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My hell as a 911 operator

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Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#41

Post by megablast »

300bps wrote: post #30

Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like: They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready. Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They'…

I don't think it is just computer training, it is complete 911 training. Maybe includes emergency procedures and even simple psych profiling.

This system is disgraceful, and endemic of cheap outsourced computer systems that places like EDS have been getting away with for a long time.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#42

Post by HCIdivision17 »

300bps wrote: post #30

Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like: They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready. Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They'…

I thought it was very easy to believe. A central conceit of the piece is that the system's maddeningly insane and needlessly difficult to interact with. If the system actually worked as advertised, you would certainly be right, and no doubt that was a goal of the refactor.

But training people to deal with crashes and exceptions is very hard, especially if it is under pressure. Often, this sort of training only takes places as catastrophes happen. Imagine you're an operator, and you have to use a system that's made of failures and bugs, you're exhausted from working doubles, and you can't debug anything: when it fails you have to rely on someone else.

(I have never worked in 911 operator facilities, only industrial operations.)

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#43

Post by vxNsr »

gregd wrote: post #12
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

Pre-9-11, I spent some time doing some high-level analysis, talking to users and administrators, of a nation-wide EMS system for an entire country (Sorry, can't say which) It was a U.S. firm interested in figuring out exactly how much it would cost to create a national system so they could bid on it. This does not have to be a very complicated system at all. It's basically a real-time workflow system. Information com…

"This does not have to be a very complicated system at all. It's basically a real-time workflow system. Information comes in, is assigned a type and other data, and depending on the values is routed to various other people, which also tag and update it. " So basically SharePoint?

Exactly what I was thinking. The only question is how many tickets can Sharepoint take per minute?

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#44

Post by gregd »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #39

The sensationalism is high in this article. Operators had to record 911 calls with pen and paper I know I work all day on a computer but I wouldn't consider using pen and paper a hindrance.

Have you ever been in a 911 call center? Many, many, many things are computer driven, not the least of which is interfacing with the various agencies one may have to deal with on a per call basis. Then there's "whose jurisdiction is this"? Kind of hard to determine with pen and paper. Who's dispatched to what? Who's covering which stations now? How many calls are in the queue? The list goes on and on.

Having to record things on pen and paper is hardly sensationalism. It's more or less a worse case scenario in the 911 dispatching arena...

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#45

Post by mh- »

siculars wrote: post #17

Twitter can handle north of 4k tweets per second on virtually entirely open source software and these morons can't record phone calls. If this is not a glaring example of government mismanagement and waste I don't know what is. Where are the criminal indictments?

while Twitter's infrastructure is impressive[1] (though, not because of the tweets/second number you've cited), that is an entirely different problem set with different challenges and no regulatory/integration concerns.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-tw...

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#46

Post by milhous »

greghinch wrote: post #15
gregd wrote: post #9

Having been involved in long, arduous government procurement processes, I can assure you that it will leave you shaking your head and wondering how ANYTHING in government gets done. The trip from RFP to signed contract is maddening and has probably driven more than one government worker to an alcoholic stupor, wishing for the sweet embrace of death. On a side note, I'm no longer a government employee. My name is Greg…

When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices. Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which ess…

Large scale disruption is impossible because the government and its employees are protected by guns and the force of law, permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services.

Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace, so it's in their interest to follow orders, at whatever cost, to keep their jobs.

The best thing for young professionals is to fight the system intelligently for those that have the resources to do so, or avoid it entirely.

Edit: As is with NYC's 911 boondoggle, a SF startup could've built out an amazing system at a fraction of the price. But that wouldn't be the government thing to do. It has nothing to do with building a quality product.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#48

Post by jjindev »

Large organizations have a tendency to demand custom solutions, and then they want to throw the switch all at once. That is pretty much opposite the bottom up, self-organization, of HN themes.

If you could "bubble up" a "good enough" 911 system, it probably would be reliable and probably would scale. But the contract will be given to the company which will say they can provide a big custom solution on a deadline. It's almost worse if they believe it themselves. A dishonest vendor would at least understand the scale of the problem(s).

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#49

Post by 5vforest »

mjn wrote: post #22
greghinch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was freelancing, I did some government work. I was flabbergasted by the slow pace at which things moved, and that I had to create accounts in 3 separate systems to submit and get paid for even very basic invoices. Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them. There is a huge machine in place of contractors and lobbyists which ess…

> But certainly someone who designed infrastructure for Twitter might have some interesting perspective on how to manage 911 traffic. This program seems aimed at bringing in some of those kinds of people to government agencies: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows I think I've seen a few of them posting on HN, but I can't remember who. They seem to be especially pushing to get things like data.gov working in a…

FWIW I was one of the fellows, and happy to chat about it if anyone's interested. (contact info in my profile)

if anyone wants to help us fix the broken procurement policies that lead to systems like the one described in the article, let's talk too :)

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