8 ms·

Let's assume a hefty markup for the long sales/BD time for a government contract like this: $336k * 0.60 = $200k Since this deals with national security, could

• AndyNemmity 11y ago
  PM would be higher than that. There'd also be a Manager above the PM scheduled some days as well. And the security, analytics, and monitoring are probably all smaller specifics days for individual experts. Point is though, you're thinking the right way on it. Very reasonable.
  • swanson 11y ago
    Good point, added a couple more line items.
• joering2 11y ago
  No, just like I don't believe any reasonable company could be allowed this contract for less money. Having to dealt enough with IBM on contract levels, I rather believe there has been bribes involved, but I can't prove anything.
  • AndyNemmity 11y ago
    I live in this world, and have been in the upper levels of all sorts of these discussions regularly. I've never seen a direct bribe. If you want to call lavish dinners, drinking, and entertainment bribes, okay, that happens constantly. But a bribe? No... You don't need bribes. It's quid pro quo all of the time, but bribes?! No... Maybe you can get hired at a higher pay scale/job title from your work getting someone a deal. There are certainly perks.. but not bribes...
    • enraged_camel 11y ago
      Expensive dinners and entertainment can definitely count as bribes. In certain sectors of government, decision makers are required to disclose things like when vendors take them out to dinner or pay for fancy seats at ball games.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • sergers 11y ago
        the company i work for doesnt allow us to provide dinner/entertainment for clients/vendors, nor can we accept offers to be taken out for dinners/entertainment. if we do go out somewhere, we pay our own we deal with govt and large healthcare corporations, the same policies are the norm among them. we also get these policies hammered into us quarterly through Anti-bribery/corruption and code of ethics training which is mandatory for all 30k employees regardless of role.
      • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
        > In certain sectors of government, decision makers are required to disclose things like when vendors take them out to dinner or pay for fancy seats at ball games. I used to work in this space. Not only what you are saying is wrong but it's very illegal. I was lectured for offering a government representative lunch from a cheap place we were all going to (have to give them the opportunity to pay). There are so many rules around this that the type of bribery you're referring to just doesn't happen.
• sailfast 11y ago
  Likely your security / approval estimate is low [edited]- typically you can write an app like this quickly but the ATO / certification and the BAs and PMs filling out paperwork and sitting in meetings will add weeks / months. Also I agree the overhead of current T&M contracts likely doesn't make contracts under 100K worth pursuing especially given the huge amount of competition for some of this work and (unless an incumbent) a pretty low win probability. Fingers crossed the TechFAR and some of the micro auction steps being taken make this a more dynamic market. EDIT2: Here's the spending on that Contract by task order (as up to date as USASpending can be anyway) https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=CIO549 https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?k=CIO5... EDIT: If the re-compete was done under OASIS then maybe we can get a lot of information out of this line by line transaction from USASpending: https://www.usaspending.gov/Transparency/Pages/AwardSummary.aspx?AwardID=17381939 https://www.usaspending.gov/Transparency/Pages/AwardSummary....
• donw 11y ago
  Your analysis sounds pretty spot-on. It's government, so you'll likely have a 508 compliance audit (accessibility) as part of the project as well. Figure a work-week of that. Security clearances are almost a definite "yes". Extensive background checks at a minimum -- and we're talking three days of paperwork, fingerprinting, calls to your third grade teacher, etc.
  • swanson 11y ago
    Great point on the accessibility audit, added that to UI/UX section.
  • wkoszek 11y ago
    Exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if things on the airport have to meet weird regulations, and that the IBM will have to take some responsibility as a result of possible damages.
• cha5m 11y ago
  Yeah clearly this ui http://elliott.org/wp-content/uploads/IMG_6317.jpg http://elliott.org/wp-content/uploads/IMG_6317.jpg required 10 days to design. Why would this require more than a few days? Simple UI, then just generate a secure random number and draw an arrow. Bam. Give me 200k. I mean the largest expense would almost certainly be third-party pen testing and QA. And why would it take a technical writer 5 days to document this? It has 1 function.
  • sailfast 11y ago
    You need to be on site with a Secret clearance, a DUNS number, and about three months of paperwork, never mind the cost of the proposal hours to get on the multi award BPA to have the opportunity to win this task order for the work which was 1000 pages and half a year of capture and messaging. The market has a huge cost to enter which makes it sound insane to anyone that's ever posted something to Fiverr
    • cha5m 11y ago
      Fair enough. I imagine that the paperwork and app verification is where most of the cost was generated. Sometimes bureaucratic inefficiency just really gets under my skin.
