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> Remember when the Obama administration wrested control of healthcare.gov out of the hands of the consultants, aimed a bunch of competent geeks
by humanrebar 10y ago
> Remember when the Obama administration wrested control of healthcare.gov out of the hands of the consultants, aimed a bunch of competent geeks at it, and rescued it?
Yeah, but the government screwed up healthcare.gov in the first place. Some engineers were surely death-marched and then besmirched afterwards for a variety of reasons that boil down to having a bad manager and a bad customer who ended up being the same clueless organization.
Maybe it's getting better, but I have experience contracting for the government. It's underpaid and higher stress than it's worth. And it's not like you can get a new boss or a new customer. Not without changing countries anyway.
- larrywright 10y agoAlso, to be completely accurate, they wrestled control of healthcare.gove from one set of consultants and handed it to another set (though I believe with a greater degree of oversight and involvement from the government).
- humanrebar 10y agoFrom what I recall, the final specs weren't set until months before the original launch. With that sort of situation, level of oversight isn't the biggest issue.
- coolgeek 10y agoThe consultants from whom it was wrested are consulting companies. These are described in the article as "loathsome blue-suit operations whose core competencies are winning public-sector bids then cashing in by charging for every ripple coming out of those classic waterfall projects" "These companies work their people insanely hard, and in my opinion, based on thirty years of observation, charge too much and deliver too little. They are definitely Part Of The Problem, and you should stay away" The consultants to whom it was handed to would be better described as an ad hoc, temporary startup
- praveenster 10y agoYou should check out 18f. https://18f.gsa.gov https://18f.gsa.gov They seem to have taken a totally different approach of bringing agile and startup culture into government software engineering. This podcast about cloud.gov on SoftwareEngineeringDaily has very interesting insights about how they work: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/26/cloud-gov-with-aidan-feldman/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/06/26/cloud-gov-wi... Totally changed my opinion about software development and the government.