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

#551

Post by ethbr0 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

rabidrat wrote: post #364

ethbr0 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code This one is more insightful (in the big non-tech enterprise / government spaces). Because the takeaway for most HN developers who flip between projects should be: (1) learn how to recognize one of these projects & (2) stay away / find a new job when you do. You'll save years of your work.

How might you recognize a project like this?

In addition to what others have said, from my previous experience:

- Does the customer have an IT org capable of fulfilling basic tasks you won't be authorized to do (app / db access, AD / rights modification, firewall adjustment, AV adjustment) in a timely manner?

- Can the customer provision necessary machines in a timely manner? If using VMs, is the virtualization team competent with their chosen platform?

- Does this project directly threaten the job of anyone whose blessing / help is required to successfully deliver the project?

- Is your leadership / your customer champion intelligent and willing enough to say "No" to scope creep when the customer gets excited?

- Do the PMs attached to the project have a basic understanding of how software is built and the systems involved?

- Does their management understand the actual processes being interacted with? (Major red flag! If their management / leaders say things in meetings that demonstrate a basic lack of understanding in what their own people do, run)

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

#552

Post by flurben » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 2:57 PM 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?

This would mean having elected officials, top-level managers, who knew what software development was, and prioritized those capabilities over extended periods of time.

The top 2-5 layers of management tend to be the types who want solutions, and they don't care how it works, and they don't really want to be bothered with the details.

To the extent they expend thought at all on systems, they tend to be focused primarily on questions like, "why is all this stuff so confusing?" "who do I blame when this thing goes wrong?"

Where I work, they go through cycles; a higher-up will say "Hey let's build a staff of in-house developers." And they'll do that for 2 or 3 years, until someone reads an article in CIO magazine about how outsourcing is superior. Then they'll start unfairly purging and firing developers, writing code is now "bad", configuration is "Good." This goes on for several years, until the cycle starts over. So as a developer, after you survive your first purge, you begin to see that invisibility is the only way to survive.

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

#553

Post by headmelted » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

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.

There are certainly a lot of 22 year olds that have been led to believe that they’re unbelievably brilliant.

I’m sure some of them are. I’m sure a lot of 22 year olds were brilliant in the 80’s and 90’s too.

Unless your thesis is that there’s been a sudden upsurge in the proportion of superintelligent earthlings in the last 25 years I’m unsure what your point is.

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

#554

Post by siilats » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

_njyk wrote: post #508

theshrike79 wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Estonia has done a great job with these contracts. Washer salaries are 400Eur per month here and 1600eur per month in Finland so Estonians keep the washing factories open overnight.

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

#555

Post by atlgator » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #488

rlonn wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

US Digital Service. GSA 18f. They already exist. Mysterious why CDC didn't use them. Maybe they are hollowed out after the Trump years. I know I wouldn't have stuck around.

In my 10 years supporting CDC, I can tell you 18f is nonexistent there. Nothing to do with the administrations.

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

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Post by mixedCase » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

bbarn wrote: post #513

rishabhd wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say this, but having worked in similar industries, RFPs are sometimes deliberately skewed/ created in a manner that make it hard (or downright impossible) for others to participate.

A lot of the time, that's ok. A few people in the know want to avoid a lengthy and wasteful evaluation process for the product or company they already feel confident will meet their needs. Or worse, they're afraid someone might underbid, people without context will pick the lowest cost option, and the product or service will end up being a disaster. The problem comes in when things like this happen - that a company f…

That's why biddings are well-intentioned but mostly bullshit.

The biased/corrupt person that ultimately is forcing the decision gets their pick, but doesn't face the full consequences of their decision because "hey it was a bidding, everyone got to offer". People making multi-million dollar decisions should be exposed with plenty of skin in the game for things to ever not be as rigged as they currently are.

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

#557

Post by GizmoSwan » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:06 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #543

GizmoSwan wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that any success in delivering past contracts does not guarantee success in future in software technology where a typical software technology becomes obsolete every 3 years. In software world things change so fast that someone with 6 years of experience developing software will not have enough experience with newest tools, languages, methods, etc. Newer graduates with experience is newest applications…

> The problem is that any success in delivering past contracts does not guarantee success in future in software technology where a typical software technology becomes obsolete every 3 years. They don't even seem to be saying "because Deloitte was successful in the past". It's literally saying "because they're the only ones who have access to their proprietary system that we already locked ourselves in too.... they ge…

But they must have had something going for them in the past to get them that status.

Nothing happens for no reason. Few cases of success in big projects in the past must have got them in. History has impact on future.

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

#558

Post by ghettoCoder » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

bbarn wrote: post #513

rishabhd wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say this, but having worked in similar industries, RFPs are sometimes deliberately skewed/ created in a manner that make it hard (or downright impossible) for others to participate.

A lot of the time, that's ok. A few people in the know want to avoid a lengthy and wasteful evaluation process for the product or company they already feel confident will meet their needs. Or worse, they're afraid someone might underbid, people without context will pick the lowest cost option, and the product or service will end up being a disaster. The problem comes in when things like this happen - that a company f…

But that’s also a failure of internal IT and processes. These types of architectural decisions really need to go through some sort of ARC before proceeding.

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

#559

Post by atlgator » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #468

smsm42 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the thing is that when the government takes tax money and allocates it to private companies via obscure and arguably corrupt procedures, you get the worst of both worlds. Inefficiency and rigidity of the government, combined with opacity and greed of the private companies. When people say privatizing things could be a solution, they don't usually mean "take tax money and award it through a no-bid contract to a…

Isn't the problem that the compensation structure is wrong? By paying lump sums you are basically encouraging your contractor to screw you over. You should compensate them based on metrics that align with your goals. For example, pay $1 (random number) for each vaccinated citizen.

There are systems like that within the government, but in those scenarios the Contractor owns the system and deploys it as a service. While it can be cost effective in the early years, it does entrench the Contractor and make it difficult for the Government to switch because they own nothing.

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

#560

Post by sokoloff » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:17 PM UTC

praeclarum wrote: post #534

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.

What you call gaming, I call working around the government’s idiotic visa requirements.

That depends on what you see as the purpose of the visa requirements. If the purpose is to support economic prospects for American citizens and current residents (which seems like a completely valid purpose of government), then putting hurdles to ensure the job opening was “shopped” to qualified existing authorized workers seems pretty reasonable.

(I should clarify that I’m fully in favor of immigration programs that serve to increase the density of highly qualified individuals in the US and to fill positions which would otherwise go vacant. If as a small side-effect, those programs depress wages via increased supply, that’s still an excellent trade for the population. I am not in favor of visa programs substantially/primarily aimed at decreasing wages.)