It definitely seems like the amount of money the government spends on projects like this starts out at something outrageous no matter how complex.
We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
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Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#12Site just crashed my IE8.
Generally I have had nicer experience with most sites developed under Obama administration like wh.gov and such.
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#13Interestingly CGI is a Canadian company...
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#14I'll never understand how it's possible that government web sites cost so much, yet usually look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack (at least in my country). I always get the feeling that companies that win the contracts are somehow related to people responsible for the decision, it's like "Hey, it's not our money, so let's milk the budget as much as possible!".
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#15> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.
How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing o…
I'm all for it -- good old free market and whatnot, but... how exactly would one pick the most promissing project? Do we have any undisputable metric of project progress (both completeness and quality) yet?
Would we judge competing projects by kLOC? By percentage of code coverage? By extensibility of architecture? By percentage of GUI widgets already laid yout (even if just mocked up)? Or perhaps by conformance to an arbitrary test suite -- which raises the good old `Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' problem?
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#16Interestingly CGI is a Canadian company...
CGI Federal is run mostly independently to get around the laws preventing foreign companies from bidding on US government contracts. Source: I used to work there.
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#17> the factors that play into which companies receive government contracts, a process called “procurement,” are fundamentally broken This.
How would you fix it? I could imagine a competitive process, e.g. pay a number of different companies to start producing their solution in parallel. And then at the end of 3 months, pick the one(s) that looks the most promising and pay them to continue with it. It sounds wasteful, but I just don't see a better way, because people seem incapable of judging beforehand which companies are actually capable of providing o…
I think that this plus open source. If anything should be open source it's anything built for governments.
I should note that the project I'm on did use this approach, but having picked winners it then proceeded to monkey with the teams constantly and generally screw everything up anyway.
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#18As has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago:
https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#19I'll never understand how it's possible that government web sites cost so much, yet usually look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack (at least in my country). I always get the feeling that companies that win the contracts are somehow related to people responsible for the decision, it's like "Hey, it's not our money, so let's milk the budget as much as possible!".
It's because they're procured based on verifiable requirements, and yet there's no way to specify a verifiable requirement for user interaction.
Security is almost the same. 'Must be secure!'. Unless they procure and schedule independent penetration testing and code audit (if they even get the code), the vendor is able to deliver insecure code with a horrible UI and still be 100% within the terms of the contract.
The reason government doesn't do more agile is because the politics of the stakeholders can get crazy, with the end result being constantly shifting goal posts and nothing delivered. So they require Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS - give us something that already works), and yet due to the requirements... there's always significant customization required. I wish someone in government understood this : P
Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404
#20This is absolutely nothing compared to what they waste on technology in DOD...
I'd be happy if they were actually "wasting it on technology", but this seems like corrupt money, going into the pockets of big corporations for very little and poor work. They probably charge at least 10x what it's worth on the market, and do work that is worse than the average on the market. It helps that the people signing these contracts are either clueless or don't care, since it's not their money.