Experian and CGI Federal wasted hundreds of dollars building a "healthcare.gov" site that didn't work That was very much a management problem; from what I post

Experian and CGI Federal wasted hundreds of dollars building a "healthcare.gov" site that didn't work That was very much a management problem; from what I posted to HN back when it was happening (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586705): The government took way too long to get started "bending metal", it had the inexperienced/no experience on this scale HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services government bureaucrats be the integrator for this 50+? contractor effort, per the NYT "In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327), those changes continued through the last week before the launch, and full testing obviously was delayed until that last week. Underlying their inexperience, evidently CMMS didn't see a need for bottleneck monitors, given that we've heard of them being put in place post-launch. And we learned they completely underprovisioned the database, and the specific one CMMS forced the contractors to use was unfamiliar to them, in paradigm (not a RDBMS), let alone the specific one. And refused to listen to the people waving red flags started no later than spring of this year, when one of these bureaucrats changed his goal/desire from a "First World" website to one that wasn't "Third World".... That this front end was a disaster turned out to be a major blessing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6701748 (more details as well). As you say: It's a desperate attempt by the cult of managerialism that dominated that 20th century to figure out how to run software projects without understanding software itself The key to me being "without understanding software itself". I've personally observed that many of the worst managers I worked under were failed software developers....