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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

#51

Post by wikiburner »

josefresco wrote: post #36
wikiburner wrote: post #4

Scaling on the web is basically a solved issue for sites with such limited functionality. Even the CIA is using AWS, so I can't believe the regulatory and security hurdles were prohibitive. To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful: "The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single…

Beware of potentially politically motivated garbage quotes. The referenced Washington Post article quoted an "insurance industry official" who would only speak anonymously: “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administrat…

How about the CBS video linked above? Or the links below? Or the countless other media accounts of the launch being a "complete disaster"? Or all the comments on this very page of HNers not being able to use the site?

Not even the administration's biggest defenders are trying to spin this as a successful launch.

Are you really implying the media as a whole is biased against Obama?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505269_162-57606633/obamacare-we...

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/poll-rollout-health-exchanges...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#52

Post by smackfu »

Osmium wrote: post #8
Tloewald wrote: post #7

> 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…

Sounds awesome! I'll put in a bid, then hire the cheapest programmers I can to make it look like I did some work, then of course I'll lose the competition and still get paid for 3 months. Repeat and you have a viable business. And you never need to actually support software after the 3 months is up.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#53

Post by mark_l_watson »

I lost my group health plan, which I had for fifteen years, recently so I has experienced the web site first hand :-)

My latest complaint: I logged in many times last week to fill in information, a bit at a time before I lost access.

Then starting Sunday morning I could no longer login. On the phone last night I was told that they had wiped all stored passwords and to follow the "I don't remember my password" link. Couldn't they have posted that as a huge banner message and let people know? I had four days of frustration trying to login.

Then, when I got the reset password link, and followed it, one of the profile verification questions they asked for resetting my password WAS A QUESTION THAT I HAD NOT BEEN ASKED so I had no way to answer it. I wrote down my profile questions so I am fairly sure of this. wTF

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#54

Post by dfc »

JPKab wrote: post #25
ck2 wrote: post #2

If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 over…

It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but…

There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful.

What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#55

Post by penguat »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #42
zachrose wrote: post #37

There are a lot of interesting things to say about a $634M website that didn’t work when it should have, but what pops out at me here is the description of “poorly written code.” This article even links directly to some of the code, which A) looks fine? and B) is like “Yeah, the problem wasn’t with procurement regulations or clear requirements or public-private cronyism or managerial competence, it was that damn pers…

Here is my personal experience with some of that "poorly written" code: http://www.postlibertarian.com/2013/10/yes-the-obamacare-web... > the text on the sign-up page, the front-end javascript validation on the sign-up page, and the text on the help page all have different requirements for valid usernames in the database!

That sounds like poor BA/spec work. BA asks: "what do we need from this username". BA should ask "what do we need from usernames overall"?

It's always going to be hard to be agile on federal contracts - there're too many customers to really get a clear view from them.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#56

Post by smackfu »

ck2 wrote: post #2

If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 over…

>It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for

It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#57

Post by tokenadult »

National Public Radio had a good report on 8 October 2013, "Health Exchange Tech Problems Point To A Thornier Issue,"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/10/08/230424...

that discusses the broader issue of United States federal government contracting for information technology services. Some reforms are suggested in that story that would help more competent startup companies compete against the established federal contractors that win most of the big contracts. The specialized skill that the incumbents bring to the contracting process is not specialized skill in data-processing or programming for federal agencies, but rather specialized skill in navigating the federal bureaucracy for bidding on federal contracts.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#58

Post by 001sky »

ck2 wrote: post #2

If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for: http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y... Given how we can see the problem with this as developers, imagine what we don't understand about the 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 over…

for only 50k parallel connections

Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#59

Post by sehugg »

josefresco wrote: post #36
wikiburner wrote: post #4

Scaling on the web is basically a solved issue for sites with such limited functionality. Even the CIA is using AWS, so I can't believe the regulatory and security hurdles were prohibitive. To spend this kind of money on sites with these kinds of results is just disgraceful: "The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the 'single…

Beware of potentially politically motivated garbage quotes. The referenced Washington Post article quoted an "insurance industry official" who would only speak anonymously: “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one insurance industry official, who like many in the industry, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for possibly offending the Obama administrat…

I would think WaPo has plenty of sources, and if anyone was wiling to speak on the record they would have published those quotes.

Re: We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404

#60

Post by mseebach »

d23 wrote: post #43
mseebach wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally: get government out of the business of procuring custom software and shift to procuring outcomes. Something like these healthcare exchanges should have been put to the market in a from where the revenue is directly tied to the end goal: The successful purchase of health insurance by customers (or whatever is the case here, I'm not intimately familiar with the mechanics). Have providers bid on the full thing…

Yeah, because you're going to get the highest quality from firms that want to do completely speculative work. That's why 99 designs has the best designs, right? If you know you're the best, you'll compete for free!

It's not speculative? If the work achieves the stated end-goal-metric ("A citizen of the state of South Tennechigan can purchase a health insurance plan subject to the given constraints.") the operator is awarded the revenue offered ("$150 per successfully sold health insurance plan").

Think of it as a feed-in tariff. If you successfully purchase, install and connect a solar panel, and the panel feeds power into the grid, you're paid. If not, because you screw up any of these steps, you don't get paid. If you make a substandard installation (say, in the shadow or on a north-facing roof), you get paid less. The only thing that matters is the desired end goal: solar power is fed into the grid. You carry the risk, you get paid for the result.

The idea is that (at least in these cases) it's much, much easier to describe and document a desired outcome than to accurately describe and anticipate all the variables that potentially affects the outcome.

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