      • sailfast 11y ago
        It is a good and understandable instinct. It is the bane of my existence, which is why I've also devoted a solid chunk of my life to unscrewing it. :)
  • swanson 11y ago
    That's one screenshot, are you prepared to submit a legally binding quote for the project with that little information? Are there more screens? I don't know. Did the client require multiple designs and iterations -- each stamped with the approval of several stake-holders? I don't know. Judging the final output without any consideration for the process is akin to asking why it took a week to fix that hairy bug. It was only one line of code that changed, how could it possible take you all week to fix it?
• jonahx 11y ago
  This proves that similar absurdities are common practice within large corporations, and breaks down nicely how they are justified. I doesn't, imo, prove the price isn't absurd. The point about field testing is fair, but shouldn't account for a huge chunk of the price. The invisible-to-the-public features point is also fair, but there's no way to estimate that cost of those. The rest of the points, though, while fairly reflecting the way enterprise works, just show how utterly dysfunctional the process can be, and imo bolster, rather than refute, the position in the original article.
  • swanson 11y ago
    I'm not seeking to refute anything. I agree that it sucks that software costs are so expensive and that taxpayer money was spent on this, but if you don't try to understand the process that is broken I don't think there is much chance to fix it. "That is literally a hello world ipad app, how could it possible cost $300k?!?" -- I attempted to provide an answer that goes a bit beyond "shrug govt" or "shrug consultants".
    • massemphasis 11y ago
      It's like the $10,000 dollar hammer, but this is far worse. With the hammer, government apologists claimed it was to "secretly move money for DoD"... which really means it was the DoD and military just giving themselves a shit ton of money. The US is very corrupt. The DoD dodged a bullet when 9/11 happened because that was the day they were going to be put under investigation. Sadly enough, nothing happened at all, and this type of political graft is very common among the military and their politicians. A recent case for example is the head of University of California who does not even belong there and is completely ill qualified to lead a college. Her only real experience is as a _spy chief_ for the military and DHS. This type of political graft resulting from military connections is going to be far more common and invade further into civilian infrastructures. It's not like the NSA's complete treasonous behavior in spying on the US citizens they're supposed to protect isn't bad enough... that isn't even the tip of the iceberg, I'd wager. Before that of course was the CIA funneling drugs into cities to fund their own pockets and programs. Or even the joke of the "war on drugs" which all it was meant to do was control the profit flow of illegal street drugs. These styles of military programs, also known as soft power projection, directed at the US population and citizens is getting far more common and invasive. These days, it is almost considered the norm.
• alexandar 11y ago
  great points.
• riazrizvi 11y ago
  I'm going to file this analysis as 'Breakdown of the cost of bureaucracy'. Considering that the process could have been solved with a common sense email that might have identified an existing free app.
• bigiain 11y ago
  > Do you folks really know people that are doing government contract work (for the TSA no less) for less than $100k? We have done recently. (Not TSA - not even US govt...) And, in spite of our "mid 5 figures" price for the iOS+Android apps for a fairly simple app - the whole program of work the government department included this in, and hence the media reporting of "what the app cost" came to 1.3million dollars. Now I get people asking me "How on earth did it cost over a million dollars for that app? Surely that's practically fraud!" If the only requirement is "an arrow that randomly points left or right when you tap the screen" - I suspect _anybody_ who reads HN could whip up a provably-correct solution in under 30 mins just using html and javascript. I _strongly_ suspect there's a +lot_ of other requirements and costs we don't understand here. (But cynically, a lot of those costs could well be high paid consultants writing Powerpoint decks justifying why the only requirement should be "an arrow that randomly points left or right when you tap the screen". That'll be $325k thanks - here's our recommended outsourcing partner who can deliver the app for $11k.)
  • makomk 11y ago
    Have you considered that maybe it's the government's fault that the media reported it in this way because - as in this example - the government intentionally obscured both how much the app cost and what was actually being supplied for the figure they stated.
    • TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Maybe, but then again the media has zero incentive to report this truthfully - "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is what sells.
