Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 688 posts

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

#601

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

awestroke wrote: post #351
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Free work from developers? Deloitte got 44 million. Do you think they would get no salary for the extra hours spent on making it not suck?

If they didn't deliver a functioning website as per the CDCs requirements they shouldn't have been paid.

If the CDC signed off on it, it isn't deloitte's fault. Sorry.

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

#602

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

raverbashing wrote: post #419
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's your fault for buying it then. If you don't state what you want in a contract, this will always happen.

All you SV elitists do it, you just want to hoard the wealth for yourselves. It's not just deloitte, all the SVs do the same damn thing.

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

#603

Post by WhompingWindows »

wp381640 wrote: post #572
snarf21 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major problem with using contractors. They bill by the hour. Their continued employment is not dependent on doing a good job. They half ass everything because it is about billing and being done. Also, doing a bad job means "overruns" for more free money. The government needs a Department of Technology that runs all these systems for all national systems that are needed. This isn't like building a combat fig…

The problem is because of government pay scales they can’t fill those digital agency roles with the right people Within a year or two the good staff end up working at the consulting shops and influence their former employers

Could big tech firms help by loaning out their employees on sabbatical, or could they sponsor government tech positions? It feels like so much of the talent there would be very useful to the government, which would probably have a positive feedback loop on the economy as a whole.

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

#604

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

lmilcin wrote: post #463
ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting paid for a deliverable. Why do you expect free work?

Imagine you are signing a contract with a car shop to add a spoiler to your car. The car shop spends months of your time obsessing about the dimensions of the spoiler. Then the car is out of service for as much time and you start wondering what they have been doing. Then the car arrives and there is a bunch of paint missing around the spoiler, the spoiler is completely unpainted an it falls off when you accelerate to…

This isn't how life works.

If spoiler work fails instantly you can say it wasn't done properly, which is true. You then withhold payment, or sue.

Not that complicated. Not worth a damn novel post from you either.

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

#605

Post by WhompingWindows »

info781 wrote: post #545
snarf21 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a major problem with using contractors. They bill by the hour. Their continued employment is not dependent on doing a good job. They half ass everything because it is about billing and being done. Also, doing a bad job means "overruns" for more free money. The government needs a Department of Technology that runs all these systems for all national systems that are needed. This isn't like building a combat fig…

Good people want to work at places with stock options and bonuses for good performance, the government can not offer that. Government is more suited for people interested in management, not pure technical people

Speaking as a technical person who worked for government, one of the most frustrating things was not pay, I am a simple man. What was frustrating was the GARBAGE tech we had to deal with. I'm talking 5+ year old windows versions, crap peripherals and desktops, shitty offices in ugly buildings, super intermittent connections to the data that always go down, throttled data-centers by incompetent SQL pulls (I was guilty of this starting out, too)...the list goes on and on. Compare this to other places, where you can actually code in comfort, can actually solve more problems because you're not constantly derailed or demoralized by government's rusty and slow systems...

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

#606

Post by treis »

Demiurge wrote: post #568
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…

I’m going to be discrete but I know of a Deloitte project where they are allowed to use AWS Fargate, but the gov’t side is limited to IBM mainframes. Why are they so limited? Who knows, but it’s a deep question, that would require total reinvention. Perhaps, in the end, it might not even be worth the risk because the gov’t is so essential. They can’t move fast and break things. But it does look insane as a result.

FEDRAMP requirements and auditing are difficult and expensive to meet. I've seen the cost of these in bids. We said something like $20k per month for what would be a $50 per month EC2 server. It was a shocking thing to see. I'm guessing Deloitte is charging six figures a month to host this thing.

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

#607

Post by ric2b »

petarb wrote: post #320
canofbars wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because governments outsource everything possible and end up with no persistent talent that really understands whats going on so you end up spending all the money on interfacing with contractors.

What if the government had an internal technology division to build things like this

Nah, there are more important things like spaceforce /s

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

#608

Post by info781 »

userbinator wrote: post #238
bit_logic wrote: post #142

Does anyone know if this was yet another React website disaster? This is exactly the kind of website that should be built with reliable technologies. You don't need fancy animations or whatever junk the SPA style sites have. Just old style server side frameworks, minimal Javascript, standards supported HTML and CSS. The article mentioned Internet Explorer as an issue? Cross browser support is no issue if you stick to…

No kidding --- the fact that they mentioned it only worked in Chrome is a sad commentary of the state of the Internet and what Google's effective monopoly has lead to.

We had to live with sites than only ran in IE for years.

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

#609

Post by martincolorado »

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…

This right here “configuration of the VAMS application is occurring using Deloitte’s propriety GovConnect platform.”

Because it is so difficult to launch a project and provision the requisite infrastructure in the federal government due to various IT regs and laws and subsequently obtain an Authorization To Operate (ATO) in a timely fashion an existing platform is routinely sole sourced especially when speed is necessary.

Why? This is both legit and utter bs. Legit: the fed gov actually attempts to protect a persons’ private data. BS: after the drain of the acquisition process (led by non-technical folks), ATO, slide decks to more non-technical management (Deloitte and their peers crush this), the competent folks find other jobs either in or outside gov that free their creativity.

Positive: groups like USDS are reducing the drain, but once an exec gets burned they go back to checkbox management and shun the learning organization culture that has made tech the anti-thesis of this type of acquisition in other sectors.

*edited misspelling to show gov tries to protect not product privacy data

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

#610

Post by WhompingWindows »

eigenvector wrote: post #277
nataz wrote: post #226

Earlier 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…

I worked for the government and it was pretty damn hard to get further training. We had no funds for conferences, classes, travel, or any such. All the improvement was down to me, what I could learn about R/stats/STATA from forums, from colleagues, and from the 1500 member analyst email list. There were all sorts of forums/libraries "within" the government system, however their search functionality was garbage and they didn't have enough users to make it a useful forum for most topics. Sigh!
Post reply on HN