51–60 of 165 posts
My girlfriend works for the Health Department in my home state. They paid two consultants $100,000 to convert paper documents to digital form. The contract lasted one week.
The consultants literally put documents into a scanner and converted them to PDF. At the end of the week they took their money and left, leaving the bulk of the documents unscanned.
An intern could've done this work for $10 an hour. And he/she would've actually finished the job.
Is this really much different than outsourced projects for huge corporations? Seems like large organizations get charged a premium for the same amount of work. Government can hire technical people who can do the work in house, or who are qualified to evaluate the work. But because of the pressure to keep government small, qualified tech people go to the private sector and overcharge the government. Seems like one can…
Its also worth pointing out that sometimes, just sometimes, it works out the other way. I was the lead on a team that took $150k in funding and produced an open-source implementation of some CDC specifications (https://github.com/talho/openphin), and became the first software in the country to be certified with it. We developed it in about 12 weeks, and the first milestone certifications were actually complete-able (meaning we had the features, though the paperwork took longer) within 2 weeks. We were up against companies used in other states like Northrup and SAIC that literally spent millions on the implementations (and don't even get me started on how much those same companies spent coming up with the standards in the first place, which is a whole 'nother problem) and beat them handily at their own game.
We did use private contractors as additional assets starting out and while they were more expensive than hiring additional developers, they had two great attributes: temporary, and good at what they did. Its worth it to pay for competence, every single time. And when its a one-time expense for a project, its much, much easier to deal with than something that incurs year-over-year expenditures.
Brilliant article. Couple of key takeaways: 1. "The shocking part about this isn't even that it happened, but rather that it is incredibly routine. This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department for one tiny, single use application that will perhaps be used by, at most, five hundred people.. and it cost as much as a house. You can imagine what the waste must be like in other government run sectors..." 2. "The o…
You realize that these two sentences oppose each other, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and provide the documentation they were asking for, People who've never worked on government contracts cannot conceive of the reporting and documentation projects. I've been on several (govt) projects where we spent as much time writing as doing.
But what's the quality expectation on the reporting and documentation? Is it likely that your audience (the gov't managers) have lower standards?
Because they're the government, they often overspecify to not get taken advantage of.
I'm curious if this really surprises anyone here that the entire process for the government purchasing three mobile applications (Android, iOS, and BB) was ~200k. This seems pretty ordinary/normal to me.
In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses. Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site. Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same produ…
In the European Union, governments are legally required to open public works and supplying contracts to competition through an open tendering process. I'm surprised that this doesn't happen in the US. There's a fair bit of criticism levelled against the EU tendering processes, though. Many feel that the process emphasizes price at the expense of quality, resulting in a "race to the bottom" as another poster mentioned…
I was surprised by this and decided to check it out, and it looks like they're not really. the implementation of EU government law by national governments is far from uniform and sometimes weak – in 2002, for instance, only 16% of governmental calls to tender were published – government procurement has been called "the weakest link in the common market".[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_E…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an app specifically designed to help protect your life (one of those rights) from unsafe employment. I get the dig you're making but this seems a weak target for it...
The government's duty to protect your life does not extend beyond protecting it from the use of force by other people. If you choose to work in a place, that's your choice. Even if you fail to make sure it's safe before you work there, or decide to work there despite the risk. Anyway, even if OSHA were legitime, this app is not effective at achieving anything, even if executed well.
The code was actually released November 2nd: http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of-america/so...