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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

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121–130 of 200 posts

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

#121
In the past week, there's been discussion of how sophisticated the campaigns are at managing and leveraging the vast volumes of data they collect. I've argued that while they may have lots of data, and that they think they're being sophisticated with it, the results don't seem to indicate that they're particularly clever (or, more importantly, clever enough to be devious with it).

Having access to data is one thing...having the logistics and middle managers who have good insights is the other. I think it's safe to say that no matter how much money and resources these operations have, it doesn't mean anything without campaign operatives who have a real IT/data background.

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

#122
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Well, one could argue that there were a few other mistakes, some quite public, that Romney made leading to the election.

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

#123

No one should allow a business or non-profit to face a situation like this. Only bad managers put something so important into such difficult circumstances. Why go live the day of the election? Are they insane? Unless the contract (to build this application) had some kind of clause like "This thing must work perfectly or all the money will be refunded" then this is a great contract to get. Let us consider this cynical…

>I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople... Anecdotally, this is exactly how large consultancies, particularly those who specialize in serving the public sec…

Was this a talented sales pitch or just your standard politics and an old boys club connection? No mention of the consulting company.. If it was my campaign, I'd hang them out to dry.

Seems the IT staff was out of their depth but there were some very serious and very fundamental issues if the users were confused as it sounds.

I say it as a joke but a barbed one: this guy thinks he was fit to manage a nation when he couldn't knock out a web app for 30000 users!?! Really?

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If there is anything a president's job isn't , it is to micromanage.

That excuse covers just about anything.

There's a big difference between micromanaging and verifying that your critical infrastructure is in place when you launch.

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

#125
How effective these things actually are in US?

Why am I asking... I am in from Czech Republic, where I can't imagine anyone knocking door over door and asking people to vote. Actually, this behavior is so connected here to Jehova's Witnesses (yeah) that it would have only the negative effect.

Similarly, I can't imagine any candidate seriously considering calling random people and persuading them to vote. Again, this behaviour is so connected to annoying salesperson (most often mobile operators) that it would hurt the candidate.

And I don't think our democracy suffers because we don't have that in here.

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

#126
post #102
post #96

[deleted]

Where Ace of Spades HQ says it's the reason for the Romney defeat? Here's their article: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php Nowhere in it it is said that Romney was defeated because of this.

The Ace of Spades post suggests that Orca was a key reason for the defeat (though it doesn't explicitly assert it). The post attacks Orca and asks "If this had worked could it have closed the gap?"

Erick Erickson makes the suggestion more strongly. He points to the "Ace of Spades" post and uses it to reject the possibility that the election was a defeat for "conservatism". In http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/09/the-only-thing-you-need-t... he says that "the biggest problem the Republicans had on Tuesday night was not demographics, but turnout operations."

The post on Breitbart makes a similar suggestion and leads with "As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely."

Orca is just the latest reason I've heard, previous theories (from staunch conservatives) can be best summarized by what I heard Charles Krauthammer say on Fox News (on election day). He dismissed the defeat by describing Romney as a "northeastern liberal".

[edit] See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11... “I’m very surprised, as digital guy, about the pushback people are getting” over Orca, Moffatt said. “This didn’t materially change the course of the election.”

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

#127
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.

If he can't pick a reliable deputy to manage a single IT project how could he possibly manage a government? The President has to delegate well: Mitt either couldn't or didn't place a key service under someone reliable.

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

#128
post #77

Perhaps Republicans should have spent more time actually displaying the business and organizational acumen and discipline that they claimed as an advantage over the Obama team, and less time suppressing the black vote. Snark postscriptum: Also, next time, GOP, you might wanna hire some IT guys who make more than $12 an hour.

You don't even want to think how much more than $12/hour they paid. Big consulting companies are usually $200+ for fresh grads whose best work happens on PowerPoint slides

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

#129
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGP-VAN, which is probably the most important company in the Democratic sphere, uses a Microsoft stack. And it didn't lead to a spate of post-election recriminations about how its tech fell apart.

Using the MS stack for a situation where you will have huge spikes of activity on an app with an expected lifespan of less than 24 hours is not best practice.

I'm an open source developer – working on Linux servers since 1997 or so, etc. etc. Please stop what you're doing: it's not very funny and it's not helpful, but it does give OSS people a bad reputation.

You can host plenty of high volume things on Microsoft's code – Azure, Bing, etc. have proven scale. We can argue about cost, ease of use, etc. but a decent team should have no trouble making a serious service. The problem here is that they didn't hire a decent team – from the sounds of it, it was the usual executive-level schmoozing and managerial incomplete you see throughout large organizations of every type. They could have used HN'a favorite stack and failed just as hard.

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you determine using Windows was a mistake from the information presented in the article ?

"Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism. Also, from the article, project failed. Failure is regularly equated with having made mistakes.

> "Using Windows was a mistake" is a truism

If you use or have used StackOverflow or Newegg, realize that you too are using Windows. Projects' success and failure is much more correlated with the folks running them than the technologies they use.

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