3 ms·

It's still at least $330,000 just for the app, according to the documents.

by creshal 10y ago

robmcm 10y ago
I expect most of it was spent on bureaucracy and trying to figure out what they actually needed.
- dagw 10y ago
  Yea, people forget how much effort that can be. I delivered a project last year where if you where to just look at the very simple final product and look at how much it cost you'd accuse us of either incompetence or corruption. However what you won't see are the two more complex prototypes I made according to first the original spec and then the revised spec, all the meetings (with travel time, since they where two towns over and always wanted all the meetings to be held in their offices) it took for the client to eventually realize that they actually wanted something much simpler and the massive efforts of collecting the all the data (in various obscure formats) needed to put together that simple solution.
ucaetano 10y ago
[joke] Come on, putting together a face-recognition system that attributes ethnicity using the iPad's camera isn't cheap!
chris_va 10y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417050
dagw 10y ago
My company is currently looking to bid on a government software project, and if we where to deliver 100% of what they're asking for exactly as written in the spec we're estimating a cost of at least $2 million, with some pretty serious R&D efforts on our part. On the the other hand if we where allowed to deliver 80-90% of what they they're asking for and 100% of what they actually need it would probably cost around $100-150k, using standardized solutions and very little R&D. Basically government specs often contain some really crazy requirements written by people who only have a vague idea of what they actually need and no idea of how hard things are to implement. I have no trouble believing that at least $250k of those $330k went towards fulfilling some obscure bullet point which some bureaucrat required, but which had no practical effect on the final product.

It's still at least $330,000 just for the app, according to the documents.

by creshal 10y ago

It's still at least $330,000 just for the app, according to the documents.

robmcm 10y ago

I expect most of it was spent on bureaucracy and trying to figure out what they actually needed.

dagw 10y ago
Yea, people forget how much effort that can be. I delivered a project last year where if you where to just look at the very simple final product and look at how much it cost you'd accuse us of either incompetence or corruption. However what you won't see are the two more complex prototypes I made according to first the original spec and then the revised spec, all the meetings (with travel time, since they where two towns over and always wanted all the meetings to be held in their offices) it took for the client to eventually realize that they actually wanted something much simpler and the massive efforts of collecting the all the data (in various obscure formats) needed to put together that simple solution.

ucaetano 10y ago

[joke] Come on, putting together a face-recognition system that attributes ethnicity using the iPad's camera isn't cheap!

chris_va 10y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417050

dagw 10y ago

My company is currently looking to bid on a government software project, and if we where to deliver 100% of what they're asking for exactly as written in the spec we're estimating a cost of at least $2 million, with some pretty serious R&D efforts on our part. On the the other hand if we where allowed to deliver 80-90% of what they they're asking for and 100% of what they actually need it would probably cost around $100-150k, using standardized solutions and very little R&D. Basically government specs often contain some really crazy requirements written by people who only have a vague idea of what they actually need and no idea of how hard things are to implement. I have no trouble believing that at least $250k of those $330k went towards fulfilling some obscure bullet point which some bureaucrat required, but which had no practical effect on the final product.