      • warmblood 11y ago
        To be quite honest, "bad government wasting taxpayer money" is more than newsworthy. To your other point, we have in the past seen the media reporting these types of things in incomplete ways for fear of irritating their sources and losing reporting access.
• jerf 11y ago
  Honestly... this doesn't sound that expensive. I think those who don't work at a tiny four-person startup but don't generally touch the money should spend a bit of time at this site: https://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/ https://tobytripp.github.io/meeting-ticker/ But rather than using it as a meeting ticker, use it to show how quick a team of 5 or 10 reasonably-well-paid people burn through the money over the course of even a day or three. Business is generally a lot more expensive than I think people often realize. I've sat through "all hands" meetings that clock in distressingly close to $350K by that calculator's reckoning (though rather a lot of engineering is really only half-listening and still working...). If you think about the expense all the time you can end up paralyzed but if you never acknowledge it you can end up with very skewed priorities. To make this line of thought appealing to those who are probably the ones reading this, when your manager asks you for that stupid-ass feature that's going to take two or three days to implement, you've actually got a really big stick if you work the math and give them the numeric figure on what that's actually going to cost. Managers themselves often don't really think about this properly either. You can help them. If you happen to do it, shall we say, a bit "selectively", well that's their own darned fault for not thinking that way themselves more often....
  • vidarh 11y ago
    At a few places I've worked, I asked for average salary figures for the engineering team by function so that I could produce weekly reports that tallied up the cost of various projects based on the time people reported they'd actually spend. What I found bizarre was that each time I've had to explain why I needed the numbers, and people were surprised at receiving a report of what the staff budget went. You'd think that would be expected, not something unusual. But permanent staff is not treated as a cost during day to day work, even though their time is a limited resource. It's quite fascinating to see how quickly priorities change when the cost breakdowns make the rounds and someone higher up starts asking critical questions about why we spent $50k of staff time on feature X that no customer had asked for.
    • hinkley 11y ago
      You have me wondering now. A big problem I've always had is getting hardware to improve productivity. Most of the time the management chain can't grasp why it's worth a $3k machine and maintenance costs to save each dev an hour a week in development time. I think this goes to just how often people I management like the title and the power but don't understand that they're supposed to be in charge of strategy. I don't think most of them would know strategy if it walked up and bit them.
• rburhum 11y ago
  We do ton of govt work for state agencies, transportation agencies, local govt, etc. That price is messed up.
  • rburhum 11y ago
    And of course I get downvoted. Nevermind that 70% of my MRR comes from govt. Whatever.
• avip 11y ago
  That plus we know little about the actual scope of this project. Sure it looks like a randomly jumping arrow - but does it have a backend? Does it have all the 'settings' and 'technician modes' that usually bloat projects x10 than the MSS scope?
• technion 11y ago
  You forgot the mandatory Oracle license the tender no doubt called for.
• Negative1 11y ago
  Your math is (relatively) sound but I don't think you understand how trivial the work required for this would be. It's pretty universally known that engineers are horrible at estimating their tasks but this particular app is so simple as to be impossible to overestimate. It literally would take less than a day for a (half)-competent engineer (and maybe 1 designer/artist) to do the work for this (I won't give you the task breakdown but I'll say the task list is short). So the answer is probably more in line with the other associated costs as you mentioned. Another just as likely (and as simple) answer; they charged some know nothing bureaucrat a ton because that's how it works in DC.
• tootie 11y ago
  And unless it was a dedicated government services vendor, all those people needed to submit background checks, get security clearance and be US citizens or at least permanent residents all of which costs a bit extra.
• bunnymancer 11y ago
  UI/UX 10 days? Yeah right.. The recoloring of the arrow itself I'm sure took 10 days... I'm working with a bank right now trying to just get them a UI for an authentication page. We've struggled 2 weeks trying to figure out what the hell they want for the FAQ page... Between the design-spec they provided and where we are now, I'm not sure why they have designers in the first place.. Our first product was according to their spec, which they scrapped instantly and stated they expected X,Y,Z instead, which weren't in the spec (Page should have an accordion, the accordion should have buttons, all buttons should have certain looks and sizes. The spec didn't even have borders, much less an accordion and no buttons in sight..) and when we produced whatever they stated they wanted they threw out half of it and flipped things around (now the buttons shouldn't be arrows, they should be + signs that become - signs when clicked on...) I'd hate to think what the UI/UX process is trying to get through multiple layers of governmental bodies....