Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by cmccabe » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:15 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #134

inthewoods wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think Holder claiming the email having words "Fast and Furious" doesn't talk about Operation Fast and Furious, and his and Obama's refusal to comply with document request is ample evidence of coverup going on. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20115038-10391695.html Read the docs yourself and try to explain how comes Holder says he did not hear about F&F until 2011 when these documents are from 2010 and are add…

This whole "fast and furious" thing is just mind-bogglingly stupid. Seriously-- it takes a lot of effort to be this stupid.

Do you realize the reason why Mexican drug gangs buy guns in Arizona? It's because the gun laws there are extremely, extremely weak, to the point where random 18-year-olds can walk out of the door with $20,000 of guns, with no oversight. Who keeps the gun laws this weak? Republicans. Who then cynically try to frame Obama for a problem they created.

Even if David Voth ever asked anyone to sell a gun to a bad guy-- and if you read the Fortune article, it seems pretty clear that he probably never did-- so what? Are we going to start prosecuting undercover narcotics agents for dealing drugs? This whole thing just shows such a tremendous lack of logic that it's just... gah.

The especially ironic thing is that since the witch hunt, the ATF's seizures of weapons has dropped 90%. There will be a lot more Brian Terrys as a result of this stupidity.

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

#152

Post by crag » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:21 AM UTC

TheCondor wrote: post #123

incision wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 c…

"If it was my campaign, I'd hang them out to dry."

I doubt Romney even knew the details of this mess. I'd be surprised if he knows it now.

As is typical of many "high level" exec's; Romney relied on the wrong people.

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

#153

Post by crag » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:25 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #143

jlgreco wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unclear. I am saying that since it is not the job of a president to micromanage, it is legitimate to criticise him for fuckups he was not directly involved with. If his job were micromanaging, then "Hey, he wasn't in the room" would excuse him of responsibility, but that is not the case. Since his job would be pretty much the greatest opposite of micromanaging I can conceive of, there can be no excuse. The fail…

Let me try: The United States has the following federal executive departments: * Agriculture * Commerce * Defense * Education * Energy * Health and Human Services * Homeland Security * Housing and Urban Development * Interior * Justice * Labor * State Transportation * Treasury * Veterans Affairs Now there is literally no way you can micromanage you way through this. Nobody, and I mean nobody can possibly single hande…

But he wasn't president. Romney was managing a campaign. And a function critical to his campaign - you gonna tell me he wasn't involved? Or at least briefed?

I mean, wasn't he expecting to see the results?

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

#154

Post by fernly » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:26 AM UTC

runn1ng wrote: post #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…

Our land-line telephone received at least six calls each day for two months, from political organizations representing candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We never answer that phone, only let the answering machine take the call and return it in the very rare event it is someone "real". But we did not get calls on election day because we live in a state (CA) that both parties assumed (correctly) would give a majority to the President.

"Get out the vote" operations (GOTV) are real and sometimes effective in states where the outcome is expected to be close. In this election there were a small number of these "swing" states where both parties thought they had a chance to win.

In such states, if the early indications are that the voting is close, the party organization can redouble its efforts to contact known supporters (contributors, or merely people who are registered to that party in the public records, or people who have signed a petition or gotten on the party mailing list somehow) and persuade them to vote.

(This is because in the USA, unlike some countries, it is not mandatory to vote, and rarely do even half the eligible voters do so. So if you can persuade a person who was not planning to vote, to do so, that is a net gain of 1 vote.)

The purpose of this "Orca" system was to collate the reports from volunteers watching the polling places and identify precincts where a few extra votes might make a difference.

You can see how serious the effort was, in that the Republicans had mustered 37,000 volunteers willing to do this sort of thankless work: to stand around polling places, politely asking people how they had voted and phone in the counts; or, sit in an office and make telephone calls to people who do not want to be called and politely urge them to go and vote. That is a large effort, and apparently wasted by poor planning.

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

#155

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:27 AM UTC

chernevik wrote: post #112

DanBC wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are we sure that Romney thought this system was that critical? It could be reasoned, for instance, that it was more of a fallback mechanism than anything else; it's not very likely fervent Romney supporters were just going to forget about Election Day. The article says the system was conceptualized by two deputies, and complex organizations like this one have many moving parts; it is entirely plausible, imo, that Romney saw this project as a relatively minor component of a much larger organization, something nice to have but not crucial. After all, elections have been won without similar systems in place before.

I dislike Romney and did not vote for him (or Obama), but I don't think this should necessarily be seen as a major strategic failure. Was this project going to get Romney the 1 million + additional voters he needed? It's hard to think that Romney believes that.

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

#156

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:53 AM UTC

crag wrote: post #153

chris_wot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try: The United States has the following federal executive departments: * Agriculture * Commerce * Defense * Education * Energy * Health and Human Services * Homeland Security * Housing and Urban Development * Interior * Justice * Labor * State Transportation * Treasury * Veterans Affairs Now there is literally no way you can micromanage you way through this. Nobody, and I mean nobody can possibly single hande…

But he wasn't president. Romney was managing a campaign. And a function critical to his campaign - you gonna tell me he wasn't involved? Or at least briefed? I mean, wasn't he expecting to see the results?

Indeed. That's the exact point I was trying to convey!

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

#157

Post by unreal37 » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:53 AM UTC

PakG1 wrote: post #103

When I worked for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, it was pounded into our heads all the time that there was no second chance. Everything we did would get one chance only. For that reason, we had two Technical Rehearsals. The purpose was to test both our systems and our procedures, and identify how they could be refined for the real thing. It was someone's job to actually design a huge number of expected and unexpec…

Ironic that Mitt Romney ran the Salt Lake City Olympic committee in light of this.

Also, the Ars article seemed to imply they wanted to keep how it worked a secret, so big testing like this would have tipped Obama what they were doing.

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

#158

Post by javert » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:59 AM UTC

TheCondor wrote: post #123

incision wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 c…

Fortunatey, it's not the president's job to "manage a nation."

As a side note, an almost do-nothing president would be the best kind. (And, as a side note to the side note, that was what was intended when the office was created.)

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

#159

Post by unreal37 » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 8:03 AM UTC

modarts wrote: post #93

sliverstorm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is sharepoint generally objectionable, or simply unsuited to certain environments/workloads/userbases?

SharePoint dev here. The problem is that Microsoft attempted to build the product to cover every environment/workload/userbase, and as a result fails pretty miserably at all of them. -You want a CMS? Use SharePoint! -How about site for delivering BI dashboards? Use SharePoint! -Large, mostly static public facing site? Use SharePoint! /Ugh

That's true! I met Microsoft last year at the start of a large project for a client, and we were asking them to recommend a CMS to run in a .NET environment. They DID suggest Sharepoint. I laughed at them - "you are joking" I said. But they insisted, and we had to add Sharepoint to the shortlist of recommended CMS's just so that the client thought we considered everything their Microsoft salespeople were saying. But it was always a joke at that point.

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

#160

Post by b1daly » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 9:32 AM UTC

I think there is a connection between the sort of hand-waving, know nothing-ism of Republican political messaging and this tech fiasco.

That kind of thing might work in the soft field of persuasion, but is pretty useless in creating a complex technical system. (By know nothing-ism of the Republicans, I'm referring to the birtherism, beligerent rhetoric about complicated diplomatic issues, anti-science views about global warming, trying to paint Obama as a socialist, in general the whole "Guns, God, & Gays" type of messaging).