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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

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Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#111

Post by hythloday »

lifeguard wrote: post #52
ams6110 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, a database-backed web app works just fine on a Microsoft stack, there are thousands of them out there and I say that as someone who vastly prefers unix but this is clearly a project management fiasco and architecture design fiasco, not a technology stack fundamentally unable to handle the demands.

I agree the MS stack works fine in the dev lab.

Stack Overflow (you may have heard of them) runs a Windows stack with Linux used only for caching & logging (because it's "cheap").

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo... http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch...

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#112

Post by chernevik »

DanBC wrote: post #30
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

> Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management skills and who he hired to run things. Wait, what? There's a difference between people taking responsibility for what their staff do (thus, he should take responsibility for it) and people actually being responsible for what their staff do - especially if those staff are not staff but sub-contracted service providers.

Leaders have to allocate attention to detail based on the strategic importance of that detail. The innovative application completely supplanting traditional Election Day strike list processes? The CEO had better be assured that's going to work by several different checks, and by multiple sources. Even then he probably had better have some backups in place.

I voted for Romney and yeah, this does have me reconsidering just how competent he is.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#113

Post by rhizome »

acslater00 wrote: post #29
meepmorp wrote: post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.

"The buck stops...somewhere else."

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#114

Post by rhizome »

lifeguard wrote: post #35
niels_olson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SharePoint. Oh my head. When I saw us using that in the future ops center for Fukushima, it was the same feeling I had when I came back from sea duty and there was this thing called PowerPoint: I felt like they were asking me to put my brain in egg slicer. Giving a bunch of Marines with history degrees network and expecting them to understand version control is a step to far. Maybe in ten years. But the interface is…

And then a 18 yo REMF downloads all your secret classified documents and uploads them to the Internet.

Due to security policies ordered by a 48 yo REMF.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#115

Post by inthewoods »

smsm42 wrote: post #104
pyoung wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a magnitude of difference between the two. When you run a top heavy campaign to get elected and a critical project fails miserably, that falls on you. When you preside over a government that consists of a large number of relatively autonomous agencies and departments, and something goes wrong deep inside one of them, that falls on the project managers and department heads. To provide some scale, Romney's cam…

Eric Holder is not one of 4 million. Eric Holder is a personal selection. It's not like it is a random failure in some lowly backwater office. It is a failure and a coverup going to the very top - to people personally appointed by the President. So if you think people are responsible for a mobile app done for them - then they should be responsible for the mess in their administration too. And if we start counting how…

No, there is an accusation that there is a cover up going on - this has not been proven in any sense.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#116

Post by rhizome »

gamble wrote: post #79
SkyMarshal wrote: post #32

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, * etc...* This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup t…

Politico's article on ORCA today claims that one of the major problems was that they deployed the system in their election night HQ just prior to the election, and the surge of legitimate traffic on election day triggered their DDOS defences. They'd never tested it in that location with realistic traffic levels.

Deployed just prior: poor project management; late delivery.

DDOS defense: crashing

realistic traffic levels: more than the 3 ppl on the coding team

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#118

Post by rdtsc »

brianchu wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cynic would say that this is just the software consulting version of what management consultants like Romney do.

Yes and no. On one hand, management consultants are typically working with the executives of a company, and usually one of those executives will have been a former consultant (the executive boardrooms of companies are filled with them). Not to mention that both consultants and executives usually have the same set of "skills." On the other hand, one former management consultant I spoke to told me that executives would…

Yap pretty much. There was an article from an insider about how these large consulting firms work.

They are hired in order to protect against liability. They are paid money to say what clients want to hear (but in an official "report" and "power point format") and then if shit hits the fan executives can always point to "But look we hired the best of the best, these experts all agreed we should go this, so it is clearly not our fault".

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#119

Post by rhizome »

Jare wrote: post #81
atomical wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people who make mistakes can still run the entire USA. It has been done before.

This "mistake" is what most people would call 'utter incompetence'.

"Utter incompetence" is composed of more than one mistake.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#120

Post by SkyMarshal »

ams6110 wrote: post #43
SkyMarshal wrote: post #27

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1... I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

It's a stretch to think that a functioning mobile app on election day would have made the difference between Romney winning and losing. The election wasn't really that close. And I say that as someone who voted for him.

It's not a stretch to think that a functioning GOP GOTV campaign could have made the difference in 4 swing states that tipped the election to Obama (CO, FL, OH, VA), where the vote differential was just under 400,000.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/as-natio...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au5WjgbQnYrSdFd...

Romney had 37,000 field volunteers, plus phone bank. I don't know how many were in each of the four tipping point states, but had each of them been able to bring in between 10 and 20 voters who didn't vote (of the 2 million extra who voted for McCain in 2008 but were absent this year), Romney could have won.

Instead it sounds like due to the massive Orca failure, they all gave up and went home.

(and fwiw, I say this as someone who voted for Obama. Not sour grapes here, just assessing the IT project failure.)

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