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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

#581

Post by ndiscussion »

greggyb wrote: post #197
ndiscussion wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deloitte is a $40 billion company, it's not like every single one of their projects is a complete failure. Citation needed, see Oracle, many companies have grown that large on the backs of taxpayers by employing the best "Sales" techniques in the biz.

I've worked with many database technologies and many data professionals. I don't recall any instances offhand of technical critiques of Oracle. Pricing and business practices are a different story. Oracle the database is fantastic technology.

In my opinion, pricing is a part of the product. If one company can produce a banana for $1, and another company requires $1,000 to produce a banana, that second company is an outright failure. The banana still tastes great.

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

#582

Post by fuzzfactor »

Aeolun wrote: post #487
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 isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks It’s probably exactly that. I always strongly wonder if you wouldn’t get a better result if you gave a pair of 22 year olds 1M and a year to develop and figure out all the same things.

Bingo.

You just have to find the correct pair.

Doesn't actually matter how old or young they are, just that they don't actually need more experience than you could get from two top-performing 22-year-olds that could easily make more than a million in progress over a year.

And it would have even been worth it to spend the first year doing nothing but intensively searching for these two so you could have operators so far above average and so well suited to the task, and so well agreed upon over a period of a whole year, that nothing else could even come close. It would probably be best with a pair who are equally motivated whether they would be getting the half million apiece or not, because a lot of that could be spent by now.

When everyone creating the software has the rare extreme performance ability that very few companies ever get to have even one employee that good, the more suitable the performance the fewer operators it should be expected to require.

This just has to be put into perspective compared to what you can get from a typical bureaucratic team for $44 million.

Average bureaucrats have never been good enough for average things.

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

#583

Post by andrewflnr »

vinay_ys wrote: post #381
L_Rahman wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Critically, if someone within the org volunteers to organize and manage the cross departmental knowledge they'll be shut down by people within the company for trying to accumulate power or stepping into someone else's turf. Only an outsider can safely talk to everyone. They aren't a threat because they aren't part of the company and therefore can't take over.

It cannot be volunteer work. It has to be sponsored from the top. If it is, then a team of qualified FTEs can do this job similar to an external consultancy. But rarely will old-timer well-settled FTEs will leave their current position and take on this temporary risky gig. Also, the end result and the path to get there isn't clear for FTEs – let's say they did the functional domain requirement gathering work – then w…

What if it wasn't temporary, but just part of the CEOs office? The first goal should be to actively prevent these foul-ups by keeping open lines of communication.

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

#584

Post by quickthrowman »

ineedasername wrote: post #575
aasasd wrote: post #400

Earlier 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 not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract. The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

> it reads a bit like any government contract.

I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI.

I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either.

Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.

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

#585

Post by ndiscussion »

josephg wrote: post #188
ndiscussion wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well thanks for calling me out as to not knowing who the hell is responsible. I agree with your approach... we need experts, who will NOT bid to one company, who will NOT accept one-sided terms. These are fat government contracts we're talking about... the company should have to take 100% responsibility to deliver a working website at cost. If companies mismanage and fail, they should go out of business, and another…

> Well thanks for calling me out as to not knowing who the hell is responsible. To be fair, you were also partially right. Government departments usually have elected representatives who are officially in charge, so there's someone the public can blame when things like this happen. At least thats true here in Australia and in the UK - I'm not totally sure if it works the same way in the US. That said, the politicians…

The CEO analogy is a great one, I'll be stealing that, so thank you.

HN seems to have greatly differing opinions on where the responsibility lies when it comes to private businesses, ie: Volkswagen scandal, Uber scandal, et al

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

#586

Post by aweiland »

chrisweekly wrote: post #490
eigenvector wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The US has a CTO, so there seems to be some structure to support this notion, right?

It does. However every piece of the government has their own as well who don't seem at all beholden to it.

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

#587

Post by colechristensen »

mpfundstein wrote: post #399
colechristensen wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whats the prob? Its money changing hands. It flows from the Corp down to developers, managers, etc. also it is good that corps and governments try to innovate and spend money on it. Can it be more efficient? Always(!) Can it be more focused? Sure. But a big innovation takes a lot of factors to be well balanced and that alone is often not guaranteed nor possible given the circumstances. You just might not find the kin…

What's the problem?

People spending their lives pushing a boulder up a hill.

People paying taxes to pay for people pushing boulders up hills.

The problem is wasting human life on wildly inefficient endeavors.

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

#588

Post by andrewflnr »

laurent92 wrote: post #494
didibus wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks. I get your point, but also yes it is. The issue is superficial, it's like when I try to Zoom with my mom, it'll take 10 times longer as I need to explain and bring her along every single step of the way. This is the same for these type of contracts. A lot of the slowdowns come from peop…

> zoom with my mum I don’t get why people don’t just use Whereby, no login no plugin. It makes conferencing so easier.

Probably because they haven't heard of it.

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

#589

Post by mgh2 »

MikeDelta wrote: post #434
mgh2 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Palantir doing something similar?

Yes they are from what I understood. Clever strategy if you are dealing with a client who doesn't see further than the next move.

Can't they help?

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

#590

Post by bsaul »

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.

Russian government certainly doesn’t have the monopoly of that kind of practice. It’s a standard practice in wordlbank projects as well : wordlbank finances the development of a system in a foreign country, and the projects requirements are written in such a way that only US companies can answer.
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