The way government does tech is outdated and risky • Hacker News Board

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#21

Post by nraynaud » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:09 PM UTC

jarrett wrote: post #5

I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I'm a bit wary of this "open-source is magic" mantra, that's putting a lot of cooks in the burning kitchen. Open-source means community management, public relations with opiniatred people, Linus-grade emails, and if you have really a big participation but no strong leader, it ends up like GNU hurd (is it dead yet ?).

It's all about organization, and trying to have just enough people to get the work done and nobody more, and the right people, and this has nothing to do with open or closed source.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#22

Post by squidfood » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:09 PM UTC

joshdick wrote: post #20

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,…

Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.

Yes. I should have added that I understand the need for basic checks and auditing (and that the public expects us to be uniformly fraudulent as well as incompetent), but that the level of checks and removal from the process of experts who know requirements goes far beyond this need.

It's really all about optics rather than reasonable checks - no department wants to be the one that Congress targets, so especially in poisonous political environments the "checks" are significantly more expensive IMO than the actual "waste, fraud, and abuse" they guard against.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#23

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:10 PM UTC

joshdick wrote: post #20

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,…

Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.

[deleted]

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#24

Post by adestefan » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:11 PM UTC

jcromartie wrote: post #14

jarrett wrote: post #5

I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…

This is called "teaming", and it's a big game of you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours in gov't contracting.

This also has to do with the laws that mandate projects over a certain size need to have x% of small businesses, y% of veteran owned business, etc.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#25

Post by apendleton » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:12 PM 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,…

I just had a conversation with a federal employee last week talking about the issue of procurement offices being a blackbox and procurement officers not understanding the technical specifics of what they're bidding out. His solution was just to become certified as a procurement officer (apparently it's 72 hours of coursework) and deal with the bids himself. He said these kinds of problems have pretty much disappeared for him since then.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#26

Post by phy6 » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:12 PM UTC

joshdick wrote: post #20

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,…

Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.

And like most things with government, you end up getting both: the bureaucracy to prevent cronyism as well as the cronyism. Speaking from experience. Sure it might be more obvious if the bureaucracy wasn't in place, but it's still there.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#27

Post by adestefan » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:13 PM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #6

bchjam wrote: post #2

Does anyone else find it ironic that Obama's campaign was a picture of web execution but in his administration it's the opposite?

Only people who don't know how the government works.

Or the laws that are put in place mandating certain requirements for contracting and acquisition. It's a fucking mess.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#28

Post by apendleton » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:13 PM UTC

joshdick wrote: post #20

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,…

Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence. Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.

The irony is that they don't really do that. It's common in both procurement and hiring in the federal government to see bizarrely-specific requirements whose fairly transparent intention is to limit the potential bidder or applicant pool to a single company or individual.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#29

Post by danso » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:13 PM UTC

If this is the software that's developed for millions of public users, imagine the software developed for in-house use, where the users are too few and too unsavvy to see how the software could be better (this is the case with most businesses, not just government)...this applies to basic information processing and to software interfaces for our sophisticated weapon systems.

And even the software for info systems can have dangerous consequences. Does anyone remember the underwear bomber, who almost brought down a plane and caused a nice surge of invasive security measures afterwards? His own father exposed him, but the State Dept's visa system failed to find the terrorist because someone misspelled his name when entering it into the system

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/08/terror.suspect.visa/i...

Think about it...the State Dept has been dealing with foreign terrorists well before 9/11, whose names are easily misspelled by Westerners...there's not even a consistent way to spell Osama bin Laden, depending on you interpret he phonetics. And yet no one thought that a fuzzy spellcheck would be useful, apparently. And a whole bunch of people almost died because of it (and the security apparatus greatly increased)

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#30

Post by Iftheshoefits » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 8:15 PM UTC

jarrett wrote: post #5

I would also add that the project had too many cooks in the kitchen, by some accounts. I have heard there were upwards of 50 distinct companies subcontracting on this project. I work on projects that are probably on par in terms of complexity. We typically only involve a handful of firms. And even then, coordinating them all is a challenge. I can't fathom making the process work with 50+ firms. Maybe that number was…

This is just the way government contracting works. The "Prime Contractor" is often explicitly required to subcontract out a "meaningful" portion of the work to sub-contractors for a variety of reasons. Mostly because, as touched on in the article, the DoD/lobbyist revolving door has legislated a huge system of what is effectively corporate welfare in the form of contracting. The government throws money and a few "senior engineers" and management staff to oversee the Prime, and the Prime does the a similar thing to oversee the subs, plus some higher-level integration work (which may or may not require a significant staff), and the subs frequently either buy pre-made "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS) and sell it at a markup (a big markup) or are selling their own "COTS" product to the Prime (that they develop with in-house/contracted staff), also at a substantial markup.

The public reason for this crap is that the system is supposed to be structured to make sure that accountability exists, favoritism is minimized, and employment is boosted (by spreading out the work). The reality is that the system is designed to maximize the enrichment of the lobbyist-connected owners of the contractors.