The way government does tech is outdated and risky • Hacker News Board

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#61

Post by jahewson » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:47 PM UTC

crbnw00ts wrote: post #18

That diagram for the "waterfall" approach that they yanked from Wikipedia is a complete straw-man representation. It's nonsense. Here is the actual, original source for the Waterfall approach, first published in 1970: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/orig... If people would just bother to scroll past the first couple of pages, they will notice that the approach already includes some iteration c…

Yes but the waterfall paper goes out of its way to say that iteration between non-adjacent steps is a bad thing. It's still the anti-thesis to Agile.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#62

Post by squidfood » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:52 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #48

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 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!

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#63

Post by jfb » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:56 PM UTC

MartinCron wrote: post #56

crbnw00ts wrote: post #18

That diagram for the "waterfall" approach that they yanked from Wikipedia is a complete straw-man representation. It's nonsense. Here is the actual, original source for the Waterfall approach, first published in 1970: http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/orig... If people would just bother to scroll past the first couple of pages, they will notice that the approach already includes some iteration c…

The conflict isn't between "agile and well understood waterfall" it's between "agile and waterfall as understood and implemented in the real world "

Of course, there's a fourth quadrant: "agile as understood and implemented in the real world", and that probably has as much to do with the way Agile is promoted as gargantuan waterfall catastrophes do with '80s style software engineering practice.

In my jaundiced view, none of this shit works right, and we'll be much the better off the sooner we all stop pretending that buying bags of magic beans will do anything other than make a bunch of cynical grifters rich and their naïve dupes miserable.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#64

Post by JanneVee » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:57 PM UTC

leelin wrote: post #3

For the MIT alums out there, I remember a 6.170 exam that had the question: "When is it appropriate to use the waterfall model of development?" The answer was any time you are developing software for the government! The professor specifically mentioned it in lecture once, so that alone was enough for full credit on the question (other reasonable answers were fine too). Later I TA'ed the class twice and made sure to e…

One case I've heard is when you don't have any changing requirements and the domain is well known. E.g. engine control software.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#65

Post by john_b » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 9:58 PM UTC

njharman wrote: post #40

joe_the_user wrote: post #37

Has anyone noted that the government perhaps just shouldn't be in this kind of business to begin with? Any market based solution website has to be very agile and responsive [edit: to succeed at it's goal] but the government can't be super responsive and in many ways shouldn't be super responsive. The state spends all of our money and enforces mandatory decisions concerning our lives. The state shouldn't have the agil…

> 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 legal reasons and the latter due to economies of scale.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#66

Post by gibybo » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 10:04 PM 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 think you'd need a lot more than 2. It's hard to get meaningful competition from only a smaller number because it ends up being much easier and profitble to collude (see telcos/cable companies/etc).

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#67

Post by hackula1 » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 10:06 PM UTC

leelin wrote: post #3

For the MIT alums out there, I remember a 6.170 exam that had the question: "When is it appropriate to use the waterfall model of development?" The answer was any time you are developing software for the government! The professor specifically mentioned it in lecture once, so that alone was enough for full credit on the question (other reasonable answers were fine too). Later I TA'ed the class twice and made sure to e…

The government will often request an RFP that basically entails doing the entire project so that the vendor can do the 5 minute demonstration to show that they are capable of completing the project. This greatly inflates prices, since the stakes for the vendors are so ridiculously high.

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#68

Post by gte910h » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 10:09 PM UTC

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?

Campaigns are private entities designed buy a couple people to win

Governments are huge entities, with laws that look like they're there to protect public trust, but are really written to often reward key players (for this area of government).

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#69

Post by mbesto » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 10:11 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,…

Gov't procurement is actually no different from any other bureaucratic procurement organization in Big Co. They are always seen as a blocker (rarely an enabler) and the people who sit in their roles usually hate their responsibilities. (I'm generalizing of course, but you get the point) The consulting company I used to work implemented techniques for procurement orgs based mainly on behaviors.[1] It's the first time I've seen such a thing and believe it is something very necessary to scaling procurement organizations.

[1]-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xgh-A1ZCfg

Re: The way government does tech is outdated and risky

#70

Post by Systemic33 » Tue, Oct 22, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

Maybe US should look to the number of successful websites launched in European governments and public sectors. There were obviously a lot of failures along the way, but that is what you learn from. And if US can skip some failures, thats maybe a few billions not lost. Worth looking into.