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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

#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 overspending on the military and "defense" budget. Just imagine the TSA and "Homeland Security" waste.

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

#3
Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex. This is just the latest manifestation of the government-industrial complex. I'd be willing to bet that CGI Federal (the contractor) has some very well connected cronies to have captured this boondoggle.

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

#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 digits,' according to the Washington Post."

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

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

#8
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 on their promises.

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

#9
They should have opened the bidding process to Elance, they could have found someone to do the back-end for like 5K. ;)

ETA:

> And when things still go wrong, they simply throw “more money at the same people who caused the problem to fix the problem."

For that much money, I could be a terrible web developer.

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