The way government does tech is outdated and risky • Hacker News Board

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#101

Post by moron4hire » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 1:38 AM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #71

moron4hire wrote: post #53

The problem is not necessarily Waterfall, it's people's unimaginative approach to it. I've done plenty of projects for clients that wanted a Waterfall methodology, and I did it by writing the documentation and the prototyping code at the same time. In other words, Agile fits inside Waterfall. The requirements gathering phase in Waterfall projects is so incredibly long that you can definitely afford to make a prototyp…

With the government, depending on how "involved" your customer is in the contract, they might have a shitfit if they find out you are doing this. As another poster in this section noted, there are plenty of government and quasi-government[1] employees who seriously believe that you can't start writing code until you have defined all your requirements and prepared a design to meet those requirements. [1] People who wo…

You are right, which is why I don't actually do government contracts anymore. It's just too easy to end up working for a complete, abject moron.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#102

Post by hga » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 1:41 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #98

hga wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. The government, which took the role of integrator, kept making requirements changes, right through the week before launch. They also did integration testing ... and of course ignored that that failed hard. I can't see any way CGI Federal et. al. could have won.

> The government ... kept making requirements changes So, just like every client every developer ever had?

If they were all that bad we'd never get anything done.

In drafting the above I removed some thoughts about CGI Federal pushing back, since that struck me as something that probably wouldn't work in this context. But I for one have pushed back on clueless customers before, saying the usual "this change will cost time, money and/or quality".

Or, heck, I'll bet CGI did some push back, but there's no reason to believe the inexperienced bureaucrats and political appointees in HHS and CMS would have listened to them. We've been reliably told they were told it was going to hell, and there's that one fed who switching in March to "I hope it won't be a Third World experience" which I take as a sign he saw trouble on the horizon.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#103

Post by saraid216 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:07 AM UTC

allochthon wrote: post #95

nostromo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue. With such a large organization, there…

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us." I agree -- this is not a simple challenge. But I don't think stultifying bureaucracy is the answer, either. There must be some government out there, somewhere in the world, that has sorted out an efficient, effective procurement process.

> But I don't think stultifying bureaucracy is the answer, either.

Something that seems hard for people to grasp is that "stultifying bureaucracy" wasn't an "answer". It's the natural consequence of not having an answer. We have the luxury of sitting back on an Internet forum pontificating on the drudgery; they have to enact the laws that Congress passed.

> There must be some government out there, somewhere in the world, that has sorted out an efficient, effective procurement process.

The main examples of the same scale and scope as the US are Brazil, China, Russia, and India. All of these have been regularly painted as worse: more corrupt, more stonewalling, more favoritism. Whether that's just American propaganda or if there are specific processes that can be imported without breaking things is worth examining.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#104

Post by jasiek » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:34 AM UTC

squidfood wrote: post #17

Federal Gov employee here. Can't speak for a project with this scope, but the procurement middlemen get into everything, far for the worse. Two years ago our team wanted to buy a small cluster (~300 cores, ~$50K). We talked directly to two good vendors (good recommendations from university partners) and came up with a fine machine and 2 bids for it. Sent recommendations to procurement. Procurement put it out for bid,…

Yup. The heavy equipment process create an additional barrier to entry. If you want to bid for a govt contract, you need to hire someone who has done it before, otherwise you'll drown in paperwork. What's really sad about this situation is that it is stable - eg. existing stakeholders (contractors & govt procurement personnel) will work hand in hand to ensure that the process stays in place - the former to make more money and the latter to retain their jobs.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#105

Post by mwsherman » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:44 AM UTC

squidfood wrote: post #62

nostromo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue. With such a large organization, there…

> Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us." Didn't mean to imply that any sufficiently large organization shouldn't have an audit trail and reasonable accountability!

I would offer that those two concepts are optimized for ex-post-facto blame. It’s not simply gov’t, as you point out, it’s large organizations.

To contrast this with more modern techniques, ‘audit trail’ is simply source control. And most of us don’t go into source control looking for a smoking gun.

It’s rarely necessary if a process is agile/iterative. Bugs will be (relatively) small and recent in time. So the notion of going back six months and figuring out ‘what went wrong’ is just not a thing. Wrong happens every day, in small amounts, transparently.

Conversely, a bug if truly large and undetected, and explodes a year from its creation, then the whole team is to blame. We’ve all looked at the code hundreds of times in that period.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#106

Post by samspot » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:54 AM UTC

I have respect for people who are doing waterfall and admit to it. In my personal sphere I see far too many people talking agile all day while actually running waterfall projects. It seems like people think agile means "waterfall, but skip most of the upfront planning".

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#107

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 3:15 AM UTC

john_b wrote: post #65

njharman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any market based solution website has to very agile and responsive This is provably false by visiting any number of old, large company websites, esp in healthcare or banking. In addition the government isn't in this kind of business, it outsources almost everything to "free market" companies, who extract as much margin as they and their lobbyists can get away with. Complexity has much more to do with size of and nu…

Large companies in well established industries sometimes operate with near monopoly power and are only threatened when the entire industry undergoes a long term, permanent change. Most people don't consider such a situation a functioning, healthy market. Healthcare and banking are two great examples of industries whose dynamics tend to result in a small number of powerful entities calling the shots, the former due to…

Bad software development processes are everywhere. I've seen more than one successful companies that aren't massive corporations futz around and produce garbage. I've also seen highly effective government organizations produce some awesome product.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#108

Post by saraid216 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 3:29 AM UTC

drblast wrote: post #50

sien wrote: post #43

It's not just the US government that has crazy, weird, inefficient technology. I'd be surprised if every government wasn't like this. The biggest IT failure in the world was the UK's attempt at healthcare computing that cost 12Bn GBP and didn't deliver a functioning system. I work as a contractor for the Australian government. I personally know of multiple project failures in the 10s of millions of AUD range and a fe…

I kind of like the idea of every government function has two independent providers that compete for funding, and citizens could choose which provider to use. I'm sure that system would blow up in some other way, however.

> I kind of like the idea of every government function has two independent providers that compete for funding

This is what the current government contractor system looks like.

> and citizens could choose which provider to use.

And how would we receive these choices? Balloting is a government function... Should we ask Diebold?

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#109

Post by scotth » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 3:31 AM UTC

cfinke wrote: post #92

peterjancelis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my backyard syndrome.

You mean Not Invented Here.

I kind of like Not In My Backyard as an opposite to NIH.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#110

Post by saraid216 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 3:38 AM UTC

So, for everyone who feels that they have anything resembling a better solution, I'd suggest that you go and actually try implementing it at a smaller scale first. Start with your homeowners' association, your neighborhood, or your nearest town. You'll have relatively few people to convince, more access to decision makers and funding sources, and less capable contractors gaming your system.

Get that down, and then get several neighboring communities--again, HOAs, neighborhoods, or towns--and get them to adopt your ideas as well. With that amount of variation, you've got a strong base from which you can convince a major city, or a county, to adopt your ideas: after all, many of their constituents are already on it and can endorse it.

This isn't meaningfully different from founding a startup taking on governments as clients.