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Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

abc.net.au

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Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#71

Post by Reubachi »

hn-acct wrote: post #48
mrtksn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, usually you don't have 11 developers coding 24/7. What you usually have is project managers, account managers etc and then a few people who code every now and then. Then you have licenses and support costs. You can't just code the website, zip the code and mail it to the client. They have many stakeholders like this person needs to be able to show this that persin needs to be able to access this etc because they…

Sure but PMs are billed lower than devs from my experience. You might have 1-3 on this project.

Tangential, but I wonder.

This clashes with my experience; At least in my field....PM can basically only come from an individual who has architecture + development experience and thus is higher paid than any dev who is working on their product.

Maybe I need a different job.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#72

Post by SpaghettiCthulu »

OuterVale wrote: post #39

The new site post re-development: https://www.bom.gov.au The old site provided with HTTPS: https://reg.bom.gov.au

> "A complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security, usability and accessibility requirements for the millions of Australians who reply on it every day," a spokesperson said.

I guess those "usability and accessibility requirements" don't include being usable without JavaScript.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#74

Post by sandorscribbles »

when will someone find the $300M bill to update the FAAs NOTAMs website which consists of a giant database with some simple web pages on top?

google pso + cgi federal overloaded the migration with 300+ people and 4 layers of subcontractors to deliver a sub-par infra stack in order to make some media splash before DOGE (rip) could derail it - yes that is why they shifted the db choice last minute to ship quicker versus ship best practices.

NOTAMs is the most important tool used daily by airlines, pilots, airports, the military, and every other industrialized nation in the world. and its now a rube goldberg hodgepodge to avoid an audit from a team that just got canned....

disclosure - i am a pilot who also worked on the migration before being canned for vocally pushing back against the infra architecture decisions that will result in hackable, or offline NOTAMs, halting air traffic worldwide.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#76

Post by reustle »

rurp wrote: post #62
oliwarner wrote: post #40

It's extraordinary how far departments (even large companies) will go to avoid in-sourcing work. $AU96M is a small team of developers hired, paid and pensioned for decades . Anyone rubber-stamping that sort of invoice deserves jail time.

This is a huge issue in my experience. I've done some work as a government contractor and often the govt offices have been so heavily outsourced there's nobody left with any technical knowledge at all to oversee the projects. Like the most technical person literally doesn't know what a git repo is. Even if you hire good contractors who work in good faith, the inability to have remotely technical discussions leads to…

> but so many people have a religious level hatred of public employees

Are you sure this is the issue here? Seems there are lots of regulations around how much public employees can be paid (usually too low for skilled IT), how easy it is to move or fire them, etc. Sounds much easier to just hire a contractor.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#77

Post by Garlef »

I remember that a, few years back the phrase "They have not yet realized that they're a software company now." was used to describe the necessary change in perspective for many companies.

I guess while some companies have caught up, most nation states still have to make this realization.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#78

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

I’ve worked on major website redesigns, and there’s so much more to it than just refreshing a few screens. A big redesign is kind of like making a 90min film that costs over $100 million. What you see on the surface is only a small part of the effort. Behind every large website there are teams of experts and consultants. $96 million sounds like a lot, but so is the amount of work required to build or rebuild a site at that scale. It’s easy for people who aren’t familiar with the process to guess what it "should" cost, but without understanding the complexity, those guesses are usually way off. And of course, technology and tech workers are expensive. Sometimes even the initial consulting can run close to a million+ dollars.

Every now and then, we see a post on HN where someone claims they've recreated a well-known website in a short time. But they really haven’t. What they’ve done is copy a handful of screens and maybe a couple of data flows that work for a few test users with no fault tolerance, security, or scalability. Building or updating a hardened, website is far more difficult and far more expensive than anything a small team can spin up quickly. It's expensive and time consuming. Was there some small waste? Yes, I almost guarantee it. But fraud? $96m is a lot of money but without understanding the work that's gone into it, there's no way to know if there was fraud in the cost.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#80

Post by brokenmachine »

retsibsi wrote: post #10
hyperpape wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of two minds about this comment. A glance at the website suggests it has a lot of content and a full overhaul for 4.1m AUD (2.6m USD) might not be that that high of a price. But the problem is with the assumption that the website needs a full overhaul. So often a full overhaul is where projects go to balloon in cost by 20x. An outside agency sells the leadership on a big picture full of fluff about "modernization…

Agreed. I'm a regular user of the BoM website, and from my perspective the old version was absolutely fine. I wasn't one of the people instantly panning the redesign, but after using it for a while I haven't found positives to outweigh the minor annoyance of the change, let alone justify the expenditure. I can totally believe there were some accessibility issues that I was oblivious to, but it's hard to imagine they…

>It was slightly weird that the old website didn't support https

It always did if you linked to https://reg.bom.gov.au , eg https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.94768.shtm... https://reg.bom.gov.au/products/IDR711.loop.shtml

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