

Deloitte’s name seems to come up a lot when there is a multi-dozen million dollar web site that is falling over. I wonder if it was a former Deloitte person who wrote the Parler backend because it seems to be the same sort of massive footprint that falls over when the wind blows type setup.

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

#503

Post by Aeolun »

eckza wrote: post #266
headmelted wrote: post #190

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.

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.

> 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.

Exactly! If you’ve been doing that for 20 years I do not want to work with you, since you are apparently perfectly content with that status quo.

I’ve been doing it for two years and it’s already too much. My highest priority is fixing their chronically useless requirements.

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

#504

Post by GVIrish »

Aeolun wrote: post #491
rorykoehler wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been working in enterprise/government sector for a few years now and my observation is that they need to focus on better systems design. Everything is too convoluted. Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear is where most of the money is wasted.

> Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear “We need a new system, but it has to function exactly like the old one.” Including any bugs and craziness.

I've wasted far too much time in my career doing exactly this for federal government customers. My favorite is when someone insists a feature is critical and must be replicated, but when I dig into it I find it *never* actually worked and as such, no one was using it.

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

#505

Post by Aeolun »

afavour wrote: post #237
adrianN wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain old HTML is responsive. It stops being responsive when you start trying to make it look good.

I’m not convinced that’s true. Case in point: tabular data. I don’t think presenting something in a table is an attempt to make it look good, I think it’s the most logical and recognisable way of presenting certain kinds of information. But tables don’t scale well on a mobile viewport without extra work.

Reasonable tables work fine on a mobile viewport. It’s when you get into crazy ones that it breaks down.

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

#506

Post by achow »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #502

The classic “Must have caught ten pound trout in Colorado river during August 1984” method. Deloitte’s name seems to come up a lot when there is a multi-dozen million dollar web site that is falling over. I wonder if it was a former Deloitte person who wrote the Parler backend because it seems to be the same sort of massive footprint that falls over when the wind blows type setup.

‘We are very sorry’: Deloitte apologizes to RI about UHIP (Unified Health Infrastructure Project)

https://www.wpri.com/target-12/we-are-very-sorry-deloitte-ap...

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

#507

Post by dalbasal »

Government contractor cynicism is one of the saddest games plaguing the modern world. It literally guarantees the inability of governments to have decent, working technology.

IDK what the structural solution to this is, but it is horrible that Deloitte will walk away from this unscathed. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any financial incentive for them to deliver usable software.

Imagine screwing over a client that does this much business with you.

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

#508

Post by _njyk »

theshrike79 wrote: post #483
juliendorra wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an open secret in France that many, maybe most (?) calls for new teaching/research positions in university labs are designed to be won by someone already attached to the lab (like a doctoral student for example, or someone with a temporary contract). In French it’s called being "fléché", as in attributed for someone. It’s of course totally contrary to the rules. (It’s most of the time somehow well intentioned, f…

France has this down to an art. When the French government puts out an EU wide bid for something (As is the rule in the EU), the bid will be won by a French company. Every. Single. Time. And it's not by accident. Finland, on the other hand, is playing things stupid. We've had cases where a city's laundry services was won by an Estonian company(!) because they were the cheapest. They actually shipped all laundry 300km…

Estonia was probably chosen because Estonia has very good experience doing laundry of the Russians if you know what I mean.

Joke aside, it seems one of the winner of the Finland->Estonia washing contract is actually a Finnish national that incorporated a company in Estonia: https://www.aripaev.ee/article/2011/2/22/soome-pesupesijad-u...

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

#509

Post by dalbasal »

da02 wrote: post #500
anticapit wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how American companies game the h1b visa system. When I worked at AVG we would write job requirement so specific to an Israel developers who worked for one of our subsidiaries that it was clear no other human being in the world could qualify for it.

Why Israeli developers? Just out of curiosity, do you have any recommendations for anti-virus software for mobile or for desktops?

I don't think he meant israeli developers in general. Specific people.

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

#510

Post by christophilus »

The government really needs to start insourcing its IT. I worked briefly as a contractor, caught a glimpse of how the sausage was made, and left within a month or two. I’ll never do it again. I can’t imagine insourcing producing worse outcomes, and the end result would probably be less costly, even if it was still low quality.
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