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Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

wmhartnett.com

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Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#51

Post by tomjen3 »

jashkenas wrote: post #38

For folks interested in helping solve the root cause of these sorts of things ... the White House is looking for people to help build a streamlined procurement process: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfpez ... hopefully making it possible for vendors build government web projects with bids for less than $150k, instead of millions of dollars per web site.

Sorry, but for a hacker streamlining procurement procedures sounds like a huge and extreemly boring timesink.

Wouldn't this be something an mba would love anyway?

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#52

Post by thejefflarson »

slurgfest wrote: post #13

That figure is clearly not for an Android app, that is a clear misrepresentation. Who knows how it breaks down. This exposes a vast amount of queryable census data to the public (something which would normally be regarded as a good thing, particularly if you are a startup which uses data). But, to be sure, we can just punish the government for ever releasing any data unless it had such a high fee attached that only h…

You can download the data behind the interface here:

ftp://ftp2.census.gov/

My point being that the census data is independent of factfinder.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#53

Post by jbooth »

jacoblyles wrote: post #34
slurgfest wrote: post #13

That figure is clearly not for an Android app, that is a clear misrepresentation. Who knows how it breaks down. This exposes a vast amount of queryable census data to the public (something which would normally be regarded as a good thing, particularly if you are a startup which uses data). But, to be sure, we can just punish the government for ever releasing any data unless it had such a high fee attached that only h…

Sometimes the truth is partisan. The government really doesn't have any incentive to be efficient, and really does dump giant amounts of money into a bonfire on a regular basis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

Partisan nothing. It's only partisan if you think large private corps are somehow immune to wasting money. You think IBM charges fair, efficient prices for their private consulting? Big and bloated is big and bloated, whether it's Capital-G Government or the behaloed private sector.

I'd be willing to gamble real money on the following 2 facts about this project:

1) First thing IBM did was bill themselves for a couple hundred licenses of their own software.

2) The majority of the money was pissed away in meetings, and the majority of the dev time was spent on horrible multi-thousand line stored procedures for the ETL.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#54

Post by GFischer »

JPKab wrote: post #27
GFischer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the company I work for has quotes from both CSC and Guidewire for their insurance packages (kind of an ERP for insurance companies), which would handle all of our processes, and they ran in the "tens of millions" category between licensing, implantation and other costs. You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :) Guidewire at least has h…

CSC was the prime contractor for the Air Force's attempt at an ERP. 5 years and $1 billion later, there is no ERP to speak of.

Good thing we didn't go with them, then :) .

Personally, I thought Guidewire fit our needs very well (but I'm at the very bottom of the totem pole).

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#55

Post by wmhartnett »

pcrh wrote: post #7

Interesting use of the gif there. I wonder if there will be a migration of these gifs from meme-based humor sites to more "legitimate" blogs and news sites. They are, after all, the visual equivalent to using quotes by famous people.

Then there is Hyperwocky, of course: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hyperwocky/indexhy...

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#56

Post by [deleted] »

crusso wrote: post #50
schwanksta wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misread the post. He didn't query data about an Android app. You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Please, hire me for your next job. And I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ireapps/census

> You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Apparently, he/she does. I really wish I could understand why, though. Government corruption and waste hurts us all. Why do some people blow it off so easily?

[deleted]

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#57

Post by wpietri »

cdk wrote: post #48

For simplicity let's say that IBM charges $300/hr for a consultant (developer/PM/etc). That would be about 100,000 hours of work. Let's say a consultant bills 2,000 hours a year and it takes them 18-24 months to build this thing. That would be a team of 25-30 (developers, PMs, account managers, etc). The time frame is realistic considering poor original design, scope creep and federal government counterparts not bein…

And you forgot the most important part. If the project goes to shit, people can say, "But we hired IBM!" If the government employee in charge hires a smaller company that does just as well as IBM would have, then everybody yells at the government employee.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#58

Post by _delirium »

Tangaroa wrote: post #26
jevinskie wrote: post #6

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

For $33 million, I would expect not to see "American FactFinder requires an Internet Browser with Javascript enabled." I would expect them to be able afford a developer who knows how to create links with an "a" tag rather than using Javascript to duplicate a core browser feature. Given that this is a federal website, $33 million should be more than enough money to comply with disability guidelines that forbid such sl…

> $33 million is 500 programmer man-years

Where do you live where $66k/yr the total cost of employing a programmer? I don't know what IBM uses for its internal accounting, but based on what several other large tech companies use, $200k/yr is a decent guess (including salary+benefits+overhead). That'd mean 165 man-years, and only a fraction of those 165 would be programmers, since the contract also needs to pay for managers, sales, billing, legal, etc.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#59

Post by jashkenas »

tomjen3 wrote: post #51
jashkenas wrote: post #38

For folks interested in helping solve the root cause of these sorts of things ... the White House is looking for people to help build a streamlined procurement process: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfpez ... hopefully making it possible for vendors build government web projects with bids for less than $150k, instead of millions of dollars per web site.

Sorry, but for a hacker streamlining procurement procedures sounds like a huge and extreemly boring timesink. Wouldn't this be something an mba would love anyway?

Some folks might consider it a boring timesink. But it also happens to be the important meta-problem that stands between us and increased government transparency and accessibility. Take almost any government data set, request / report interface, tax service, or help center you can imagine. It's very hard to believe that we'll ever have a quality online version without first fixing the procurement process.

Re: Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

#60

Post by wpietri »

tlear wrote: post #43
HotKFreshSwag wrote: post #8

Does anyone know what something similar would cost a large private corporation?

For just webapp? about order of magnitude less I think 3-4mil . Still way too much

That's what it should cost. But I have seen large companies blow similar amounts of money on even less useful systems. And heard enough stories from friends to know that such fuckups are common in the corporate world.
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