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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

#81

Post by danso »

smackfu wrote: post #46
debacle wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300 man-years of development is crazy huge for almost any software project I can think of.

You don't think Apple or Microsoft or Adobe or Facebook have 300 developers working on their projects? Just saying, 300 man years isn't that much, considering every full time employee working on a project for a year is a man year by definition.

Yeah, but...any of those aforementioned companies produce products which each generate more usage in a day than the FactFinder likely generates in a month or even a year.

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

#82

Post by crusso »

jbooth wrote: post #67
crusso wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yeah, they should just have private subcontractors handle this stuff. Like IBM Federal or someone.

Well, since the government is the one that set up the whole game including how much they would pay for the work, how sub-contractors would be chosen, what methods would be use to ensure accountability and a quality product, etc. -- I think the target of your sarcasm is misplaced.

By the time IBM Federal got the project and could start coding, some bureaucracy of failure had already decided that $33M was a fair price for the specifications that they provided.

I know people who work on government projects like these. I know how the subcontractors are chosen. I can almost guarantee that the subcontractor who received this job had some special "in" with the decision maker on the government side through nepotism, trips to strip clubs, cash payouts, political connections, or something.

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

#83

Post by _delirium »

w1ntermute wrote: post #79
JPKab wrote: post #11

The software is a "steaming pile of shit"? Of course, it was built by IBM Federal. Building software for U.S. gov't contractors is an awful, awful experience. The end result is the talented leave as soon as they can, because working in a red tape environment with ridiculous Information Assurance (that's gov't speak for their own ludicrous security theater that is their IT security process) policies makes you want to…

> defense contractors have to meet quotas for hiring veterans Wow, that's gotta be one of the most boneheaded govt policies I've heard of. Is this because of some kind of patriotic "duty" to keep veterans off the streets? In my experience, a lot of veterans would have ended up on the streets even if they hadn't joined the military - in fact, many joined the military specifically so they wouldn't end up on the streets…

I don't believe there's an explicit quota (I could be wrong), but the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 added certain affirmative-action requirements relating to government contractors hiring Vietnam vets, which was later expanded to all vets.

From a brief skim of since-1974 stuff on the subject, it looks like much of it may result from bipartisan-coalition politics: you often see "disabled and veterans" joined together in laws and rulemaking as a group, probably as horsetrading where liberals get something pro-disabled, and conservatives get something pro-veteran.

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

#84

Post by mseebach »

BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #78
wpietri wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be something awesome to work on. I'm in software to make a difference, and dropping a digit or two off the cost of government projects could be quite an impact.

More money to allocate to the defense budget!

If that's the democratically decided priority and it can be achieved without cutting other budgets, raising taxes or running a deficit, then that's a good thing.

Conversely, fighting a bloated military by wasting money on IT boondoggles is not a strategy with a whole lot of long term potential IMO.

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

#85

Post by keypusher »

binarycrusader wrote: post #70
_delirium wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $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 ma…

The midwest (Kansas, Missouri, so on...)? Seriously. $40K a year annual salary, and if you add in all the benefits, that might hit $66K.

Total employee cost is much greater than just salary.

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

#86

Post by crusso »

_delirium wrote: post #40
crusso wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet when anyone talks about cutting a dime out of the federal budget, the cries of "You're starving poor people!" and such dominate the political discussions. There isn't even a little bit of common sense or honesty in the way the government spends our money and people wonder why some of us are so adamantly opposed to raising taxes.

This doesn't really seem like a public/private difference, but an enterprise/non-enterprise difference: Fortune500 firms are no more efficient than government contracting is, really. While it's a lot in other contexts, $33m for a custom enterprise software project, even one that seems like it ought to cost much less, is pretty middle-of-the-road as a price.

Having worked at a company that's top 20 in the Fortune500 and having a good friend who does government contract work... you have absolutely no clue about what you're talking about in terms of the relative amount of waste exercised by government vs corporate entities.

The fundamental reason why there's such a difference in efficiency between private efforts and government ones is this:

Private companies that are horrible at managing efficiency go out of business. People in private companies who are horrible at managing efficiency lose their jobs.

Government agencies that are horrible at managing efficiency get bigger budgets. Government employees who are horrible at managing efficiency rarely lose their jobs. The GSA scandal is the only one in recent history that has received any kind of real attention; and that's only because the idiots at the GSA made videos the went viral.

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

#87

Post by anigbrowl »

wmhartnett wrote: post #3
Mizza wrote: post #2

Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.

Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."

I'm waiting for someone to close the loop by complaining about the cost of FOIA compliance as a contributor to overall project cost.

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

#88

Post by adrr »

aggronn wrote: post #14

This is disgusting. I've had to use it extensively for research, and while it 'gets the job done', its such a pain to use. I've asked myself who put this together, and I always assumed it was a team of interns working across a decade for each version. I can't believe this is the best they could do for $33 million. I just can't. They better have some slick stuff under the hood.

NYTimes paywall cost $40m. Heard bank software refactor can easily exceed 100m and take many years. I've personally seen 25m project fail and the code thrown away. Its not uncommon especially when you have 3 to 4 "support" people per developer especially when dealing with a bunch of stake holders aka executives with fragile egos.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

crusso wrote: post #82
jbooth wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they should just have private subcontractors handle this stuff. Like IBM Federal or someone.

Well, since the government is the one that set up the whole game including how much they would pay for the work, how sub-contractors would be chosen, what methods would be use to ensure accountability and a quality product, etc. -- I think the target of your sarcasm is misplaced. By the time IBM Federal got the project and could start coding, some bureaucracy of failure had already decided that $33M was a fair price…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by _delirium »

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?

Sure, I'd like to reduce government corruption and waste. However, I think most of the problems relate to scale and bureaucracy, not the public/private distinction. I've seen enough of how large multinational companies work to have my doubts about the private sector's efficiency and honesty, as well.

I suspect a lot of people opposed to "government" and "taxes" in some general sense have ulterior motives, mostly relating to libertarian ideology ("taxation is theft", etc.) or just plain not liking to pay taxes... as opposed to honestly assessing the efficiency of different organizations.

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